Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a technology used by enterprises to manage their relationship with customers. The CRM contains all the data on customer interaction whether it’s on-website, social media, blogs or third-party websites. The technology gives an overview of all your potential customers that have interacted with you on any platform. CRM helps organizations to stay connected with all the potential customers without losing a track of them and improve profitability.

CRM is a Sales and Marketing tool for your business, wherein you can track your client conversion ratio, define productive channels, focus on improving the relations with potential clients using different marketing techniques, and define your sales goal according to previous data in CRM and future business path. CRM is not just defined toward managing the potential clients it can also be used to provide different services throughout the relationship manage the supply chain and also serve the employees.

Gartner recently predicted that by 2021 CRM will be the largest revenue generating area for enterprise software developers. If the enterprises want to strive and expand their business they would require a strategy to manage their customers and potential customers. Every business needs sales data to define their short-term business objective and develop a profitable plan.

Many businesses shun investing into a CRM; the constriction of tapping potential clients reduces their business growth. CRM gives your business an opportunity to tap into every aspect of revenue generation, whether it’s sales, customer service, marketing, social media or any third party business source.   A CRM also gives an opportunity to have a clear overview of the customers – with a utilizable dashboard to suit your business needs.

Using a CRM technology an organization can also tap into their public social media activity to view the likes and dislikes, what their competitors are posting about or what is their content really about? A marketing team can get a clear overview of the sales funnel and what are the exact pain points that customers are talking about during the sales process. CRM technology is imperative for an organization if they want to take every potential client through a journey of conversion. Some CRM even offers supply chain management and HR management using inside the same tool.

The exact difference between CRM and not having CRM?

Having a database for each client is important because it gives you an opportunity to view, whether you should contact them in the future or take learning from the sales journey. To manage all the data you would need an admin to continuously monitor the data coming in from different sources. Whether the data is relevant or irrelevant for any further processes. If such data gets stored in excel sheets, notebooks or inside the head of the sales team you could lose out on many prospective clients.

Data can get lost, meetings cannot be followed on the given time, prioritizing can suffer and business results might not appear as required. As data gets added the rigorous exercise of managing each one with a personalized message can be a tedious task also. It’s not just that you could lose your potential clients the already converted leads customers may face customer service issues. Having a common platform for customers to interact, communicate can miss a load of important data.  Sheets can help you to extract data by applying techniques but it would ultimately be a challenge for you to make intelligence from the data.

Here is what you should look for in a CRM?

1. Look for more than a contact manager it’s important that you look for CRM that helps you to develop a relationship using different contact channels.

2. Email Support. All your client data may come from different sources but the follow-up 99 percent of the times happens through email. Email integration into CRM is important.

3. Marketing campaign integration is important when you are handling a pool of potential clients. It would help you manage marketing campaigns and have effective ROI.

4. Have easy import and export of data to manage the sharing of data. It would give you an opportunity to share your data without having to deal with long procedures.

5. The CRM should be robust enough to deal with technology developments, integrate analytics or Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. A CRM technology should be constantly be updated according to the requirements of organizations and customer touch points.

Implementation and Cost are important when you are dealing with CRM technology to manage your sales and marketing too. Small and large businesses have different sales and marketing channels and integrating them can be made easy with the right type of CRM. To know more about Customer Relationship Management (CRM), you can download our whitepaper.