What is CRM? How does it really add value to businesses?

What is the first this you do after the lead in generating?

1. Download the lead
2. and give it to the sales team

Or you have a sales pipeline setup. if you have one, then that’s good but if you don’t have one, here is how billion-dollar companies do with the help of CRM.

There are 3 things that enterprise businesses do just after they receive your contact

1. They acknowledge that they have got the request
2. The team takes action in less than 24 hours
3. They evaluate your requirement, see if you qualify to be their customer, and…
4. Then discuss further, if disqualified the drop right there

This all happens in real-time, unlike “downloading leads” and sharing in “google Sheets” or sharing on “email”.  Customer mind swings when they are in the market, it’s the most important time to be in front of your customer.

It’s the time, the customer would like to talk to you, would like to take a demo, would like to discuss their future goals, and present their requirement in detail.

Let me ask you a question,

What would be the best time to sell security services to a company? 

Guess!

The moment they get hacked!

All other times a part of this time will be less in priority or worst, they will dodge the security issues.

Similarly, the best time to get the customer is when they search and shared the information.

To be present at this time, businesses spend billions of dollars by running ads, keeping fancy women in the background to create interest and doing automation to fulfill the user’s query, and much more.

So what’s the point?

The point is, CRM is a system that allows you to reduce the time, acknowledge their need, contact them in time,  and keep the customers happy.

This is done by having a data system that tracks everything about the company.

So, should everyone just start using CRM?

Not really, if you are in an e-commerce business, you likely don’t need a CRM. But if you are in a service business where the general service sales operation is going out of hand, it’s time to implement CRM.

CRM will help you in the following way

1. It will centralize all your leads from all mediums (online, offline)
2. It will automatically allocate leads to your sales team (earlier you were doing this using google sheet, or even worst excel)
3. Setup targets for each and every sales team(You can do the same for everyone or allocate custom targets individually)
4. And get a real-time report of what’s happening within the sales team (Earlier, you were likely using a pivot chart to see this)

The system doesn’t just limit you here, it goes beyond. But just imagine not having to do all the 4 things we have discussed above. It used to be regular, rigorous, and tedious work to do every day. Now you can use that time to improve your business processes.

Let me tell you a funny thing,

CRM stands for customer relationship management but it’s not just what the definition says, it’s more.

As said earlier, you will be able to centralize your lead, allocate leads, and observe the actions of the team in live reporting but you can also create a new target for every team, show how they are doing towards the target in a live reporting and on the way when a client has issues, you can use shared  “issue list” that can help you solve query faster.

Let’s understand objects in a CRM

The object is a way to define different types of data in a CRM system. The “Contact” of the person who filled out the form is an object. “company” information for the sales team is an object.

Type of Objects in CRM

1. lead
2. Contact
3. Account

4. Lead

The lead is the person who has filled out the form on your website. Lead has likely filled out the form to know about the product or service your offer.

Once the lead is qualified, you generally call them and see if they qualify to be your customer.

Here qualification means that they suit your need

In the general case the qualification parameters are

1. Project budget

2. Timeline

3. Technical Requirement and etc.

Once the lead is qualified, then you accept them to become a “contact, deal, and account” or you just drop them because they didn’t qualify to become your customer.

2. What happens after a lead qualifies for the buyer’s requirement?

After the customer is qualified, there are 3 things are created in CRM.

The very first one is “account“. The account is basically the name of the company.

and then the “deal” is created, and deals mean the “current requirement” and “its overall value”(the amount) and other related information.

and then, “Contact” is created. Contact is basically the details of the person who filled out the form to get the service,

Why follow account, deal, and contact architecture to map the data?

We should follow that because it is efficient and very effective.

Usecase 1: Smooth transition when an employee leaves

Over a period of time, while the project happens, you meet a lot of people from your client companies. If you add those contact as in your CRM contacts, your project will have a smooth transition if the “point of project” person leaves your client organization.

Usecase 2: When your point of contact delays the response

Usecase 3: Ability to talk to a different person if the point of contact rejects upselling proposal

Use case 4: Having multiple contacts in an organization helps in upselling another project to other teams

Centralization: Having a centralized system helps the business in creating a detailed report on the overall business with a company.

In CRM, each deal is allocated with an account (company) and client company point of contact and pointed as “contacts” of that company.  That means that you have multiple ways to close the deal, in case the first contact bails out.

You can create tasks, that might

What can you do more?

1. Create competition in your sales team

Using CRM, you will be able to create fun competition among the sales team and congratulate them on their deal closure, automatically. Yes, that’s possible.

3. More client information 

The more information you have about the client, the easier it becomes to sell.

An excel sheet is generally used to store the client’s contact details, a very basic details about their problem and that’s all.

But imagine having the basic data, and getting a notification that “your lead Andrew just visited the pricing page”, it would be crazy right? You can just call him up and ask if has any questions on the pricing and then you can take it further!

Let me ask you a question!

Which one of the systems would you choose?

1. Excel sheet with basic information about the client and their requirement

OR

2. A CRM that gives you the basic information you need but also gives you information about client engagement with your business. In this system, you will be able to see “the data, time, and page name your client has visited”, “The last mail he opened”, and “the action he took on your website”.

Which one would you choose? 

1. Excel Sheet
2. CRM

I know the answer. It’s CRM!

The other benefit you have using a CRM is

1. You can allocate tasks of specific clients and due date
2. Create a competition for the sales team
3. Create a meeting and send invites right from CRM
4. Send SMS, Text, and more from your CRM
5. Centralization of business data

The sales job is basically calling, convincing, and selling products and services. Sometimes you get fuzzed into long conversations, A CRM allows all the data to be present in one place and reminds you of the next action to be taken.

Once you have this information in one place, ie: CRM, the no of tabs you have to open every day in your computer to just do sales and reporting reduces to almost 70%, and the time you spend on actually doing sales increases.

Isn’t that what every business looks for?

The best CRM!

Well, there are a couple of them in the market, and you should choose them based on the requirement and resources you have.

The fancy ones are expensive and the cheaper ones are not that effective. You need to find something that fits your requirement and enables you to reduce time and innovate your business process in long term.

The course of industry leaders are

1. Salesforce (Fancy and expensive)
2. ZOHO CRM (Okay on price and feature)

What is CRM?

CRM start for customer relationship manager. CRM is software that helps businesses be with customers from the point of lead generation, delivery, and support in each and every phase of their journey.

Related Read:

1. Challenges in implementing CRM in a business
2. Things to look at before buying CRM (with checklist)
3. Small Business CRM vs Enterprise CRM (coming soon, check on search)
4. Difference between CRM and ERP (Coming Soon, check if it’s published)