There are many things that 2020 has shown us – and crashing markets would be one other thing that we can safely say we all have seen in these unprecedented times. The markets and businesses within these markets have seen a tumble like never before. Yet, thanks to technology, these markets have been able to revive themselves and their businesses in order to make up for the losses. The revival is a slow yet steady process that calls for even more technologically friendly business practices than ever before. How does your business fare in light of these challenges? Let us find out with a few questions before we go any deeper into the realm of CRM and automation.
- Have you been wondering what CRM is and how it can help your business?
- Are you looking to make an even more impact presence online?
- Does this make you look at big data and worry about how you are going to use this wealth of information in order to reach your right customers at the right time?
- Have you found that you are hard pressed for time when it comes to manually charting campaigns based on the insights in this big data?
- Do you feel overwhelmed by all this?
- Does your business need help?
Chances are you have answered a big Yes to all of these questions! In fact, we would not even call them questions since the current times would make them read more as a cry for help than anything else. While the CRM software has come along since 2006 to revolutionize businesses the world over, we are only now beginning to understand how any business – big, medium or small – would necessarily need the right CRM software in order to survive since all businesses have moved to the virtual world, mandatorily. Earlier, many businesses could confidently say that they use social media and their website only to build a presence. But now, all businesses have been forced to find ways to do business online. Everything has been digitized almost overnight in a short few months – which is a far greater evolution than what we have seen in the past two decades since the world discovered the art of doing business online and getting that extra revenue by being online. Now, the main revenue streams come from being online.
Before we help you understand the benefits of a CRM software and why you would need it, let us understand what CRM really is. CRM or customer relationship management is a tool, a platform, a process or even system that can help you organize all your data and information so that it corroborates with the various functions that are core to your business. This would help in reaching your conversion goals and would even help you run a number of automation tools for sales and marketing in the back end. As you can see already, CRM is a very important tool for your business. Let us now understand the exact benefits and why you need CRM.
1. Organization: Who does not want a better organized business? A well-organized business is a business that is all set for growth. Imagine if all your information is scattered all over the place and in a world where big data exists to overwhelm you, this would not be the best news. With the right CRM software, you would be able to organize all your data in neat fields that would be built into the framework of the system so that the information may be linked with functions. What will this do? Well, it will help you further organize your goals as per those functions and that in turn, will help you organize your teams as per the goals. This would help your business run in a more streamlined manner and leave you with the bandwidth to take relevant decisions, solve problems and creatively reach out to your audience and engage them well enough for a well-deserved conversion.
2. Planning: When you have a CRM software working for you in the back end, everything would be properly scheduled. So, there would be no chance of accommodating a team member who is anything less than fully accountable. This is because every activity is planned, timed and scheduled with the notifications going out as soon as the previous task in the sales or marketing pipeline has been done. This notification would also come with the right information so that the next task can be completed very easily. This would help you plan your goals and strategies in a way that would support your growth bound vision for your business.
3. Tracking and Analysis: These are some of the most important functions that many business owners often miss out on. When we are in the middle of doing all the tasks – monotonous and others – we tend to lose sight of where we are headed and whether or not we are on the right track. With the help of the tracking and analysis tools in the CRM software, you would be able to carry out sales and other forms of analysis so that you can get a complete measurement of your efforts and individual reports of the resources and team members as well. This would help you understand whether or not you are on the right track and whether or not you need to change tracks or improve your strategy.
4. Data Driven Operations: If we have not yet stressed on this enough, we all need to understand that we are living in the information age where even the eye heat of the audience on a certain post is measured and then used for advertising dollars. Therefore, it would be in our best interests to get the data captured by the CRM software so that it may be used to create data driven campaigns that would have a better shot at getting conversions. This would also fuel higher profit figures and even more revenues
