What Does a CRM Do?

What is a CRM system?

Fundamentally, a CRM system allows you to manage the business relationships you have with your customers to help you grow your business.

In fact, CRM goes far beyond customers, allowing you to focus on your organization's relationships with all sorts of people – colleagues, suppliers, service users, and customers.

How does it do this? At the most basic level, a CRM system provides a central place where you can store customer and prospect contact information and share it with colleagues.

Once this is in place, you can track the history of all the interactions you have with those customers: phone calls made, emails sent, meetings held, presentations delivered, enquiries received because tracking is everything.

With a CRM system in place, every question, every service request, every preference, and every past contact detail about every Customer is at your fingertips. And that means that every contact you have with your customers is always personal, relevant and up to date.

By understanding your customers better, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities become clear, allowing you to win new business from existing customers.

And as well as tracking contact histories, you can also add notes, schedule follow-ups and organize the next steps that you or your colleagues need to take. That means you need never miss an opportunity to close particular deals or grow customer accounts.

These traditional functions of a CRM system, then, might include:

• File and content sharing
• Sales forecasting
• Instant messaging between employees
• Email integration with Outlook and Gmail
• Dashboard-based analytics

But modern CRM platforms such as Salesforce go much further, integrating with marketing automation and customer service systems to provide a complete, cloud-based ecosystem for customer data.

What Are The Benefits Of Custom CRM Software?

Before implementing a strategy, you need to understand how custom CRM software can help your company in practice. Customized CRM can help both your business's public image and in more basic indicators such as return on investment or cost reduction. Custom CRM enables marketing and sales processes to be automated without losing the intimate and personalized character they need.

To better understand all the advantages that a custom CRM offers for your company, we have listed the biggest benefits below!

Helps to improve the relationship with active customers

Active customers are one of your company’s most precious resources. They are the ones who guarantee the financial health of the business. In addition, they are the ones who can become loyal customers and promoters of your brand. Custom CRM software can help a lot in this challenge. This is because it helps your company better understand these customers' needs, preferences, and habits.

Integrates the marketing and sales teams better

If you are looking for the best possible results, your teams need to work together, especially in marketing and sales. However, these forces can only work in alignment if they have access to a platform that makes available all relevant customer data in real-time. Customize CRM allows marketing to create communications segmented according to interests, increasing the performance of lead nutrition, etc.

Offers more managerial power to the sales leader

As an entrepreneur, you know that the more you follow up, the more control you have over your results. Custom CRM software is an effective way to offer more power management to your sales leader. With the information obtained, it can do much more with fewer resources. All you need is to design the CRM as per your business requirements.

Practical information storage

The best solution to these issues is a complete CRM system to maintain a quality standard and optimise processes. This custom platform keeps all your information in one place, where the whole team can access it. What’s more, they are updated in real-time!

Maintains focus on customers and sales processes

When implementing a Customize CRM system, you guarantee that your attention will always be where it is most needed: in strategic planning focused on your Customer. In addition, because automation eliminates the need to perform repetitive tasks, you have more time to develop a solid sales process and an effective strategy.

The data obtained by the customized CRM guarantee high performance in marketing and sales. That’s because you can focus your resources in the right places and quickly identify problems.

Allows tracking of results

Monitoring the performance of your strategies through objective metrics is essential to keep your company on track. As an entrepreneur, you certainly know the importance of this monitoring. Customize CRM organizes data in one place.

With much more complete and real-time reporting, the decision-making process becomes more dynamic – as it should be. As a result, you’ll be able to identify potential problems much faster and implement truly efficient, data-based solutions.

Why Build Your Own Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software?

In business today, there are thousands of moving parts that can lead to an enterprise's success or failure. To help you stay on top of your work and give you the time you need to accomplish your goals, it’s important to automate everything that can be automated. With technological improvements and more advanced software development, automation is everywhere. One of the best ways to make sure that you’re managing your business to benefit you and further your profits is through the utilization of customer relationship management software. Your customer relationships are some of the most important aspects of your business. Strong customer relationships help to boost loyalty, encourage sales, and give your brand a respectable, trusting image. However, not all customer relationship management (CRM) software are created equally. While there are some great options on the market, sometimes you need a system that allows more personalization. In this article, we’ll go over a few reasons as to why you should build your own CRM (customer relationship management) software.

Signs You Need Custom CRM DevelopmentSigns You Need Custom CRM Development

While plenty of CRM platforms are available to choose from, most of them don’t offer enough customization options. You might find that one CRM platform offers you certain benefits you need, and another allows you to perform desired actions. Some CRM platforms are extremely basic, and others are so complex that it can be difficult to understand how to properly use them. It can seem great in theory when you have an overwhelming number of features, but it often becomes too difficult and leads to abandoning the CRM platform altogether. If your business needs or wants any of the following, it’s a good sign that you should get custom CRM development software:

• Specific integrations that work with your database or call systems.
• Money that would otherwise be spent on unnecessary functions or complex systems.
• Less confusing features or a simpler, more personalized interface.
• More time to focus on your business goals.
• A CRM that reflects your business identity and your specific business needs.
• Improve overall user experience and user interface.
• Unique communication with customers.
• To stand out from your competition and avoid using cookie-cutter communication.

What’s the Future of CRM

The future of CRM is bright. CRM will continue to report key data and give insight for future action; however, leading experts see CRM evolving to measure and inform sales enablement and customer engagement while playing a tremendous role in the success of a future business.

At this session of Dreamforce, led by John Taschek, Senior Vice President of Market Strategy at Salesforce, panellists Paul Greenberg, Denis Pombriant, and Ray Wang weigh in on important considerations for the future of sales, marketing, and customer engagement. These leading CRM experts recommend the following measures for future-proofing your company’s sales:

Unify Sales, Marketing, and Operations Around Common Goals and Definitions

The evolution of CRM will facilitate the aligning of sales and marketing even more closely, says Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light. Gone are the days when sales and marketing could expend effort on internal conflicts. In order to thrive in the future landscape of sales, organizations must seek to unify sales, marketing, and operations around common goals and definitions.

Sales enablement, the fusion of sales, marketing, and operations, will share goals and have common messaging and materials to the point where marketing may even have revenue targets. Marketing, sales, and customer service will need to more closely align, says Greenberg. Marketing will primarily be responsible for getting the customers’ attention and providing extensive content. Sales will need to become subject matter experts. Customer service will provide communities that capture information and bring people together.

Focus on Customer Retention Through Customer-Oriented Processes

Denis Pombriant, author of Solve for the Customer, asks two important questions:

“What are the things that I can do to keep my customers in the fold?” and

“How do we see the vendor-customer relationship through the customer’s eyes?”

The evolution of CRM will help us answer Pombriant’s questions in a 360-degree view. With all the data available today, organizations have an unprecedented opportunity to see customers in more detail than ever. The mindset of keeping the Customer in the fold will be more important as the cost of changing from one provider to another becomes very low. Traditional forced loyalty programs such as frequent fliers may not be enough to keep the Customer in the fold, says Pombriant.

What will keep customers, says Pombriant, is to develop customer-oriented processes. When customers know the business is all about them, they have the potential to be evangelists for your brand. Developing engaging experiences and being a guide to help customers meet their goals will aid in customer retention.

Use Mass Personalisation Through Relevant Data

John Taschek of Salesforce asks if mass personalization is an oxymoron. Ray Wang, author of Disrupting Digital Business, explains that mass personalization is another key objective for the future of CRM. The ability to have each customer interaction defined by the Customer themselves will make mass personalization possible. Mass personalization, says Wang, will be a possibility through extensive ambient data mining of the collection of relevant data by sales enablement. We are somewhat limited today by technology, but in the near future, it could very well be possible to enter a grocery store and have an app that auto generates a shopping list based on past buying habits and consumption rates. The same app might also guide customers through the store in the most efficient manner to get those items making your shopping experience personal quick and efficient. There may also be no need to checkout as the cart may scan everything you put in and charge your account accordingly. While technology might not be quite there for everything we would like to do today, mass personalization has the ability to significantly impact the way things are done in the future. Not least is what data we gather and how we gather it to improve customer engagement. Trust, says Wang, will become one of the bigger barriers to mass personalization.

Constantly Survey the Business Environment and Your Business Model for Disruptive Technology

In a business environment where disruptive technologies are allowing nontraditional competitors to get a foothold in many markets, it becomes a priority to review and perhaps redefine your business model. A good example of disruptive technology is Uber. They have been completely disruptive to the taxi industry, which has been forced to review their business model. The impact of the disruption on the taxi industry has been devastating.

Companies need to be better at surveying the landscape, understanding what is important, and placing KPIs around them to make sure we remain focused on those things. A regular review cycle to make sure that the current business model is still the right business model will lead to continued success. Building customer-oriented processes and establishing CRM KPIs around those processes will help the business focus on what is important.

Set KPIs Around Important Customer-Oriented Processes to Achieve Consistent Results

In the future, it will be essential for CRM KPIs to measure customer-oriented processes and the efficacy of the business model. Ray Wang says, “We are basically trying to deliver campaign-to-commerce around the customer.” In other words, businesses need to understand that the Customer cares about what’s important to them. The campaign starts customer engagement, while commerce is the sale.

Wang says two CRM KPIs will stand above the rest as the evolution of CRM continues: Conversion rate optimization and click-through rates. Conversion rate optimization, or the rate at which passive viewers become active users, measures how effectively an organization has delivered the message. Conversion rate is a CRM KPI that will depend largely on sales enablement measures. Another CRM KPI, click-through rates, can be used to measure how successful online campaigns are and measure the message's effectiveness.

Manage by Exception to Refine Processes and Ensure Better Results.

Denis Pombriant warns against committing “random acts of CRM.” OrganizationsInstead, organisations need to become more methodical as they take in data, says Pombriant. In the future of CRM, companies need to become better at management by exception, says Pombriant. The KPIs matter, but more important are the outliers. Careful scrutiny of the exceptions and outliers in the data will give companies predictors of possible changes in the business landscape and customer traits.

Understand Profitable Customers and Customer Referral Value

Dr V. Kumar, the author of Profitable Customer Engagement, broadens the discussion of CRM’s future and how to understand customer lifetime value. In a study of 15,000 people, Kumar asked customers if they would recommend a brand to someone they knew (67 per cent said they would). He also asked if they did recommend the brand to someone they knew (34 per cent said they did). What came out of this study is the concept of customer referral value, which is the indirect financial impact that a customer has on the company.

According to Greenberg, Dr Kumar’s study has broadened the conversation about indirect customer value (including loyalty program referral, brand value, customer influence value, and knowledge value) into a discussion of direct customer value. Profitable customers and customer referral value will become increasingly important. Businesses need to give customers reasons to become customer-evangelists for the brand. Customers will become a company’s best sales reps through superior products and services and customer-oriented messaging.

The future of CRM is more than just the future of Customer Relationship Management software. It is the future of business. Organizations that unify sales and marketing, constantly assess the business landscape, focus on and measure customer-oriented processes, and understand the value of customer referrals will thrive in the future business environment. Greenberg assesses the future of CRM: “It is becoming the operational core of a much larger market around customer engagement.”