5 Reasons Modern All-In-One CRM’s Beat Out Standard Ones

Those who utilize a CRM for their business have great intentions of utilizing it to its fullest potential. However, most don’t end up using all of the features they have available to them. If you have one of the better all-in-one CRM’s, you know that it is a time-saving software that can streamline every aspect of your operations.

Let’s say that you purchase a top-rated CRM system that is geared towards your industry. You train your employees and move forward with the streamlined functionality of your systems.

You feel like you need to work a bit more to hit your goals, and you know that the CRM you chose is capable of bringing all of your departments together and working in sync towards your company’s mission and vision statements.

How do you know that you’re not using your CRM to its fullest potential?

• You have trouble prioritizing and triaging leads.
• Routine tasks are not automated. You find yourself working to fix issues that should have been done by AI.
• Your assigning of leads is still not adequate. Your top sales representatives are suddenly not producing the numbers they were before you began using this new CRM.
• Your weekly and monthly reports are not providing key information, and some of the data is inaccurate when evaluated.

If your CRM is not strengthening your business and company, you need to make changes so that it works better for you. Studies have shown that those who do not work with a superior CRM program work less efficiently than those who are working with a great system. In fact, sales representatives work less than one-third of the time due to a failure to find the correct information to close a deal.

Here are five ways that your sales representatives can excel, and your CRM can work better for you.

Automate the Basic Tasks with Your CRM

Task automation is one of the most underutilized features that a CRM can offer. Task automation allows the software to do the scheduling for your sales reps. It can:

• Schedule phone and conference calls
• Automate personalized emailing sequencing
• Automate Data Entry
• Redirect customers to your knowledge database instead of filing a help ticket

Your calendars, email providers, mass email marketing platforms, social media, and accounting software should all be synced to your CRM. If the systems don’t talk to each other, you will be missing pertinent information from your reports, unless you manually enter the data. Do you really want to have someone spend their day working at updating your CRM? No. It should all be seamless and automated.

Building Out Your Customers Information Card

Your CRM works best when it is complete. If your client’s cards are not updated properly or don’t contain past contacts and interactions, your sales representatives will not be able to work efficiently or effectively. This also means that your reports will be incomplete because the proper information is not being filtered through it.

Ensure that certain data points are being completed with every customer contact. If a sales representative fails to fill out something in its entirety, you can be missing lost opportunities. Instead, ensure that your CRM flags your reps to complete the customer card before they click out of it. This way, you can ensure the next person who needs to access that card has the most up-to-date details and can give the extra care your customers deserve.

Include Your CRM in Your Marketing Strategy

Your all-in-one CRM has the ability to access insights and demographics within a particular market when it is utilized properly. Most people fail to use the information gathered when developing their company’s marketing campaigns.

Customer recruiting and retention should be at the center of your marketing strategy. Sure, you can convince anyone to give your company a shot, but can you keep them as a life-long customer? That’s the challenging part.

With a great CRM, you can increase your customer retention rates to nearly 99% and new customer acquisitions to almost 70%.

Learn from Trends Outlined in your CRM

Your CRM is a hub of information. It holds all of the information you need to make educated decisions about all aspects of your business. But you need to look at it for it to be effective.

Look at your failed conquests. Listen to recordings of your sales rep interacting with a prospective client. Analyze the notes on their card. Compare the details to others with similar demographics. Has a trend unfolded?

If you are able to find trends, you can adjust your marketing strategy to adapt to this new information. However, if you never take the time to look, you could be missing out on a huge share of the market.

Pay Attention to Productivity and Key Revenue Metrics with Your CRM

Do you know how many calls your associates make each day? How many calls do they get? How many meetings are booked each day? How many meets are canceled each day?

Each of these productivity metrics can be produced from your CRM and can help you to reach if not exceed set goals for your sales representatives.

Be sure to share these details in sales meetings. Pointing out a strong employee does two things. One, it lifts the employee up and acknowledges their hard work. Two, it can make for a competitive work environment when your sales representatives try to out-do one another.

Without using the tools that CRMs have, you can energize your staff to work smarter and harder.

Your CRM is an instrumental part of your business. When used properly, it can produce key data that will help your business to move forward and thrive. It can also help you to see trends and adjust your marketing strategy to adapt to changing times or demographic shifts. In addition, ensuring that all the information in complete in individual client cards will help generate these reports.