5 Sep 2020

News

Ultimate

The adoption of technology, by businesses both small and market-leading, has become necessary to retain a competitive edge. While often companies nominally take on changes and are publicly seen to adapt, often, the true potential of the technology is left unexplored.

So how do businesses unlock the potential of technology to improve those all-important sales? Learn about the potential of a CRM, in this guide from Ultimate.

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Now, we know that a CRM doesn’t always come off as the most exciting of platforms. Taking care of sales, marketing, administration and data storage doesn’t always sound like a thrill-ride – but the potential it gives your team is something truly exciting. By streamlining the administrative side of sales, it allows your team to focus on maintaining and building relationships with new and existing customers. Ideal, right?

By taking care of your customer data, sales tracking and storing your reports, a CRM allows your team to access a wealth of data that can be utilised in your relationships with customers.

What Is A CRM?

Let’s start with the basics – what actually is a CRM Platform?

A CRM or a Customer Relationship Management tool, is an online platform that takes care of many administrative sides of customer relationships allowing your team to focus on building those relationships; past, present, or future ones!

‘How?’ I hear you cry, ‘What is this magic?’. Well, it’s not quite magic, but rather the power of data. In the digital age, data is king and a CRM allows your team to organise the data they gather from customers, from each meeting, phone call, email and online interaction, allowing you to effectively build a portfolio on your customers that the entire team has the ability to access at a moments notice.

So, why is a CRM a good idea?

Through the collection of customer data, a CRM gives vital insights into a potential sale. Having this data in one place allows sales teams to more efficiently spend their time creating sales pitches, without spending hours researching (or compromising on the quality of their pitch!). As we all know, understanding a customer, their needs, what they want and why they should buy from you is the key to any sale.

Using a CRM allows you to personalise your customers’ experiences, tailoring each journey to match the insights you’ve found from customer engagement. For instance, perhaps your sales pitch is based on your quality and efficiency, but your reports show that many returning customers comment on your reliability. With this insight, you can shift your sales pitch to include your reliability and the glowing testimonies of your customers on your ability to deliver your promises. You are now telling them not just what you offer but why they should trust your product.

Constantly evolving and adapting your sales technique, overcoming pitfalls that you may never have considered and taking advantage of USP that customer insights will reveal. At Ultimate, we focus on our creativity and experience and are always open with our clients about our process, which increases clients’ faith in our brand and strengthens the loyalties of our existing customers. CRM’s help to find that USP that makes clients not just want your services, but your brand too.

Hmmm. What else?

Furthermore, a CRM’s data-collection allows you to optimise sales performances by revealing effective strategies used in the past and also where in the sales process they lost customers. By using this data, your team can build more effective techniques that appeal to your target audience, allowing your team to focus on strategies that work. With the successes and failures of sales clearly identified, your teams can create new strategies built upon the past while also looking forward.

Giving your team a system that allows access to all this data, on previous and current sales, lets your team remain focused on promising leads, and continually pushing towards goals.

Communication is key here, too: a CRM which integrates several departments at once in this way keeps your teams on each other’s activities, avoiding the classic error of two salespeople chasing up the same lead; or worse, missing a lead, and letting a deal slip through the cracks. With a CRM, all deals and leads can be assigned and updated instantly, with automated reminders to keep the team from losing track.

One of the greatest advantages of a CRM, however, is mobility. With the mobile capabilities of most CRMs, you can take this data with you wherever you are. The advantages of this flexibility are obvious – you can receive updates on leads and deals, or even update them, all while you’re on the go! This accessibility allows the entire team to stay up to date on sales, letting them make decisions that are based on current and relevant information. This creates cohesion between members of the team, no matter where they are (as long as they have a wifi connection!).

It sounds good so far – but who should use a CRM?

Whether you are a small business looking to grow, or a well-established business looking to streamline your operations, everyone can benefit from a CRM. If you’re a small business, a CRM allows you to centralise your customer data, and the automation allows your team to focus on that all-important expansion rather than getting bogged down in routine and mundane admin tasks. For businesses that are already leaders in their industry, a CRM can simplify the administrative side of customer relations, with tools that can be scaled to fit the role required – a must in large-scale, market-leading enterprises.

Simply put, CRMs simplify the job of a sales team, allowing them to focus on creating new relationships and manage old ones. By removing the bulk of those time-consuming administrative responsibilities from your team and automating the rest, you can rest assured knowing that the customer is prioritised and that no one ever slips through the cracks. All of this lets you crack on with the really important stuff. Turn your focus to what matters, by implementing a CRM.

Want to learn more about how a CRM could transform your business? Our team is experienced implementing CRM systems, and showing you how to make the most of them. As a platinum partner of HubSpot, and with a wealth of experience setting up CRMs for our clients, our team can guide you through the process and get you started. Get in touch with Ultimate today.

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