The needs and expectations of your prospects and customers are changing, as is the structure of your company (new professions, new employees). These changes necessarily involve rethinking the organization of tasks and processes between your production teams, your sales, marketing, HR teams... You need a tool to be able to ensure the proper coordination of this small world, monitor the performance of this in relation to the objectives that you have defined and communicated. A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution ticks all these boxes, but not only! We detail in this article why we advise you to invest in a CRM.
Whether your workforce is 5 or 800 employees, your
objective remains the same: to develop your market share and increase your
turnover, while offering a frictionless customer experience.
There are not 10,000 solutions for this: as the market
is not unduly expandable, there will come a time when you will also have to dig
into the market shares of your competitors. Knowing moreover that new players,
not necessarily physically present, also come to take market share. A
Hubspot/MIT study recalls that each company had 6 competitors on average in
2014, there are 22 in 2018.
To deal with this, you can increase advertising
pressure. Everyone does (with more or less results). Although effective on loss
leaders (water packs, tray of chicken drumsticks, toilet paper), you will have
to roll up your sleeves to be able to attract, satisfy and retain customers who
need to buy a swimming pool , redo their kitchen, change the aluminum joinery
or ask for a loan. Same in B2B.
You must organize your armies: production, sales,
marketing, customer service, in order to provide what more and more customers
are looking for today: a flawless and flawless customer experience.
To meet your customers' expectations, you must collect
and analyze information about what interests them, and provide quality service
by effectively managing your business.
The CRM for more visibility on who does what in the
company
We are not talking here about policing, but about
simple organization: marketing, sales administration.
- Who has been in contact with this ready-to-sign prospect that you met 4 months ago?
- What is the last commercial offer he received and who sent it to him?
At best, the salesperson or the executive assistant
who generated the estimate will know in which binder it has been stored. In the
worst case, you lost a sale because you did not follow up on this prospect in a
timely manner. A CRM tool or solution allows you to manage your teams and gives
you the elements to support them towards success (new lead, new client, etc.).
“The rule is that the general who triumphs is always
the best informed” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War
A CRM to keep the history of the last exchanges with
your prospects
What are the last interactions with this prospect or
customer:
- did he receive a reminder email?
- a follow-up email?
- was he called?
- did he come back to the website to see the prices page or did he end up downloading the catalogue?
- Did the person in charge leave a voice message?
- Has one of your collaborators already set an appointment with this prospect?
- Has this prospect signed your offer, and if not why?
Logging interactions not only helps structure your
business and saves your salespeople time, but above all it reassures the
customer about your support methods.
A CRM to align your sales and marketing teams
Your teams have objectives to achieve (monthly or
quarterly). For marketing, it is potentially the number of qualified prospects,
for the sales team, the number of new customers, customers visited, business
proposals sent, or turnover to be reached at the end of the month.
Your CRM solution will greatly facilitate day-to-day
work (assignment of tasks, scoring of prospects, creation of contact lists by
offer, recording of appointment dates and employee notes) but it is up to the
management teams to organize the work and reporting tables in this sense, to
make them aware of the main objective: the growth of the company will pass
through coordinated work by the two entities. Your employees must help each
other and move in the same direction.
Most tools, like HubSpot, give you the ability to
create these valuable dashboards to track the number of leads generated by
marketing, you'll also be able to see if those leads are being well supported
by sales teams, and if so , how long.
A CRM for keep the data of your sellers
The majority of companies today are computerized
(email accounts, laptops or office PCs with USB ports). When an employee leaves
your company, it is therefore very easy for them to leave with customer data.
Beyond the “security” aspect, when your salespeople
leave you, they leave with all the customer knowledge! (Literally as well as
figuratively).
If all the important data: invoices, dates of
purchases, requests in progress, contact details have been recorded in your
CRM, you keep the history on the one hand, and can simply revoke the access of
the former collaborator by deactivating his account, and assigning the customer
(which belongs to the company), to a new employee or to a salesperson with a
less extensive portfolio.
A CRM because your teams are digitized
Providing a laptop, a smartphone to your teams to
allow them to work on the move is good, but if you do not provide them with the
digital tools that go with it and force them to go through your secretariat to
find out about Mr. Payet or Mrs. Lebon, it is quite simply counter-productive.
Buyers are digital. And your salespeople? And your
business?
If you're lucky enough to have collaborators looking
for technology (and not to play Candy Crush, huh), take advantage of it.
When your teams work with the same tools, and the same
methods, they will be led to share the data acquired in the field more easily.
The time they will spend on the phone with accounting, in traffic to come and
clean up their quote is time they will not spend selling! If in 5 minutes and
from their smartphones, they can access the contact sheet, and can send him the
quote in stride, here they go again to the next customer. That's more
productivity and more value for your customers!
A CRM to optimize your marketing campaigns
Collecting information on the navigation of your
prospects on the website, on their reactivity on your last emailings, your last
blog article, or Facebook campaign are all data to allow you to adapt your next
actions to generate more prospects, or get a better ROI.
All of these centralized user behaviors are a
veritable gold mine that you can use to provide them with a better experience
and ultimately build loyalty and resell one of your products (upsell, cross-sell)
or service to them. coming.
To optimize the management of your leads, we advise
you to work on the proper use of your CRM. Indeed, a well-used CRM will allow
you to better understand who your leads are. To do this, you will need at least
to know their life cycle, collect information related to the context, know how
to contact them, etc. Take a look at this article from Canva, which will give
you tips on how to better manage your leads.
A CRM to maintain or create a competitive advantage
A market can quickly be saturated, and you will have
to, as we explained earlier, “steal” market share from your favorite
competitors, or prospect outside your catchment area with a real digital
strategy.
In order to be competitive, you will have to be
reactive, perhaps even precursory. A CRM allows you to know the state of your
sales, judge the evolution of the market, keep watch and thus try to innovate,
to diversify... By enriching the knowledge of your customers, you increase your
chances of converting new potential customers.
Our favorite general above, Sun (who is not from
Capri), actually summed it up nicely in one of his sentences, which you can
take out of context during a samosas evening:
“Who knows the other and knows himself can fight a
hundred battles without ever being in danger. Who does not know the other but
knows himself, for each victory, will experience a defeat. Who knows neither
the other nor himself, will inevitably lose all the battles. » Sun Tzu, The Art
of War
Choosing to equip yourself with the right CRM solution
means choosing to maximize the productivity of your teams (and even reduce
hardship and frustration), but above all choosing to optimize the relationship
you have with your prospects and customers to increase sales.
If you are considering setting up a CRM, do not
hesitate to download our selection aid grid. You can also make an appointment
for your free demo of the HubSpot tool (best CRM 2018 according to Gartner, and
CRM that we use for ourselves and for our clients).