A smooth-running CRM system is essential for your sales team to hit their targets and help business boom. The numbers don’t lie.
According to Hubspot research, 75% of sales managers say that using a CRM helps to drive and increase sales and CRM systems improve customer retention by 27%.
Here are some of the reasons why a CRM system is essential for a growing business when a few spreadsheets and rules of thumb just won’t do.
Better lead intelligence for both marketing and sales
CRM’s like Hubspot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive give you full transparency over who’s on your website, and what they’re looking at. This is absolute gold for both sales and marketing teams when personalization is becoming more essential to catch people’s eyes.
Implementing a CRM gives your sales team visibility over how many times a potential customer has visited your site and previous conversations with any sales team members. This is the type of real-time, detailed lead intelligence which makes a salesperson job so much easier.
It’s not just beneficial to sales, either. Your marketing team can also see which of their efforts are turning visitors into customers, and what brought them to your website in the first place.
Better sales and marketing alignment
Both sales and marketing teams have a goal to hit at the end of the month. So when both teams have visibility over each other’s goals and metrics, they can easily assess each team’s progress, identify potential issues, and suggest some impactful ideas.
However, this is only possible if they are using the same CRM and reporting system. Real-time reporting also holds both teams accountable and helps one another work towards a shared outcome to benefit the business.
Help sales prioritize its pipeline
With the visibility provided by a CRM, salespeople will have an easy-to-use sales pipeline that enables them to prioritize certain leads so that they don’t miss important opportunities.
This is helped further, as in the case of the Hubspot CRM, by the ability to create alerts when a lead becomes more interested, and also automates follow-up emails so that you don’t miss a beat.
Organisational systems, including lead scoring, also save time spent sifting through lead information and enables salespeople to prioritize the best opportunities.
Closed-loop reporting lets marketers improve campaigns
“Closing the loop” means that sales teams will report back to Marketing about what happened to the leads, and this helps Marketing understand their best and worst lead sources.
This is made even simpler through a CRM. Marketers can easily see the effectiveness of their campaigns, and how it is creating customers, whenever a salesperson marks a customer into the CRM. This helps the marketing team attribute the new customer to a specific campaign, page, or channel, educating them and improving their marketing efforts.
Mapping marketing activities to sales events is critical for marketing to improve campaign by campaign, and it’s all made easier through a CRM.
Sales and marketing teams no longer need to fret about endless spreadsheets and lost leads. Implementing best practice with a CRM system can lead to a stronger pipeline and a better, faster selling.
To get a full insight into the benefits, features, and personal acquisition experience a CRM system can give you, download the beginners guide to CRM and explore the opportunities today.