“This CRM is going to revolutionize our business!”
-Every CRM Buyer Ever
Your team was elated. Remember? You just signed off on your new CRM. Maybe there were even a few high fives, a few back slaps.
After months of researching vendors… brainstorming an exhaustive list of questions… narrowing down the list of vendors… more questions… gaining buy-in from an incredibly thorough IT department… at last, you e-signed the dotted line.
Whew! Full steam ahead!
And then you discovered: The rest of the team – and especially the sales team – wasn’t nearly as excited. No biggie. That’s what CRM training is for, right?
A few years later, you’re staring a stark reality in the face: That advanced, expensive sales engine we bought didn’t come with fuel. And if employees won’t enter complete, accurate, and up-to-date data into our CRM, or login to prepare for clients, this ginormous investment is useless.
But if you could somehow just flip a switch, you know, some sort of “CRM adoption” switch, then you could finally realize the following benefits.
Benefit #1: An actual ROI from your CRM
Which option do you think sales and business development teams prefer?
Option A: Spend roughly an hour per day manually looking up and logging contacts, creating accounts, creating opportunities, logging outreach, logging notes, entering action items, figuring out who to reach out to next, and basically anything other than actually meeting with customers!
Option B: Let AI intuitively feed you just the information you need at just the right time to connect to real rooms full of customers and prospects all while taking care of all of the logging and admin work for you in, you guessed it, your CRM.
By making it stupidly simple for employees to get amazing information to your CRM, you finally have the contextual data that fuels your powerful relationship intelligence engine. Now say it again (and this time it’s actually true), “This CRM is going to revolutionize our business!”
Benefit #2: A streamlined sales process
You hired your sales team to generate revenue, right? So why all the admin work? The average CRM user spends 5.5 hours per week adding contacts, updating contact information, capturing meeting notes, noting action items, assigning tasks, logging phone calls, inserting email interactions, praying that everyone else is doing their part to log the right data in the right fields, all of which costs companies an average of $13,200 per CRM user, per year.
What a waste.
Your CRM should serve sales and business development teams, not the other way around. And when you REALLY automate your CRM, it will serve the core function of sales, which brings us to our next benefit.
Benefit #3: A smarter sales team
If you’re in sales, you’ve been there. There’s a big client meeting on the immediate horizon and you’re scrambling. You need knowledge and you need it now.
So you’re tearing through email conversation threads, online notes, paper notes, checking with colleagues regarding recent interactions…
Is there anything I should know about in the CRM? Probably not, but better check anyway… I wish my colleagues who touch my accounts would enter data into that damn thing… I would. Just don’t have time…
Any big client news? What are they talking about? Can’t look ignorant… Oh, that’s right – they hired that new executive. What do we know about her? Does anyone here know her? Is the competition connected to her?!?
You know the feeling – it’s like you’re running yourself ragged just to appear competent.
Imagine letting the system prep you with everything you need to know:
- What’s going on with the client?
- Any new relationships I can leverage?
- Do we have board connections?
- Has anyone been touching my client?
- What if they didn’t log it all?
- What’s new with all our contacts?
- What is the status of the agenda items they care about?
- How has relationship been trending?
- Are we likely to close the opportunities when we think we will?
Getting all this information without the work enables a serene, successful meeting that leaves prospects impressed. No scrambling needed.
Benefit #4: An empowered marketing team
Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing teams see 38% higher sales win rates. It’s not hard to see why. With buyers now escorting themselves through most of the buying cycle before contacting a company, the pressure is squarely on marketing’s shoulders to identify ideal prospects, attract them with content, and nurture them until they’re ready to buy.
Any B2B marketing leader will tell you that “nurturing” is far easier said than done. Effective nurturing doesn’t just require quality content, but also contextual content that meets the reader where they are in the buyer’s journey.
“Overall, there is a significant correlation between the effectiveness of customer-facing content and the level of relationships that can be achieved with customers,” says Tamara Schenk of CSO Insights. “Content matters. Content in context matters even more. Content must become a sales force’s strategic imperative and a number one priority on every sales leader’s agenda. Highly effective customer-facing content that covers the entire customer’s journey is a must-have ingredient to remain successful in an ever-changing, buyer-driven world.”
Marketing automation systems need contextual data, and that contextual data comes from the CRM. A marketing team empowered by data can deliver the right content, to the right person, at the right time. A marketing team that lacks data can’t. It’s that simple.
Benefit #5: Keep your customers
Legendary aviator Edgar Mitchell famously said, “If we don’t take care of our customers, someone else will.” Given competitor’s’ ability to swoop in with insight-fueled solutions, Mitchell’s quote has never been truer. Customer retention is the bloodline of any business, especially when you consider that it costs 7x more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one.
Today’s customers expect more, and disjointed experiences don’t fly. Each team member, from business development, to support, to marketing, to the CEO needs the ability to pick up each customer conversation where it left off. How can you reasonably expect to deliver superior customer service when 88% of CRM users admit to entering incomplete contact information?
You already know all this, which is why you bought your CRM. Now it’s just about simplifying and automating everything already.
The good news is you don’t need to switch your CRM – you just need to automate everything, making it so simple and advantageous that employees don’t think twice about using it. In fact, they may not even know it! We can show you how with a personalized demo.