Too often, business development professionals view CRMs as a performance-monitoring tool. They don’t realize that, when consistently updated with data from internal and external sources, CRMs can deliver precisely the information they need to win more sales and exceed their quotas.
These real-world examples demonstrate how CRM data achieves this by:
- Optimizing Workflow
Gene Marks, CPA, and columnist for publications such as Forbes and The Washington Post, says CRM data is critical to helping his team stay on top of opportunities.
“We have a workflow that is automatically created when a quote is done from our CRM system, and where a salesperson is reminded to follow up on that quote. If no follow up is done, management is alerted,” he explains. “We have another workflow that scans our CRM system for any client that has not had any contact, such as a call or appointment, in four months, and a reminder is scheduled.
“The best way to close a deal or advance a relationship is to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.”
- Attaining Powerful Insight
When Ray Beste, a partner with Sikich, demonstrated to a prospect that he could collect insight about their own company that they didn’t even know yet, they were sold.
“We were showing a feature that pulls in information about prospects and customers from the internet and makes it available to users of CRM, and we used the prospect’s company as an example,” he explains. “In the news feed was an announcement about a merger that was going to happen. The people in the room weren’t even aware of it yet. It really helped show the value of real-time data in a CRM system and helped us get the deal.”
- Facilitating Cross-Selling
CRM helps USAA, a financial services firm, consistently outperform most of its competitors and earn the highest customer loyalty scores, according to Harvard Business Review.
The company does deep data mining from multiple sources to identify signature events in the lives of their clients. Those events trigger their client-facing professionals to contact the customer at just the right time with just the right offers, such as auto insurance when a customer’s child is about to turn 16. As a result, USAA outperforms most competitors in the number of products held by its customers.
CRM automation helps you effortlessly duplicate the successes of Gene, Ray and USAA by:
- Providing a complete, accurate, up-to-the-second view of the customer through continuously enriching data from internal and external sources. There’s simply not enough hours in the day to manually compile what CRM automation collects automatically. This includes:
- Previous and present accounts
- All customer interactions, including emails and meeting notes
- Relationships both inside and outside the organization
- Potential opportunities, behavioral information, and activities
- The data is packaged so it’s easy to understand in the formats your team uses most, such as Word or Excel. Then it’s delivered via email on the platform they prefer, whether that’s mobile, tablet or laptop. There’s no navigating across a CRM system to gather and analyze data, in fact, they don’t need to log into the CRM system at all.
- Streamlining workflow. Because CRM automation eliminates the need for manual data entry, client-facing professionals can spend more time focusing on those they serve. This saves them at least 5.5 hours per week while eliminating the inaccuracy and gaps that can come with human error.
- Making it easier to quickly identify at-risk clients and respond appropriately. Customer relationship automation can alert your team when a client is at risk, it’s time to touch base, or even sell them additional products and services. You can always be certain your business development professionals have everything they need to know to move relationships in the right direction.