What is a CRM, and why are they so useful? 

A CRM, or customer relationship management, can be made up of a lot of different platforms, software, and business strategies. According to Forbes, a CRM is “is all of the activities, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage their interactions with their current and potential customers”. A CRM “toolkit” is made up of many facets, including websites, social media, telephone calls, chat, mail, email and various marketing materials, and modern platforms such as HubSpot like to combine all of these services into one, easy to use service. 

By intelligently storing and managing your customers' data, a CRM system increases lead volume, helping your marketing team find new customers faster. It supports your sales teams in closing more deals faster. It also enhances customer service. We are going to dive into a few of the reasons why a CRM is essential for a modern business to utilize, starting with the most obvious one, better customer relations. 

Improve Customer Relations with useful data. 

While “customer relations” is in the name, it's not always immediately obvious how a CRM really helps with the customer experience. CRM tools help businesses to better learn about their customer bases, including who they are and why they are interested in purchasing your products. This allows businesses to better anticipate their customers' needs and, as a result, fulfill them. Effectively using a CRM platform also provides a strategic advantage. Well organized and prioritized customer data helps companies select the correct recipients for new promotional initiatives, including newsletters, email blasts, and early access to new products. Finally, CRM software allows businesses to optimize their customer interactions. By simplifying and streamlining many of the more complex customer interaction processes, you free up more resources for your employees to focus on more thorough interactions with potential clients and leads, increasing customer satisfaction.

Rev Ops Strategy

​​When a business becomes large enough to establish separate departments, proper coordination between dynamic teams often becomes difficult. CRM software is designed to improve collaboration throughout the entire internal process. This efficient combining of multiple areas within a business is known as Revops or revenue operations. Your CRM system serves as a single source of truth for all transactional, business, and customer data that has been gathered on your customer. Employees across the company can work with the same customer or follow a customer's progress through marketing, sales, and service. Everyone who has access to your CRM can work together because they have the latest information. 

A good CRM system provides automated workflows that enable your marketing team to spend more time on strategic tasks, such as creating marketing campaigns that resonate, analyzing the data from those campaigns, and testing different approaches based on those analytics. Customer service agents can spend their time working with customers who have more complex questions, problems, or needs. In short, with more efficient customer care processes, companies can build better customer relationships. By effectively utilizing these tools affording by a CRM platform, you will score more leads, improve closure rates, and increase your revenue. 

Transform your workflow with AI & Machine Learning

One of the new trends in CRM technology is the adaption and usage of AI to bolster their already powerful tools. These powerful additions allow even more optimization to your business strategies, such as:

1. Utilizing machine learning to examine data around each sales opportunity gives a business the ability to better forecast the likelihood of close rates. Some platforms even allow the use of powerful digital assistants, chatbots, and other automated messaging systems to handle simple customer inquiries, such as order status, payments due, or even just to help navigate through your site and product offerings. 
2. Powerful data visualization tools and access to AI-curated company data for dozens of demographic’s and types of signal data to better target your audience and power more precise account-based marketing strategies, further honing in your sales and marketing strategies.
3. Use machine learning to automatically predict the best-performing mix of send time and channel for each customer based on their interaction history, profile, and content metadata.
4. Use AI-curated data and machine learning to create an ideal customer profile that can be used to identify lookalike sales opportunities. 
   
   

Examples of CRM’s resources

Now all that's left is to choose what platform works best for your business. This isn’t a one size fits all situation, and each platform has its own specific tools to help manage your customer base and maximize on lead generation. Carefully weigh all the different price points and feature sets to determine which platform works best. 

• Hubspot: HubSpot is Poeta’s CRM platform of choice, and we utilize all of its powerful tools. HubSpot offers marketing tools, sales tools, and so much more. HubSpot also includes powerful AI tools, a robust and customizable chatbot builder, and even a robust CMS builder for creating websites and landing pages. Top that off with industry leading customer service and flexible pricing options, and you really can’t go wrong with this one. 

• SalesForce: Arguably the biggest CRM platform on the market, Salesforce is an extremely powerful combination of tools. They have just about every marketing or sales tool you can think of, and just a glimpse of their site showcases just how many suites they have on offer here. This might be overkill for smaller businesses, but luckily they even offer a smaller, more tailored experience for them as well. You can’t go wrong here! 

• Zoho CRM: While other CRM's often utilize third-party solutions for effective communication between teams such as Slack or Google, Zoho utilizes powerful first party tools for this, as well as other functions. They even offer a custom-made “Creator” tool for superfast application creation with minimal coding required. Zoho is a super powerful all-in-one solution for businesses who want to keep their online workspace minimal and clean. 

Conclusion

Powerful marketing and sales tools, better collaboration and communication between departments, and an enhanced customer experience coming together in one powerful package makes it easy to see why utilizing a CRM in your business’ digital strategy is essential. Whether you choose to utilize some included tools, or all of them, we are confident that your business will see improvements across all departments, and generate more leads as a result. 

If you liked this blog and want to learn even more about CRM’s or Digital Transformation, check out some of our other blogs! We cover a wide array of topics in Technology across multiple industries. If you have any questions or are interested in our very own CRM integrations services, we would love to chat with you. 

Thanks for reading!