If you’ve been in business long enough, CRM tech is a concept you’ve probably come across at some point in time. It simply involves use of a software suite to enhance management of customers or prospects throughout the sales process in a bid to maximize business profits and grow meaningful relationships.
A few years ago, CRM technology was considered to be a complex concept to learn and implement especially by small and mid-scale businesses. The cost implications, shortage of innovative alternatives, and a lack of knowledgeable support were some of the factors that hindered most business owners from adopting it.
However, a lot has changed over the years and today any business regardless of its size can easily access the many simple and affordable CRM software options available on the market.
In this post, we discuss four ways in which you can leverage the power of CRM software to turn prospects into buying and even repeat customers.
Ready? Let’s dive straight in.
Information gathering and management
A powerful CRM software is capable of collecting lots of valuable information about your prospects from various sources including social media, manual entries, surveys, etc. Usually, these tools will use customer behavior based on the activities your prospects are engaged in while surfing the web. Based on this data, you can easily understand their preferences which is key in ensuring you send them offers and products that interests them.
For example, most CRM tools will allow you follow up and assess the purchase pattern of your leads as well as their buying power. As you can imagine, this is crucial information that can assist you create highly converting adverts, sales pitches, and trade items that match up to the expectations of your prospects. Nothing will stop them from considering and buying from your brand at this juncture.
Lead qualification
One of the most common (and costly) mistakes sales reps make is to give undeserved attention to prospects that are unlikely to convert into customers. Usually, this is triggered by the shortage of information about a particular prospect which eventually leads to wasted time and resources. Now, with CRM software, you can easily set qualification parameters based on the actions taken by leads.
For example, you can find out who opens your emails, visits your marketing links, and takes any other action leading to sales. What this technology does is to eliminate the lengthy process of nurturing bad leads which almost always never brings any money to your business.
Automation of day-to-day business processes
Let’s face it, it can be super time consuming trying to manually manage the database holding information about your prospects especially once your business has grown big. To deal with this kind of situation, the first area you need to prioritize is to automate daily, repetitive tasks that take most of your valuable time. This can range from sending emails, scheduling meetings, report preparations, etc.
Luckily for you, there are lots of CRMs and many other related tools that can assist you automate these processes quite easily. For example, you can automate your commonly sent emails like the welcome emails by using autoresponder tools like MailChimp. You can also consider using integrations like this Pipedrive MailChimp sync which, just as the name suggests, helps you sync information between Pipedrive CRM and MailChimp software. This way, you don’t need to manually import or export contacts of your potential clients from either tools when sending out emails.
Create sustainable relationships
One of the key purposes of applying CRM technology to your online business is to build better rapport and relationships with your prospects and existing customers. To do this, you need to figure out their expectations, challenges, and finally what they’d consider to be appropriate solutions. Using this information, you should be able to create great products and services that meet their specific needs.
With CRM tools, you can easily explore your leads’ goals, preferences, and shortcomings while meeting their aspirations using existing solutions. This is easily the most effective way to establish sustainable relationships with your customers.
Conclusion
Converting prospects into buying customers is an art every business owner needs to master if they’re to remain profitable and relevant. Luckily, CRM technology makes this process quite painless by managing relevant business data for you.
With these tools, you’re able to improve nearly all areas of your online business ranging from simple tasks like setting up task reminders, to creating email sequences, and even more complex ones like lead scoring and reporting.
Are you using any CRM or related tool to enhance your business? If so, what’s you experience and would you recommend the tech to other business owners? We’d like to hear your feedback.
