What most successful businesses know is that effective customer relationship management (CRM) involves nurturing customer relationships throughout the sales process, but you need to create an effective CRM strategy before choosing a solution.
What is a CRM Strategy?
Customer Relationship Management is designed to manage your business’s communications, relationships, and interactions with your customers.
Finding the right CRM system is key to success in developing an appropriate customer management system. The most appropriate system is one that stores contact information, can help predict future sales, and guides customer service interaction, while at the same time driving sales by offering tailored recommended products and services, and creating personalised email and SMS campaigns.
This approach will help deliver improved sales and bottom-line results.
It is worth noting there is a clear difference between a CRM platform and a CRM strategy. The CRM strategy is the roadmap while a CRM platform is the technology that moves you in the right direction and is based on the roadmap. Get the strategy right before deciding on your platform!
As a business owner faced with ever-increasing challenges to finding and keeping customers your CRM strategy will need to be a well-thought-out and crafted plan that will enable you to improve customer relationships (and consequently, sales). It is a series of tools and methods used along with other marketing strategies to improve engagement, sales, and existing processes.
Is there value in CRM systems?
The best approach is for the companies to identify the strategy tailored for their operations and develop one that best serves your business’s individual needs. The challenge is your approach to implementing it.
Getting your approach right will benefit your business.
Better Collaboration - with the right CRM strategy, you will see improved collaboration between customer service, sales, and marketing teams that will boost the efficiency of all your business processes
More effective Sales and Marketing Campaigns - this will position your business to create targeted marketing campaigns to help further drive customer acquisition and retention and deliver improved customer experience during the customer journey process
Delivering improved Service to Customer Needs - by keeping track of the sales funnel and buyer's channel, your business is better equipped to deliver an improved customer experience
Provides Data and Insights on Performances - your CRM strategy uses data provided by the CRM system to give a detailed estimate of future business strategies and their expected performances
Creating a successful customer relationship management from scratch involves certain steps you need to include:
Define your CRM’s vision and goals
Define your target audience and buyer personas
Define your customer journey
Establish processes and systems for your 360° customer experience
Understand your market and know your positioning
Know your product or service
Invest in appropriate CRM software
Define KPIs for your business and teams
The success of the CRM strategy you develop for your business will depend on the level of collaboration and interaction between the sales, marketing, and customer service teams.
Take the time to do it right and build the right approach.
This article was provided by The Dept. (The Department of Marketing), Auckland.
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