In this article, we explore the reasons as to why a CRM should be one of the sales technologies set at the core of your business and sales operations.
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Companies have been increasing their IT spends over the last few years and there has been significant increase in CRM adoption patterns. Companies who have successfully embraced strong CRM practices have also reported improvement in achievement of sales quotas as a result of it.
What is Driving CRM Adoption Trends for B2B Sales and Marketing Teams?
The CRM software market is expected to reach $80 Billion in revenues by 2025, some of the key factors that are driving interest in CRM platforms is their increasing mobile accessibility, cloud-based, AI backed capabilities and ability to collate and centralize multiple sources of customer data and behavior patterns.
With the need for marketing and sales teams to drive customer acquisition efforts with deeper personalization, customer support teams, email marketers, marketing and sales people have started depending more on the capabilities of CRM systems to centralize their customer data and boost their personalization efforts.
CRM systems, when implemented with the right processes can help eliminate common challenges in the sales process, sales and marketing leaders who have set in place strong alignment processes using their CRM as a common reference point have reported reduced inter-team friction. CRMs do more than just help sales and marketing teams centralize customer data and contact records, it can help automate everyday sales tasks and provide benefits in many other ways.
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Here’s a quick dip into why CRMs should be one of your key SalesTech systems:
Aligns Business Growth, Sales Goals and Marketing KPIs
CRMs can be very beneficial to businesses that are looking to quickly scale their sales and marketing operations, it acts as a central system that collates information, helps automate large scale marketing and sales outreach while also prompting sales teams with relevant responses based on customer behaviors.
For lean teams, or teams looking to significantly scale their overall ROI, a CRM can help act as central resource that collects all the data of your customers from various sources, sales leaders can set sales goals and track the performance of their teams and traction on key accounts in one place while marketing leaders can have comprehensive insights into performance of outbound/inbound efforts and campaigns and other marketing campaigns. When sales and marketing teams and leaders have constant access and visibility into the team goals, traction on team goals, status of accounts and more such key data in one place, it reduces the time taken to collaborate with different teams.
Seasoned sales and marketing teams who have implemented CRMs since years usually create workflows to organize sales and marketing processes and to save internal team time.
Syncs and Updates Contact Data/Customer Interactions across platforms with Ease
Once integrated into your tech stack and email, a CRM records customer interactions no matter which sales rep from the company is currently nurturing the prospect/account; this automated update and syncing of data gives better visibility to sales and marketing leaders on the traction being made for their target accounts.
This further helps sales and marketing leaders focus on simplifying the overall customer relationship process and kind of messaging they use to move accounts/prospects through the buying journey. Most CRM leaders like HubSpot, Salesforce offer all-in-one capabilities that allow call tracking, live chat integration and support, email tracking, social media management and tracking and a lot more.
With all of this information in one place, sales and marketing leaders can find better ways to create relevant customer campaigns that speak to their current interest level in their product/service.
Allows Teams to Build Custom Dashboards to Assess Metrics that Matter
Based on the level of growth or stage of your business (start-up/scale up/enterprise, etc!) different metrics will matter to sales and marketing leaders at different times. CRMs have facilitate better reporting and analytics management by allowing teams to create their own custom dashboards to track and analyse those metrics that matter most at a particulate time of the business. These reports can be accessed in real-time and the better data visualization allows sales and marketing leaders to drive faster business decisions and make quicker pivots when needed. These reports can even be set to be shared with relevant stakeholders on a weekly, daily, monthly basis, as the case may be.
CRMs have the innate power to fuel better sales and marketing processes while helping boost their output too. With the capabilities on offer by today’s range of sophisticated CRMs, what matters first is choosing the best-fit CRM specific to your business and team needs and then putting in place the right CRM practices to ensure you maximize the value of your CRM investment.
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