Importance Of Having A CRM

In this day and age, for any business, the competition is too high and every business owner needs to take measures to gain a competitive advantage to sustain and grow their businesses. One of the ways to gain a competitive advantage is to leverage on the latest software tools which help to streamline, manage and monitor their business processes and the people involved. One such software tool which is a must-have for any business in the tech stack is the CRM software!

Customer relationship management is one of the essential things in today’s business world. As per statistics – Acquiring a new customer can cost 5x more than retaining an existing customer. Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits from 25-95%. The success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is 5-20%. These stats inevitably suggests that the business owner should commit to maintaining long-lasting customer ties. Thus, for companies of all sizes and industries, it is necessary to capitalize on a CRM software tool for not only customer acquisition but also retention.

What is a CRM?

Typically, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an approach to manage the interaction with the current customers and focuses on customer retention which ultimately helps in increased sales. Having CRM software in the technology stack is more of a strategic approach rather than just having a tool to manage the customer relationship. The CRM software tool helps to learn more about the customer needs, have and track all the communication and data under one single tool, and helps in the final goal of creating a good relationship with the customers.

Unlike any other software tool in the earlier decades (wherein most of the software was installed On-premises at the businesses) the CRM tool implementation and usage were hard. But with the COVID-19 pandemic and majority of the businesses running remotely, there has been a massive transition to Cloud-based CRM software and businesses are now taking advantage of it to run their operations more efficiently than they could previously.

It is estimated that the CRM market size will grow to $113.5 billion by 2027.

Importance of CRM software

1. CRM software serves as a comprehensive Data Storage tool, wherein all the information about the target company, contact information about key decision makers, customer data points, and communication is available at a centralized platform. CRM also enables ease of tracking, data cleansing makes historical data easily accessible, and aids analysis.
2. CRM helps to set up, monitor, and evaluate the processes of sales, marketing, and customer service. Thus, CRM helps in streamlining and aligning the key functions of Marketing – Sales & Customer Service.
3. One of the key features of CRM in the market today is Automation. With the use of CRM tools most of the activities can be automated – reducing the workload of marketing or sales or customer service personnel. Automation in marketing such as email outreach, and social media management. Sales automation such as lead rotation, sequences, etc. helps in expediting day-to-day tasks and the team can focus on actual tasks that matter which results in more sales and revenue generation.
4. Company of any size, be it a large company with 100 sales reps or a startup who are yet to define and streamline the sales process, having a CRM in place helps to track, monitor, and evaluate the sales team’s productivity &provide necessary training which in turn help improve the sales team’s effectiveness and efficiency. Thus, having a CRM in place drastically reflects in increased revenue and profits.
5. Having a CRM in place helps to easily build and choose the right customer profiles and high-value accounts. As discussed earlier a CRM serves as a single tool to store all leads/prospects and customer data, this helps to easily filter out good fits and segment the data based on the ideal customer profile or the target accounts depending upon the stage of business and the objectives the company has.
6. Since all the sales, marketing, and customer service data is available in the CRM, having a CRM in place helps the decision makers to leverage the historic data and effectively aids in forecasting, reporting, and analytics. The insights from this reporting and analytics provide the competitive edge for the company with better meaningful business decisions.
7. As we know the main objective of having a CRM in place is to retain the customer. Today CRM tools not only help in customer retention but also serves as a platform for Customer acquisition with features that seamlessly integrate with the company website and help in lead generation, lead capturing, email marketing and digital marketing, and so on.
8. A CRM tool servers to be significantly cost-effective for any business- CRM helps in setting up the process and streamlining it which saves a lot of time and provides great value for faster processing, improved department functionality (sales, marketing, and customer service) and management decision due to easily available data, reporting, and the analytics in the CRM inevitably reduces costs and increase profit.
9. Today’s cloud-based CRM systems provide the necessary flexibility and scalability for business growth. Whenever there is an expansion in the sales team or huge inflow of lead data from a marketing/ad campaign or any restructuring in the customer service team based on productivity analysis – the CRM system helps in achieving all with a few clicks of a button.
10. One of the key benefits of having a CRM system in place is that it helps in organization and optimization. Be it organized and clean data or structured marketing or ads spent reports or sales rep’s day-to-day activity reports, sales cold call or customer support/service call recordings, ticketing/complaints data, and so on, all these can be easily accessed and managed in a CRM.

We at V-Nxt, are pioneers in helping choose and implement the right CRM system/tools for businesses at scale. With experienced professionals at V-Nxt from a diverse set of tech and functional department backgrounds – we are quick to understand your business, brainstorm on the problem statement and implement/set up the right CRM tool to help you achieve your business goals.