3 Proven Ways a CRM System Can Increase Your Sales.

I think you will agree that using a CRM system is not like waving a magic wand. Your customers still don't buy everything you offer, your team doesn't perform wonders and at the end of the day, you haven't made all of your customers happy. Good news! It happens even to the best of us.

But if you really implement these 3 key CRM features in your business strategy, you will increase your sales, build lasting relationships and keep your customers for life. Here’s what I mean:

Get Your Sales Funnel Working For You

Look: Most people think about the Sales Funnel as some visual graphic that shows you how many leads have been converted into prospects or clients. But it is way more complex than that. It is all the efforts you put in capturing, organizing, and properly tracking leads to converting the best to sales, and all that is in between these two stages.

A sales funnel is the "ideal" process you expect your customers to experience as they go from leads to customers.

The original idea of Sales funnels really stems from the classic Marketing concept of AIDA - Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. The concept generally describes how you can build customer relationships.

The boom of the Internet made sales funnels easier to build in with websites and email marketing being widespread. Develop a strategy for every step of your sales funnel and put it in motion. You can evolve your efforts until it works best for you. The first steps are to make your potential customers aware of your existence. You can do this by social media marketing, email marketing, cold calling, attending events, advertising, etc. These efforts will fill your sales funnel with leads. For example, you can attract more visitors with relevant content. Most CRM solutions provide custom lead capture forms. You can create a website and landing page forms, email campaigns, pоlls, and all data will go directly into your CRM account as leads.

Every lead is a potential client so you need to further connect with them. There are many methods you can use to nurture your prospects. Depending on your industry you may want to talk face-to-face about potential purchases, call or email leads with exclusive offers and discounts, send relevant resources, give free samples, and more. Having a CRM system in place lets you follow up with your leads promptly so you can qualify them quickly. You can organize and manage your leads effectively. You can assign leads so your reps can start qualifying them. With easy access to relevant information, salespeople will be able to better understand and get acquainted with client's wants.

All of these efforts are sure to bring you success. Your team can focus on selling while your CRM solution automatically tracks and stores your accurate and complete sales data.

 

Make Your Customers Happy

I'm sorry, but your work doesn't end once your prospects are converted into customers.

Now, you need to build loyalty towards your brand, to make sure your customers are satisfied with your products and services. Customers don’t want to wait to get their questions answered. Once they paid for something they want you to pay them attention. Establishing customer support and enabling customers to interact directly with you and your team can help you do that.

A help desk solution manages issued tickets and empowers your teams to efficiently communicate with customers via email, chat, phone, and directly on your website. It isn't really so hard to find a help desk and CRM in one system. You can even integrate a help desk product with your existing CRM system if it doesn't support customer support. You give your customers the resources to help themselves by running a knowledge base. You can publish a “Get started”, “How to ” and more articles and FAQs related to your products. You can even get custom knowledge baserunning on your website with your brand look.

Putting a help desk eliminates and automates a lot of manual processes. It gives your users a single place to create new tickets, views the status of open ones, and closes out issues that are no longer present. They can communicate with a team member on every ticket they have submitted. The help desk will receive and log all issues automatically. You keep organized, traceable records of all tickets that are submitted.

One of the best advantages of using a help desk alongside a CRM system is that you never lose data about your clients. All interactions are collected and organized from every channel in a customer's account. Your team can dive right into their cases, posted tickets, and communications.

What’s the bottom line?

You will offer fast, helpful customer service and personalize customer care.

 

Make It Easy To Connect

Pat yourself on the shoulder! You are making more sales, even better, you are keeping your customers happy.

So now what? Now you make sure you provide them with cohesive, personalized communication that speaks directly to each client. What’s more, in recent years building a relationship between the individual customer and the company has become more and more important. The number of new and innovative companies has increased and because of that keeping existing customers has become more important.

A CRM can help your staff deliver highly tailored and targeted messages at the right time. Using a CRM solution allows your business to keep track of customer activities over time. With features as the  Event Timeline, it is even easier to achieve sales successes. In a customer's profile, a sales rep can see every previous purchase, communication, or activity. Every piece of information related to a customer is stored for you in one central location.

If your business is based on monthly subscriptions it's easy to set up alerts that notify you when a customer's subscription is ending, so you can contact them back at agreed times, etc. You have a single customer view for your employees.

With the development of the Internet, online communications are rather preferred by most people. Targeted email campaigns with exclusive offers and discounts, personalized shopping offers and emails, are all strategies you can use to engage your clients to buy more. Sales reps know each customer better.

Most people see CRM systems as a miracle that will instantly solve any sales and marketing problem they have. The truth is that it needs time, patience, and perseverance to get things right. The right CRM solution can be a great tool in assisting and improving your company's sales, marketing, and customer service processes.

Now it’s your turn to put these techniques into practice.