The Main Benefits of a CRM and Why Your Company Needs One

That’s where Customer Relationship Management software – or a CRM – comes in. It’s a system that stores, tracks and manages all the interactions and communication your employees have with customers (and potential customers), such as phone calls, web visits, email opens and more.

A CRM organizes and helps you manage all this customer information so you can streamline communication and enhance your customers’ journey with your organization. CRMs are powerful tools that can help you grow and scale your business, let your internal teams collaborate and provide exceptional customer experiences.

These are the six main benefits a CRM can provide to your business:

1. Organize Customer Data
2. Align Internal Teams
3. Ease of Reporting
4. Be More Efficient
5. Customer Retention
6. Increase Sales

Organize Customer Data

A CRM organizes all your customer data into a centralized database and makes it accessible to all your employees. No more entering data into spreadsheets in multiple places that are prone to human error and hard to interpret. A CRM allows for all communication and contact points to be synced and shared in one place. Having all this data together paints a picture of who your customers really are and what they want. You can see what pages of your website they visited, what emails they opened, when and how they first contacted your business and so much more. This also allows for customer segmentation: you may start to see patterns or groups of customers who behave the same. You can create different customer profiles this way and alter your marketing and sales tactics accordingly.

HubSpot is one of the top CRMs for small-medium-sized organizations. They have many features to collect and track customer data such as:

• Call tracking to record calls from the CRM and then log those calls with the associated customer
• Live chat and a chatbot builder to handle FAQs
• Email tracking to tell you when someone opens or clicks an emails

Align Your Internal Teams

A CRM shares all the customer data with your sales, marketing, and service teams, breaking down silos so they can work together for the ultimate customer experience. If a complaint or service call is handled by multiple employees or teams, with the data and communication history at their fingertips, employees can solve problems faster and more efficiently. This provides customers with a seamless and consistent customer experience. And it’s this positive experience that will make your customers want to remain loyal to your brand. Collaboration between internal departments also creates good experiences for your employees, who feel part of a team and feel empowered to help customers.

HubSpot makes make collaboration easy between teams because the platform comes with natively built tools— like Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, Service Hub, and many other integrations.

Ease of Reporting

A CRM will help you report on the metrics that matter to your business. By collecting and organizing your customer data from many sources, it lets you go deeper with all your metrics. Data is easier to interpret when you have multiple points to look at that tell the whole story. A CRM can track customer interactions from all your communication channels like your webpage, social media profiles, emails, phone calls and so on. An advantage that CRMs have is that you can see who interacts with your company and how. For example, a customer comes to your website after seeing an ad on social media and then successfully fills out a form on a landing page. What ads or webpages are generating the most leads? How many phone calls or web forms are you getting? How many of these leads turn into sales?

Reports from your CRM will give you actionable data so you can effectively communicate with your potential customers and make it easier to contact and nurture those who have shown interest in the past but never purchased.

With a CRM like HubSpot, you can create up to 300 custom dashboards and reports or select from one of the pre-made templates. You can look at those reports in real-time, share reports and automate your reporting so reports are made and emailed out daily, weekly, or monthly.

Be More Efficient with Communications

A huge benefit to a CRM is the ability to streamline work, making your employees more efficient and freeing up time for things like content creation or personal sales outreach. In fact, businesses that utilize a CRM see a 34% increase in sales team productivity (source: HubSpot). A CRM lets you automate tasks and create workflows, so you don’t miss any follow-ups, replies or potential interactions.

An example of CRM automation could be automatically updating a customer’s contact record after every interaction, as well as sending out automatic emails after filling out a form or other interactions on your website.

Hubspot allows you to create automated workflows, which complete and organize sales, marketing, and service processes to save you time. You can set criteria that automatically put a customer or lead into a workflow and then take actions of your choice (i.e. send them an email, send them a quote and so on).

These are all important benefits and ways to improve your business, but the two most important reasons to get a CRM (which all of the above will support) are to keep customers and make sales.

Better Customer Retention

A CRM can help you build trust with your customers by storing important customer information that can be referenced later. Most likely a customer will interact with your business more than once, so it helps to log each interaction for future analysis. This can be most beneficial for service teams.

CRMs can also provide sentiment analysis and customer support automation to help you determine problems and quickly address them, such as reaching out to customers who have not been contacted lately. A CRM also helps you personalize your customer communications. About 41% of customers churn due to poor personalization (source: HubSpot).

For example, with HubSpot, a customer service rep can look at a customer's history, determine if they have had poor experiences with your company, then implement steps to avoid churn. On the flip side, if a customer continuously shops at your business, reps can keep track of their purchases and reward customer loyalty.

Increase Sales

Organizations that use a CRM see a 29% increase in sales (source: HubSpot). A big part of that is because by utilizing a CRM and its data properly, you can improve customer satisfaction and strengthen customer trust – leading to loyalty and repeat sales. Studies have shown the top 10% of your most loyal customers will spend three times more than your average customer (source: HubSpot).

A CRM also helps you streamline your sales process, build a sales pipeline, conduct lead nurturing, automate sales tasks and analyze data. For example, a CRM can help you automate a sales process by sending alerts when your team should reach out to potential customers, tracking every communication, sending automated emails and much more.

With Hubspot, sales reps and managers can see which sales activities and sources produce the most leads, and the most profitable leads. This data also helps with creating sales projections and updating your sales pipeline. With a CRM you can review specific activities like emails, calls, and meetings booked. Sales managers can then use this data to see which sales processes are working and what needs to be changed or improved.

To understand your customers is to have data about your customers. And if you’re like many organizations, you have data in multiple places, and it is hard to gather insights and create processes that work because you do not have a single source of truth. We can help your business grow by implementing a unified system of customer records and scalable processes that will drive revenue and increase customer retention and loyalty. Give us a call today or learn more about our HubSpot implementation.