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Pull out your thinking hat and tell us what names come to your mind when we say healthcare, social media, finance, or Fintech. There’s a good possibility you might be naming businesses that started small and grew exponentially. Instagram, Zerodha, Facebook, Freshworks, and Intercom are a few companies that have scaled extensively. Streamlined automation, well-defined strategies, and clear workflow are why these businesses grew. We have discussed earlier and would like to reiterate the importance of a CRM system for your business. In the previous discussions, we noted how a CRM is helpful and what it does for the business. We will further this discussion by taking an example for each use case. This will give a complete understanding of how CRM helps firms.
» Top 10 Examples of How CRM Works
#1) Improve Personalization with Automation
Get your marketing team to answer a simple question- where do you spend most of your time? They would claim welcoming people and getting up-to-date with the company’s products and services. Imagine spending long hours knowing which lead has joined the business. You are then supposed to send them an Email letting them know about your business. This can become tedious and waste your marketing resource time as your business might get multiple leads several times in a day. Using automation workflows, CRM systems can help you plan your lead’s welcome into the business. Create a welcome email series and create the flow for each email. For instance, if a lead has subscribed to your newsletter, send them a thank you email with some nice pointers. The next email could talk about your business and what it offers. Each email should address a purpose and move them through the funnel. Doordash reduced the email campaign creation cycle by three days with HubSpot for marketing. They introduced automation into their Email marketing campaigns by creating specific workflows. They ensured that 80% of their campaigns were within the workflows. With this automation process, they were able to save resource time, improve their segmentation abilities and launch the campaigns faster. The overall processes sped up, and you could see a productivity improvement. Automation also gave them free time to think through the user’s requirements. Here is a detailed case study on how Doordash managed it to help understand.
#2) Reduce Sales Cycle by Tracking Deal Closure
Your sales team is likely to lose sleep over deal closures. Getting the lead to move through the funnel, nurturing them appropriately, and then closing the deal is a dream come true. However, your team should know which deals are worth investing time and effort. It is not possible to manually track the crucial deals. Moreover, you must properly know the lead’s needs and time for your sales strategies. CRM can help you ensure perfect timing to close every single deal. It will give you the exact information regarding the lead’s interest. You would know their stage, what they are looking at, the information they have, and the reasons they are showing interest in you. If you tap into this information right now, you will notice that the deal is yours. The CRM sales management workflow will push the most interested and aware lead to the fore. You will know if the lead is hot and ready to convert from the pipeline. This way, you will never waste your efforts. Rainier Custom Homes were able to reduce their time-to-close deals by 50%. Using Pipeline CRM, they reduced the sales cycle from 132 days to 62 days. You can read the detailed note on how this CRM helped the business here.
#3) Increase Profits with 360-degree View into Customers
The magic of retention doesn’t go unnoticed. It can save your business many costs and get you to repeat revenue. Moreover, there is a good chance you can sell expensive products, cash on upselling, and generate more revenue with repeat customers. To retain customers, you should know them like the back of your hand. It should start from basics like demographics. But, with time, you should have a 360-degree view of your customers’ habits. Look at their spending habits, the frequency of visits, and even their repeat purchases. CRM can help you access all relevant customer insights from a single place. They can help you access insights into your customers to personalize campaigns. The analytics CRM will give complete details to help you plan your nurturing strategies. You can also plan the sales and marketing strategies to meet customer retention goals. Rock Content grew its annual recurring revenue by 650% using 360-degree customer insights with Hubspot. They used the sales, marketing, and service CRM to gather insights on leads and customers. They integrated the data across processes to deliver appropriate strategies that enhanced retention. You can read the entire case study here.
#4) Improve Collaboration to Enhance Productivity
One of the key aspects of deal closure is help from other team members. For instance, when closing a deal, you realize someone has worked on a similar client. You can tag them and seek help while closing the deal. The CRM will allow you to collaborate in real-time and help you connect over a single document. You can manage the deal from within the CRM using all the integrated tools. This allows you greater access and helps you in multiple ways. Moreover, you will realize that you will enhance the sales team’s productivity by collaborating and closing the deal on time. Clari revenue platform needed CRM to manage their sales activities and keep track of incoming leads. They collaborated seamlessly and kept 100% track of all sales efforts with the Groove CRM. The complete view of their deals made the business enhance its abilities. You can check the detailed case study here.
#5) Manage Sales Strategies with Bird’s Eye View into Sales Performance
The sales personnel are your biggest asset. They can become your liability if you don’t have a bird’s eye view of their deals and closure rates. You won’t know which salesperson is performing well and who is not performing at all. At the same time, you wouldn’t be aware of the bottlenecks making it impossible for the person to close the deal. Tracking a sales team’s performance is critical. The CRM can help you monitor each person’s deals, closure rates, sales cycle, and retention rate. A single dashboard would give you a complete view of your team, enabling you to make better strategies and decisions. You will also know if the sales process needs to be tamed to improve the deal closure rate for the sales team. MyHome, the remodeling and renovation company, clocked a 25% increase in deal closure with Hubspot CRM. They improved their appointments booked per lead by 20%. Here’s the story connecting their problem and how switching to HubSpot CRM helped them with the right solution.
#6) Seamless Experiences with Omni-channel Communication
Businesses should be where their user is. This is an important part of extending seamless experiences and making them happy. WhatsApp is a commonly used communication tool by businesses and users. It allows the customers to connect with the business in real-time. Businesses can create live chat abilities, help agents connect with customers via WhatsApp, and enhance support. CRM allows you to integrate WhatsApp and build the communication channel you want. It also helps automate the entire flow so that you can only let your agents know when needed. This helps sales, marketing, and service teams be where the customer is. It also helps them nurture their potential customers or retain their existing ones. A school in Mexico City incorporated Hubspot WhatsApp integration. This allowed them to monitor customer conversations and enhance them. It also helped them track the customer’s journey.
#7) Help Desk Automation to Improve Service Outcomes
Let’s understand the role of the help desk with the retail example. If you need to replace a particular product or need help with your shopping, you connect with the customer support executive in person. However, what happens when you move online? You must create a virtual help desk that supports and answers your customer’s queries in real-time. By automating the help desk online, you can free your resources in the service teams to focus on retaining the customers, solving their queries, and offering them upsell. It also improves the response time, enhances the team’s productivity, and streamlines service processes. You can create a self-service portal with CRM software to automate the help desk. By looking into past queries, you can easily create and answer the FAQs. Make sure to write detailed posts that would help the user get a response to all their questions. The user will look up the portal for the answer whenever they have a particular query. This way, you can introduce agents only when the portal cannot offer the answer. You will save resource time and can invest them in other important parts of customer service. InspectionXpert used Hubspot full suite CRM with complete service support to automate ticket handling. They could reduce ticket support time by 25%. They managed to improve the knowledge database with the support of the CRM. Read the full case study here.
#8) Manage Social Media Leads with Contact Management
Imagine your business has multiple facets (which is true- considering you are on social media, website, and other platforms). Your leads would be coming in from anywhere. How would you track these leads and ensure they are added to the CRM? The contact management comes to your aid. Using this tool, you can easily integrate the contacts. One key use is automatically adding social media contacts to your CRM. The CRM is active whenever you gain a new follower, or there is some lead activity on the social media platform. It will automatically add the details available to the CRM. This will help you ensure you don’t miss out on a single social media lead coming into your business.
#9) Precise Sales Forecasting for Better Strategic Management
As a sales team, you must have set the goals for the year. This would include the revenue your business will likely clock in for the financial year. However, how would you know if you can manage the sales revenue that you are planning? The CRM will help you. After comparing the past sales revenue and the current customer behavior, it can accurately forecast the revenue for your business. You can get detailed reports with the help of CRM for the sales figures, existing goals, and even the current objectives. You can see how many customers are interested in making another purchase. Your team would know how many people are moving out of the sales cycle. This would help finalize the set amount. You can redefine the goals and objectives, thus enabling your sales team for the best outcome. TKF Telecom France used Freshsales to manage their sales processes. They needed help with revenue generation and sales forecasting. With this CRM, they could determine the exact number of projects they would close in a particular year. Here’s a glimpse of how the Freshsales CRM helped them.
#10) Improve Competition Analysis with CRM Software
Every opportunity that closed for you is an opportunity that opened itself for someone else. They are your competitors. It is equally important to hold your competition closer so that you are aware of their moves. CRM allows you to understand every opportunity that knocks on your desk, be aware of the competition and plan your strategies accordingly. When closing the deal, you can mention the competition’s name. This would help you further your analysis and recognize the shortcomings. If you are losing too many deals to a particular competition, you must identify the reasons. The CRM helps with a single-page data visualization into the competition, which will help answer your queries.
» Conclusion
CRM is an incredible software solution that every business must incorporate. It can enhance business productivity, streamline conversations and even help the sales team with accurate revenue forecasting. Overall, it can make your business intelligent and improve informed decision-making. Choosing an appropriate CRM solution is key to closing deals or managing marketing strategies. Several factors include the features, cost, and avoiding vendor lock-in to ensure the best outcomes.
