CRM may be a small three letter word, but it’s been a mighty one in the world of sales, leading to greater efficiencies and better closure rates. As of late, many companies are recognizing that a CRM software can provide added value by giving strategic insights into the customer behavior, drive organizational efficiencies, improve customer engagement, and lead to a significant increase in incremental revenue. Let’s take a deeper look at this.

Better Customer and Business Insights Bring More Growth

 Businesses succeed when they effectively address customers’ needs and pain points. But this can only be achieved if you have a good understanding of your customers. This is where a CRM adds great value: it provides rich customer data, their history, interactions, and engagement. Many companies use CRM to focus on new opportunities and sales closure. In addition to that, the sea of data available in the CRM signals back information about their existing customers’ engagement. An analysis of this data can provide a company with rich insights on their customers, their products, and/or services. This, in turn, can inform a company on where to focus their marketing, product development and service efforts.

For example, a well-managed CRM allows for specific customer requirements and feedback to be noted. Using this data, a company can improve or enhance their product offerings; thereby being very responsive to their customers’ needs, as well as, competitive and innovative.

Similarly, a CRM enables a business to segment and target their current customers efficiently. You can segment your key accounts based on past interactions and target them with either loyalty or aftermarket programs, which will help with repeat buys and incremental sales. Or, as another example, you can find out who is buying what and at what margins. This enables you to create a marketing and sales strategy to promote your high margin products to the right buyers.

Essentially, with the business and customer insights from the CRM, a business can be more customer responsive and laser focused in targeting the right users with the right products, promotions or marketing campaigns.

More Productivity and Profitability

Anytime a company increases its productivity, it has a very positive impact on its bottom line. A CRM is an invaluable tool that helps increase and foster productivity across departments.

It helps businesses forecast faster because it provides historic sales data, which businesses can use to better anticipate the timing of their customers’ buying cycle. Knowing the customers’ buying patterns enables businesses to plan and prepare in other areas besides sales, like merchandising, customer support, content and mobile readiness, to name a few. Bringing your A game to all channels will help increase sales and revenues.

Of late, companies are also integrating their social media data into their CRM which gives them a single, holistic view of the customer, which again has a direct impact on enhancing productivity for employees, especially in customer service and marketing. For example, the marketing team can easily access customer sentiment and sales around a certain product family and create faster and better-targeted campaigns in response to that data.

Stronger Customer Relationships

In today’s world of increasing personalization, the success of a business is directly proportionate to their ability to engage with their customers one on one based on individual behavior and actions. A CRM provides that strategic advantage since it is the central location for all vital company data pertaining to customer, business, finance, customer service, etc.. Every customer touch point can be personalized by the different company departments as they access each customer’s profile, to respond to their specific needs and transactions accordingly. The ability to house and access all of this data in one place means  significant time savings, improved responsiveness and overall better customer service. All of this, of course, leads to happier customers. And happy customers become repeat customers, giving more referrals to their network- which means more revenue.

Increased Cross and Up-sell Revenue

Over the past few years, the cost of new user acquisition has skyrocketed, from getting quality traffic or new leads and moving them down the sales funnel. According to a recent survey by Hubspot, 65% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge.

It is becoming more cost effective and easier to gain repeat purchases from current users. Therefore, along with pursuing new customers or leads, companies are also focusing on marketing to existing customers and increasing their average order value via up-sell and cross-sell strategies. Cross-selling is offering related products at the time of purchase (think laptop bags being cross-sold with laptops), while up-selling is offering a similar but more costly product of the same category (promoting a Windows 10 laptop when a customer is interested in a Windows 8 laptop). Through intelligent and insightful use of data available in the CRM, a company can cross or upsell effectively to their existing user base.

Having all of the business data (sales, customers, etc) centrally available in the CRM allows a company to better target complementary products to the most qualified customers, based on their previous purchases (cross sell); as well as knowing who would best benefit from premium products in the same category (up-sell). For example, your CRM can provide information regarding which customers have bought a Windows 8 laptop from you. Based on data from the CRM on any customer feedback, repeat purchase cycle, and past transactions, you will be able to target these customers with a more expensive Windows 10 laptop in a timely manner. Similarly,  if you are in the business of selling printers, your CRM can inform you who bought which printer and when. Then you can effectively target those customers with the ink cartridges that are associated with the particular printer (cross sell). Furthermore, the CRM can inform you of  the average usage cycle of ink cartridges and enable you to anticipate the right time to target your customers with the corresponding inks.

As mentioned earlier, the key to business growth today is to offer your customers the most relevant, personalized experiences. By using the data available in your CRM, you can begin to effectively understand, segment, and target your existing customers through relevant, personalized experiences. And truly leverage the power of your CRM and use it to increase your company’s productivity and profitability.