Definition of CRM: CRM stands for customer relationship management, or the process of managing interactions with existing and prospective customers during the sales process. Focused targeting. One of the most difficult tasks for marketers' is to look through all of the. A recognized leader. Rest easy when you partner with a recognized leader with millions of happy customers all around the world. CRM and Marketing Automation together as one. Market like a pro. Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the principles, practices, and guidelines that an organization follows when interacting with its customers.

Even if you’ve never used a CRM before, you’ve probably heard the term echoing through your industry. You know that many companies (including your competitors) are implementing CRM software because it saves time and drives sales.

But what is CRM software? And what can it do for you?

CRM—or —is business software that helps individuals and teams maximize their customer communications and sales efforts.

CRM isn’t simply an address book. It empowers your team to build relationships more effectively and provide the best customer experience from evaluation to purchase and beyond.

In the past, only the largest companies could afford CRM software, and it was complicated to learn and implement. Today, businesses of all sizes have access to easy-to-use, affordable CRM software options.

In this article, we’ll explain the value that CRM can bring to your business, how to know if your business is ready for CRM, and what to consider when evaluating different CRM products.

When your business first started, tracking customers by email, address books and spreadsheets made sense.

But now your company is growing—and more growth means more opportunity to change how you run your business. Right now:

• Spreadsheets are hard to update, interpret, and keep in sync with your team.
• Valuable customer information hides in your employees’ inboxes.
• Notes get lost or thrown away.
• Customer communication is inconsistent between your employees.

The real problem is that your most important data is spread across multiple systems and people, making it difficult to leverage your information and collaborate on sales.

Adam K. Founder & CEO

1. Consolidate all your data into one easy-to-access location

CRM software centralizes your customer data so that everyone at your company can access all the information they need from one platform.

Contact information
Look up customer email addresses, phone numbers, mailing addresses, websites, and social media accounts.

Communication history
Track all interactions through email, phone calls, online chats, and customer support tickets.

Customer history
Reference the length of customer relationships, purchasing history, and how customers find your business.

74% of users said their CRM system gave them improved access to customer data.

(source: Software Advice)

2. Sell more, faster

Having to do manual data entry is one of the biggest productivity-killers for sales reps. CRM automates many of these repetitive admin tasks so your team can spend less time typing and more time selling

CRM also helps you build a standardized sales process, which gives your team a step-by-step roadmap for closing deals and helps to reduce the length of your sales cycles.

With a sales process, you can…

Constantly improve your sales methods.
Sales processes provide the data you need to identify the root cause of stalled deals, take steps to address the problems, and ensure that your team focuses its efforts on the activities that generate the most revenue.

Accurately predict your sales
Having a more accurate sense of your win rate allows sales managers to dependably forecast how many sales their team will close from a given number of leads and set realistic revenue goals.

Get new hires up to speed quickly
A standardized sales process makes training sales reps fast, simple, and nearly foolproof, by showing salespeople what they need to do at every stage of the sale. Even rookie sellers can make an immediate impact once they learn the basic steps in your sales process.

Provide a better customer experience
When a sales rep rushes a prospect into a sales stage they’re not anticipating, it can can kill the deal and damage the relationship with the buyer. A sales process ensures that sellers don’t advance the sale until the buyer is ready to move forward.

Matthew W. Product Manager

3. Stay focused on your customers

By having access to information on customer interest and behavior, your sales reps can pursue the right opportunities at the right time, or collaborate with your marketing team to deliver targeted and useful content to your prospects. Selling becomes a more personalized experience that’s focused on the customer.

CRM data also helps you anticipate your customer’s needs before they reach out to you, and your support team can keep your customers happy by solving their problems as soon as they arise.

47% of polled CRM users said that their CRM had a “significant impact” on customer satisfaction.

(source: Capterra)

Any team within your organization that interacts with customers can greatly benefit from using CRM, including your sales, marketing, support, and management teams.

CRM helps

Sell smarter
CRM software allows sales reps to manage their deals and conduct all their sales communications from one central location. By integrating your CRM with your organization’s business tools—including email, calendar, and marketing automation software—your sellers don’t have to waste time and effort switching back and forth between programs.

CRM software also provides full insight into the status of every deal in progress, and helps sales managers coach their team, establish quotas, and track individual sales rep performance.

Never drop the ball
With a CRM, you can automate reminders for your team to reach out to leads at the right time so that potential customers are never lost. Seeing the upcoming actions for every deal removes the guesswork and stress from a sales rep’s day.

Stay in the loop
Modern cloud-based CRM platforms can be accessed from any device, which means your deals aren’t all stuck in the office. With mobile CRM access and smartphone notifications, salespeople won’t miss anything important, whether they’re on a plane, at a client site, or walking into a meeting.

Invest in what’s working, and stop what’s not
Instead of guessing, a sales manager can track the reasons for why deals are won or lost. By analyzing their CRM’s customer data patterns and sales reports, sales managers can determine which methods are effective and which need to be improved.

24% more sales reps achieve annual sales quota with mobile access to their CRM.

(source: Aberdeen Group)

CRM helps

Know how prospective customers are finding you
CRM helps you track how prospects find your business—through online searches, trade shows, or specific marketing campaigns—so that you can determine where you’re getting the biggest return on your marketing investment.

By having access to your company’s sales interactions, your marketing team can better understand your prospects’ concerns and commonly asked questions, and use this information to create more relevant content.

Keep customers engaged
CRMs capture a wealth of valuable data that your marketing team can use to nurture prospects into customers and customers into advocates.

Using a CRM can reduce a company’s marketing costs by 23%.

(source: Cloudswave)

CRM helps

Personalize the customer experience
Knowing the history of previous conversations with each customer enables your support team to deliver excellent customer service every time. By providing access to detailed customer notes and interactions, CRM lets your support team see the person behind each ticket.

Solve customer issues faster
Faster response times to support requests means a more enjoyable and satisfying customer experience. In order for that to happen, customer data needs to be a click away.

CRM links important customer information—including products purchased, customer history, and previous interactions—to each support ticket so that you can solve your customers’ issues quickly and more effectively.

Consolidate all customer communications
In addition to logging email conversations and phone calls, CRM can be integrated with online chat tools so that all support-related customer chats are saved in your CRM. Your support team can review these saved chats in the future, or send saved chat summaries to customers after completing service requests.

47% of polled CRM users said that their CRM had a significant impact on customer retention, and an equal percentage said their CRM had a significant impact on customer satisfaction.

(source: Capterra)

CRM helps

Measure and grow your business
Having access to data on sales opportunities, trends, and forecasts is critically important to crafting your company’s immediate and long-term action plans.

Business leaders can use CRM data to identify which markets and products are the most profitable, and evaluate how to adjust strategy in order to reach their goals.

Optimize team performance
CRMs keep business leaders up to date on the health of their business, and whether or not each team is on track to reaching department goals.

Real-time sales reports can help company leadership identify inefficiencies in the sales process, the return on investment for marketing campaigns, and if any customers aren’t receiving proper support.

65% of businesses adopt a CRM within their first five years.

(source: Capterra)

Companies often begin their CRM search when their sales communications start to get messy—and by then, they’ve already lost opportunities and revenue due to disorganization.

Our advice? Don’t let yourself get to that point. As soon as your business has a sales team in place, it’s time to look for a CRM.

To ensure that you’ll get the most value out of your CRM investment, ask yourself the following three questions before committing.

1. Do I have a sales process?

CRM is designed to complement your current sales practices. If your company doesn’t already have a standardized system for converting leads into customers, take some time to think about how your sales team generates leads and what activities your reps complete to close them. Then, outline a step-by-step sales process for your team to follow.

Does your sales team have a roadmap for success?

Use our sales process worksheet to standardize your most effective sales efforts and close more deals.FREE DOWNLOAD

2. Do I know what I want to solve?

What customer-facing problems need improvement at your company? Do you struggle with sales growth, customer retention, upselling, or customer satisfaction?

Define the issues you experience when interacting with your customers. That way, you can concentrate your efforts immediately on creating solutions after migrating your company’s systems onto the CRM.

Clinton A. COO

3. Do I have complete buy-in?

Low user adoption is often cited as the main reason for failed CRM initiatives, so getting your entire team on board is absolutely crucial. Company leadership needs to commit to transitioning business data onto the CRM, and sales reps and team leaders need to commit to using it consistently and regularly.

To achieve complete buy-in, demonstrate exactly how the CRM will bring value to each position at your company, and make sure to involve your sales team in the decision process; if your salespeople don’t enjoy the way the CRM looks and feels, they’re not going to use it.

Crm Marketing Manager

Katie P. Marketing Communications Specialist

For small business sales teams, some CRM benefits are nice to have and others are absolutely essential. These eight items should be non-negotiable when researching CRM solutions.

1. Can it track all team and customer communication?

Interactions with your customers can span email conversations, phone calls, and online chats. Your CRM should be able to capture and centralize all communications in one location so that you know the next action to take and never lose important details.

The best CRMs make it simple to enter customer data, follow customer interactions across teams, and find the information you need quickly. Pro tip: Before you choose a CRM, confirm that it can import communication history from the contact management tools you currently use (i.e., spreadsheets or a previous CRM).

2. How easy is it for your employees to use?

Sales reps aren’t software experts, so your CRM should be as user-friendly as possible. Ideally, the design and interface should be intuitive enough so that everyone at your company can learn the system quickly and start using it right away.

Which CRM has the features you need?

Our interactive worksheet compares the benefits offered by Nutshell, your existing contact management solution, and any other CRMs you’re currently evaluating.FREE DOWNLOAD

3. Can you use it on the go?

Your CRM software should be accessible and provide a user-friendly experience from all devices including mobile phones, so that you can connect to your deals wherever you are.

4. How well does it adapt to your current sales process?

Implementing a CRM doesn’t mean changing the way you sell. A CRM platform should easily mold to your current practices while adding time-saving automation tools and customization to help you sell more efficiently.

5. Can it import your existing customer data?

No one starts from scratch. Be sure that the CRM you’re considering makes it easy to import existing customer information so you don’t have to spend weeks manually typing in your current leads, prospects, and clients.

Bethany R. Vice President

6. Does it offer custom reports and performance tracking?

Take a close look at how the CRM pulls customer data for its reports. What insights can it draw from your customer behavior, interactions, and team activity? Can the reports be exported and shared? How easy is it to customize the CRM’s reporting to find the information that’s most important to your team?

7. Does it integrate with the tools your business uses?

Your CRM platform should allow you to manage all of your sales activities and customer data from one place. By choosing a CRM that easily integrates with your email, online chat, and document sharing programs, you’ll no longer have to spend your day switching back and forth between applications and browser tabs.

8. Can I really afford this?

Per-user prices can be misleading. For many CRMs, those low monthly costs don’t reflect all the hidden charges that you might be stuck with along the way.

Are there required fees for onboarding and training? Do you have to pay extra for additional contacts or reporting ability? Are there overage charges for data storage? All of these extra costs can blow up your annual CRM spend, so make sure you do your research in advance.

Stephen S. VP of Marketing

Now that you know how CRM brings value to your business, what to consider when evaluating different CRMs, and if your business is ready to adopt one, it’s time to start evaluating your options and learn if Nutshell is a good fit.

Try Nutshell free for 14 days, or use our contact form to reach one of our CRM experts. We’ll be happy to answer any questions about how Nutshell could drive the growth of your business.

Just about every marketing team and sales rep today has used a customer relationship management (CRM) tool at some point in their career. Having all of your customer’s data in one place is incredibly useful and prevents you from digging in multiple systems to find the information you need.

Utilizing a CRM platform for your marketing and sales efforts provides your business with a huge ROI and helps you achieve a better relationship with leads and customers. Popular CRM solutions like Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, ActiveCampaign, and others are great platforms that make it easy to manage contact data. It’s all about the customer journey and CRMs make it easier to connect with customers at scale.

Unless you’re only managing a handful of contacts, your business will benefit from implementing a CRM. If you’re not using a CRM at this point, we highly suggest you do. In this post, we’ll discuss why you need a CRM and how it benefits your business.

What is a CRM?

A CRM is a database that manages customer relationships, along with the data associated with them, including behaviors, purchases, activity, customer service history, and more. CRMs go way beyond storing contact information and act more like a record from the start of the relationship with the client to the current stage of the relationship.

The idea behind CRM technology is to dig deep into your customer base. Knowing the who, the how, the what, and the why will help you forecast their needs and be able to deliver solutions quickly through marketing automation. When the customers put first, they get the best experience which means they’ll keep coming back.

This brand loyalty leads to those important repeat customers who then tell their friends in the parking lot at school and post about it on social media. Now your customers are doing your marketing for you. Brilliant!

CRM software can take house data from various departments of your business and provide you with one place to house everything. For example,

• Marketers use CRMs to nurture leads and turn them into qualified prospects
• Sales reps use CRMs to find potential customers from their database, manage deals and track how close they are to closing them in real-time
• Customer support teams use CRMs to track customer service history in one location so they don’t have to pull in data from multiple tools
• Loyalty teams use CRMs to improve customer retention and measure customer satisfaction

There are various types of CRMs available. From CRMs for small businesses, on-premise CRMs, cloud CRMs, and more, you can easily find a CRM that’s a fit for you.

The usage of CRMs is increasing every year and here are some statistics to prove it:

• Worldwide spending on customer experience and relationship management (CRM) software grew 15.6% to reach $48.2 billion in 2018 according to research from Gartner, Inc.
• Grand View Research reports that CRM revenues are expected to reach over $80 billion by 2025 and is the fastest-growing software market.
• CRM can boost conversion rates by 300%
• In 2019, spending on software as a service (SaaS) will reach approximately $42 billion and represent 75% of total CRM spending
• CRM remains the largest and fastest-growing enterprise software category today according to the latest market sizing, and market share research Gartner published this week

Key features of a CRM system

Due to their popularity, most CRM systems these days have similar features. While some CRMs offer unique features for artificial intelligence (AI) or vendor management, most CRMs offer a base set of features to help you manage your contacts.

Contact management

At its core, a CRM is used to manage your contacts. With a CRM, you can manage customer data like their name, email, phone number, and so much more; think of it as a digital Rolodex. If you ever need to remember information about a customer, a CRM stores all their information for you.

As you interact with each contact, the CRM will be updated with their activity history. You can track things like phone calls, emails, purchase history, customer support tickets, and much more.

Reporting and analytics

CRMs often offer robust reporting tools (mainly used by marketing and sales). With a CRM, you can track reports like:

• The number of leads generated per month
• How many leads were qualified by sales
• The revenue generated by your deals
• Which contacts unsubscribed from your email campaigns

There are lots of reports available in CRMs. Once you have a sizeable number of contacts, you can segment your audience by common characteristics such as location or gender to further improve targeting for your marketing campaigns.

Marketing automation

CRMs make it easy for marketers to embrace marketing automation. With the data available from your CRM, you can automate certain aspects of marketing. For example, if a contact fills out a form to download a PDF, they can be put into a multi-step email sequence designed to educate them about your products and ultimately getting them to make a purchase.

Mobile CRM

Sales reps benefit the most from mobile apps. If you have teammates that travel, a mobile app for their CRM can help them track their deals and leads so they have an easier time tracking everything.

How CRMs generate value

To recap, a CRM system is an extremely useful tool and one that all marketers and sales reps should be using. While some CRM systems can be expensive, the ROI is worth it. Trust us, you don’t want to manage thousands of customers in a spreadsheet. If you choose not to implement a CRM system for your business, you could be left behind in the dust. The benefits are tremendous and it could be your most valuable asset.

Crm Marketing Def

• Boosts sales
• Reduces marketing expenses
• Creates more productivity
• Organizes data, enabling you to connect with your customers in a personalized way
• Provides you with an inside view of the behaviors of your customers, making tailored marketing campaigns easy and effective
• Increases internal productivity since multiple departments within a company can log activity and access customer data
• Enables you to easily oversee and evaluate customer interaction to strengthen customer relationships, convert leads, cultivate sales, and maintain customer engagement
• Always puts the customer first
• Easily integrates with platforms like ManyChat for the ultimate digital customer experience

Targeting

The amount of customer information available, especially for larger companies, can be massive. CRM implementation helps you probe this information and narrow it down to the exact targets you’re aiming at. Even smaller companies can greatly benefit from CRMs.

What customer relationship management tools do is look inside the mind of a potential customer. If this person researched one of your products, you can gain that information and then target them with Chat Marketing, whether that applies to email marketing, messenger marketing, which we’ll dive into a bit, SMS marketing, social media marketing or omnichannel marketing.

Since you already know that this potential customer is interested in what you’re selling, you’re that much closer to a sale. You can then target them with social media ads and offers to close the sale. Since CRM technology stores information on habits and what your customers like and dislike, your target marketing efforts are successful.

Trends

Crm Marketing Strategy

When you can predict customer behavior, it gives you a boost over your competitors. You can then target your customer based on the trends you’re seeing to ensure messaging is on point. CRM helps to filter out specific information such as purchases, behaviors, how they responded to previous marketing outreach, and more.

Personalized content

A CRM is a great complement to an existing content delivery system you’re already using. Let’s take Messenger Marketing, for example. Messenger Marketing is the process of getting people interested in your products or services usingFacebook Messenger.

The goal is to grow your business by getting more leads and customers through personalized conversations. A Messenger Marketing strategy helps you connect with customers, provides informative content, and helps you take actions that are meaningful for your business, such as booking an appointment, downloading an app, or signing up for a service.

When you can integrate your CRM tool into a platform like ManyChat, you’re now armed with specific information about your prospective and existing customers. Content is king, however, if it doesn’t reach the right person at the right time, the crown is worthless.

Crm Marketing Term

How to implement a CRM

Ready to start implementing your CRM? Here’s how to get started.

Map out your sales process

Before you sign up for a CRM, we recommend mapping out your sales process. Regardless of if you’re a B2B or B2C company, knowing the steps of your customer journey are crucial to properly tracking your contacts.

Here’s a high-level overview of sales stages you can use to customize your CRM

• Subscriber
• Lead
• Marketing-qualified lead
• Sales-qualified lead
• Closed-Won
• Closed-Lost

Train your staff and management teams on CRM

A CRM is only useful if it’s actually being used and updated by your team. You must train your teams on using and updating the CRM to keep it up to date. Otherwise, you’ll miss out on valuable data and have to spend time following up with your employees.

Use automation for repetitive tasks

CRMs are surprisingly easy to automate. You don’t have to spend hours every week entering data or building reports. Most CRMs have automation plugins that make it easy to automate the day-to-day tasks you work on. Plus, there’s always Zapier to make it even easier to leverage automation.

Using a CRM with ManyChat has tremendous benefits

• Helps you better optimize your marketing strategies
• Helps to convert leads into customers
• Helps to create repeat customers through follow up campaign strategies

How do you truly leverage a CRM to grow your business? Leverage Chat Marketing. Combining a CRM with the power of Chat Marketing is the perfect way to build brand loyalty, target the right customers, and grow your business.

With Messenger Marketing, marketers are currently seeing open rates of 80% or more, and click-through rates greater than 30%. Those are promising statistics and as a marketer, it should be a no-brainer to be using Chat Marketing paired with a CRM. In unison, these tools allow you to focus on the customer’s needs. This makes your business customer-centric and your customers will take notice and build trust. And we all know trust funnels the sales pipeline.

Marketing Crm Systems

Here’s a great example of a real estate CRM and how stored data can be useful in qualifying and managing leads through sales automation.

Let’s say you run a real estate business and have a Messenger bot helping you qualify your leads. Some of these leads want to buy a home, while others are looking to sell their home. While in the past, you may have organized the information coming in, such as phone numbers and emails, within a Google Sheets, there’s a better, more organized way, to manage your buyer and seller leads.

While a CRM is fantastic, it may not be within your budget, so in this instance, you, the real estate company, used an app that gave you the building blocks to turn your list of leads into a fully capable CRM system to close more deals.

In the template, you have a master list of buyer and seller leads at different stages in the process. At any point in time, the summary page lets you see how many leads you have, the status of those leads, and the total dollar amount those deals are worth. Pretty cool and efficient, right?

Crm Marketing Plan

Conclusion

Integrating your CRM with your ManyChat account is easy. Here’s a great instructional video to give you a step-by-step tutorial on how to get it done. You’ll learn how to set up a ManyChat CRM integration with the CRM Pipedrive. Although the video shows you how to integrate with Pipedrive, this process works universally with many other popular CRM software platforms. FYI, you will need a ManyChat Pro account as well as a Zapier account to achieve this integration.

Crm Marketing Meaning

Get started with a CRM system today and see how integrating it with ManyChat can boost your marketing strategy.

Get started with ManyChat for free.