Today’s post is a guest blog from Lindsey Patterson, a freelance writer who has written on several sales topics.
Getting an edge as a business owner in a competitive market can be difficult. However, there is one tool that can give you an edge. It is customer relationship management or CRM for short.
Customer relationship management is a strategy that implements technology to collect data from customers to increase customer satisfaction and sales. Thankfully, you don’t have to buy a lot of expensive equipment to obtain this kind of business strategy. Many affordable software packages are available.
There are many great benefits to investing in customer relationship management via software. First of all, it can provide you with the information you need to make important decisions regarding your business. The software can produce rather comprehensive reports full of detailed information regarding customer behavior. It can, in fact, use this information to produce forecasts for future sales. This can help guide your decision making in regards to where to put your resources to maximize your earning potential.
Better yet, this information can be accessed from pretty much anywhere. A business owner doesn’t require access to the office’s computers to look over sales trends and customer information. Instead, this information can retrieved from anywhere an internet connection can be made with cloud computing. With a simple log-in procedure, nearly any data point regarding a business and its customers can be found with ease whether it is on a PC or a smartphone.
Another thing that is important to a business’s success is quality customer service. Customer relationship management can help you make sure your customers’ needs are taken care of so they provide you with repeat business in the future. The use of this software can supply your call center representatives with a plethora of information regarding a particular repeat customer as soon as the call is made. This can, for example, give your staff the information they need to instantly recognize the customer’s problem or make effective suggestive selling pitches.
Customer relationship management can not only be used to guide your employees and make important decisions, but it can be used as a means to assess previous decisions and marketing campaigns as well. For example, a company may have recently launched a social media campaign to market a spring sale. After the sale has concluded, the software can give a manager the ability to examine just how successful that marketing strategy was at producing both sales and new customers.
Another thing this software is excellent for is producing sales leads. While you can draw from your existing customers for sales, it can also give you the data you need to produce new customers. For example, you may discover that a certain product sells best with Jewish senior citizens that live in particular New Jersey neighborhoods. That kind of information can make tracking down new customers a snap for your sales staff.
Customer relationship management software can even be used to help you manage your costs to help make your sales methods more efficient. Certain programs have financial tracking features or can integrate accounting information from other programs. This will give you the ability to determine just how many actual resources went into a marketing campaign and how many sales were actually produced from it. As a manager, you will able to more accurately determine your return on investment for any marketing strategy.
Author Lindsey Patterson is a freelance writer who specializes in technology and the latest social trends, specifically involving social media.
Thank you, Lindsey!