Benefits of CRM

  • CRM helps your organisation get a better insight into the behaviour of customers, such as when they typically buy, what they buy, discounts offered and so forth. For example, if sales person x is on leave for two weeks, then sales person y can continue managing a customer because they will know not to give more than xx% discount on certain items rather than having to guess or somehow find a way of gleaning that information.
  • It will help you improve customer service because it allows individuals, whether sales or technical personnel, to have access to all the correct information required to deliver a good service.  For example, an IT engineer may need to contact a different person from that of a salesperson.
  • It allows users to maximise sales opportunities because they can spot potential trends early, and allow them to ‘cross-sell’ other products and services as well as improving close rates.
  • It helps you profiling customers in order to analyse particular market sectors. For example, it may be possible to analyse the information derived by looking at all of the information based on perhaps ‘lawyers’ who will have a different buying pattern and needs to ‘doctors’. As a result, it will be possible to put in place specific marketing strategies to meet those requirements.
  • It will allow senior personnel to gain a better view of sales activities. This can, for example, highlight a particular weakness that can be remedied through sales training.
  • It allows people to share problems and experiences from within their client base. For example, larger companies sometimes suffer from communication issues in so far that there may be many individuals working on multiple projects making it difficult to share common issues with a product, service or even a negotiation. Many sales people experience the difficulty in getting access to useful information, such as finding someone within their company who has dealt with a potential customer similar to their own. Solving these types of communication problems can be invaluable for companies.
  • It allows both sales and service departments to see the status of a sale, an outstanding service call, or a complaint that needs to be resolved.
  • Improve efficiencies. This can be achieved by comparing the best and most productive sales person to the least productive and putting a strategy in place to improve underperforming sales staff.
  • It enables sales management to track performance by individuals according to the number of leads received, how long it takes them to close a sale and the average order value per sale.
  • It allows sales management to monitor activities and make improvements before issues may occur. It can also be used to analyse if certain individuals are better suited to selling certain products and which sales people are best suited to particular market.
  • It can also be used to help determine a company’s marketing strategy. For example, analysis of leads and other data may highlight issues within a product that means that an organisation’s product portfolio needs to be supplemented, or that the company would be better to focus on other industries where analysis show that the products are well received.