What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?
CRM is a type of system designed to help businesses increase sales and profitability and build customer relationships by managing interactions with customers and potential customers. CRM systems ensure retention of valuable customer data and improved coordination of activities to produce better strategies and outcomes.
CRM and Sales Activities
CRM systems support a sales force with as much information as possible about customers and leads so that they can maximize their effectiveness during a sales call or follow-up. By looking up a customer in the CRM system, a salesperson can quickly reference the entire history of the account or lead, including closed business, call reports, contacts, org charts, customer challenges, technologies used, and much more. It can also provide notifications to sales teams, providing optimal timing for follow-up contact.
- Do you have a central list of information on your leads and customers or is this data spread across multiple systems?
- Do your customers interact with multiple people on your team and is the record of these interactions easily accessible to all?
- If your leading sales representative leaves the company do you have a record of his customers and his engagements or do you have to start again?
- Can you measure the productivity of your sales team and create a good sales forecast?
CRM and Marketing Activities
In a world where marketing activities are targeting the same customers or prospects as the sales team, a CRM can bring a coordinated approach to sales and marketing activities. This coordinated effort creates better lead generation, more timely and more effective follow up and more targeted engagements. It can speed up the time to convert a prospect to a customer and reduce the cost of sales.
Long Beach Sales and Marketing
CRM systems do not need to be complex and can be easy to implement. In their basic form they are even free of charge. The process, however, can be time consuming. CRMs deliver huge returns almost immediately and the exercise of developing a single customer database for sales and marketing activities is mission critical. Let Long Beach Sales and Marketing help you.