Are you struggling to make the right decisions for your company? Do you feel like you lack enough information to pull the trigger on a necessary action? The benefits of CRM include clarifying the context so that you have a better thought process.
Your success is often only as good as your decision-making process. How you plan your actions and what actions you take can affect the potential success of your business.
As a business owner, you’re faced with a host of decisions, sometimes on a daily basis. You have to act on policy and strategy. And you have to figure out how to influence routine or empower team members.
All of these decisions determine the outcome of your company. The actions you take based on your decisions can either give you an edge over your competitors or hurt your market positioning.
Naturally, making big decisions is scary. Under pressure, some business owners fail to come up with good solutions. Others don’t take action at the right time and miss out on opportunities.
Yet one of the biggest mistakes you can see is an overreliance on gut feeling. Many think that the mark of a great leader is great instincts. While it may help, you can’t rely on it every time.
Having all the information and data that puts everything in context is more important. That’s why data-driven thinking and decision-making are the hallmarks of great business owners and managers.
If you think about it, even some instinct-led decisions ultimately come after having a prior understanding of specific data sets.
Taking action after you have all the relevant information and facts is more important than ever. You can do this if you use a high-quality CRM to guide your thought process.
Before moving into its benefits, let’s discuss why data-driven decision-making is preferable.
Why Data Matters
There’s no denying that intuition plays a big role in the decision-making process. It can provide an idea or a spark that puts you on a particular path.
Yet it’s a mistake to only take action based on your gut feeling. To small business owners, being more data-driven can sound scary. It may look like a lot to take in and not enough time for them to react to the given information.
But that’s not an excuse.
Data is the only thing that allows you to quantify and understand information.
A data-driven thinking process can also influence small business owners to develop better strategies. Or to adopt better policies.
It helps you become a more knowledgeable and successful entrepreneur.
Why?
Because it’s important that you validate any decisions you make and actions you take. You need to make the right choices if you want to achieve success.
Data gives you the context you need to arrive at the right conclusions. It can guide you and validate your choices based on factual information.
With that in mind, this is where high-quality CRM comes in handy.
It provides you with a wide range of essential information that you need to understand how your business works. And it also helps you understand what your clients or customers value.
This gives you an analytical and unbiased view of how your business ranks in the current market. CRM gives you all the context you need to see if you need to make adjustments, and where to make them.
Let’s dive into other benefits and why you might want to start using a robust CRM.
Benefit #1 – Providing Strategic Insights
One of your primary goals as a business owner is to understand where you excel and where you need to improve.
Approaching decision-making with strategic thinking is a big asset for any entrepreneur. Yet, it isn’t easy to have a strategic insight if you don’t account for data.
You don’t always need to audit your entire business to get a sense of what’s going on. A CRM can help you get an overview of your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts.
Depending on the CRM platform used, you can get a detailed account of every department.
Once you analyse that information, you become better equipped to make challenging decisions. You can then look at a transparent presentation of your sales pipeline.
After that, you can customise your marketing approach to increase conversions and profitability.
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of any CRM is lead sourcing evaluation. It’s because it shows you how your business generates leads and how prospects enter your sales funnel.
What if you’re spending too much on getting ineffective leads?
Armed with that CRM data, you can then strategize to improve the response rate of prospective clients. It not only helps you make informed decisions but also makes the process easier.
At the same time, you can also figure out if you need to change your primary sources.
Benefit #2 – Better Understanding of the Market
Most CRM software packages can show you real-time data. But it’s not just data regarding your business or employees – CRM can also give you plenty of insight into the market.
One of the key ingredients to positioning yourself at the top of every prospect’s list is understanding your market.
You need to know your audience, your niche, and your competitors.
Learn what your audience needs in your niche. Identify the solutions that can give them the best resolve.
Figure out what makes them drawn to or steer clear of your competitors. If you know what displeases them, you can stay clear of offering something similar.
Doing all of these things on gut feeling or instinct is difficult, if not impossible. Data gives you the context you need to understand the market demands. Therefore, it points you in the right direction regarding the actions you have to take.
You can only develop an effective marketing strategy if you’re sure about who you’re advertising to. And if your prospects don’t have the solutions they desperately need.
Benefit #3 – Improving Your Timely Delivery of Relevant Products and Services
Knowing who to sell to is crucial. But you also need to know when to push your prospects towards buying.
You don’t want to pull the trigger too soon. But you also want to avoid leaving them hanging in the sales funnel for too long and wasting your opportunities.
If you want to boost sales, you need to know what affects your clients. You need to learn what pushes them to take action. For that, you must have an understanding of what happens in your sales funnel so your marketing team can take appropriate action.
For this, it’s critical that you get a clear picture of your sales history. Once you have that, you have the insight needed to provide timely and relevant products and services.
Lastly, there’s the matter of your actual delivery, too. CRM data allows you to track customer satisfaction via various metrics.
Therefore, it provides insight on how you should deliver your services. It helps you understand how fast your clients want something done.
Armed with this data, you can make better decisions regarding your delivery process. You can take appropriate actions on improving your offering.
Benefit #4 – Improving the Effectiveness of Marketing Campaigns
What are the goals of any marketing campaign?
Gaining visibility in front of ideal audiences and nurturing a loyal client base.
That’s how you grow your business and increase sales. It’s your most effective tool, and also one that involves the most thinking on your part.
Marketing is all about making the right decisions. And one way to improve your marketing is with CRM data.
Remember that your growing your business depends on two things:
- Growing your client list
- Retaining existing clients
Thus, information on prospective and current clients is essential for your decision-making process.
It can help you understand how to market your business to your ideal audience.
You can also learn more about the positive or negative impact of your previous efforts. Thus, you won’t make the same mistakes twice.
Benefit #5 – Smarter Investment Decisions
If you don’t have complete control over your operating costs, it’s tough to grow your business.
Sometimes it means that you lack the funds to take actions that would benefit your company. In other situations, it may mean that you’re spending money in all the wrong places.
A good CRM can give you an in-depth overview of how you spend money. In doing that, it makes it easier to see what needs tweaking.
You can get a clear picture of where your money goes and what brings better returns. It shows you if you should divert funds from one department to another
When it’s time to make investment decisions, you’ll be able to take a smarter approach – a data-driven approach.
Investing in the right CRM can result in some of the highest ROIs.
Benefit #6 – Better Sales Performance
With a CRM platform, you can manage your sales team and ultimately increase their productivity and performance.
Many businesses rely on activity tracking and real-time reporting. Such features allow for active monitoring of salespeople.
Why is it important?
A common issue is that salespeople don’t stick to the script. As such, some end up underperforming and not delivering the results your company needs.
You want everyone to adhere to your core company values and guidelines for best practices. And monitoring allows you to make sure everyone is on the same page.
You want those responsible for sales to adopt the same methodology across the board. By leveraging CRM data, you can understand the history of sales in your company. It allows you to gauge the effectiveness of different people and strategies.
This lets you gauge customer response for various people on your team. Then, you can hold meetings to reinforce some of the core strategies proven effective.
It’s difficult to get everyone on the same page if you can’t do an in-depth performance review. But leveraging CRM data allows you to identify strategies that work and those that don’t.
Ultimately this also means you can assist salespeople with their development.
Of course, you can also use CRM historical data to reduce the workload. Use it to identify ways to automate smaller repetitive tasks.
By doing that, you unburden your salespeople and make them more efficient and productive.
Benefit #7 – Cross-Platform Connectivity
One of the pitfalls of many businesses is in data sourcing. It can take so much time to gather all the variables necessary to make an informed decision.
We often see small business owners outsource this type of work. And there’s no denying that there are some skilled and talented people that can help with research.
However, it’s rarely as cost-effective as you need it to be.
What CRM often offers is the ability to pull reliable data from multiple platforms fast. This lets you access multiple sources of information simultaneously.
You can perform more thorough analyses of prospects, expectations, and opportunities. You can then customise your approach on a per-project basis. And you can transition more smoothly between different projects.
Why?
Because you get more data to work with. You get a better understanding of what are the right and wrong actions you can take – all based on factual, relevant information.
Modernise Your Decision-Making and Grow Your Business Faster
Jumping the gun on the actions you take for your business won’t do you any good. Neither will postponing a decision because of uncertainty.
You can rely on inspiration and intuition to drive action. But never use that as your primary motivation behind your decisions.
Adopt a more modern approach and rely on data to make the best decision for your business. Embrace a data-driven culture so that you can also improve your offering and client satisfaction.
Make smarter investment decisions in your new marketing campaign. Free up funds so that you can direct it to areas that are capable of higher returns on investment.
Use a CRM to become a better entrepreneur and to improve the performance of everyone else on your team.
We also know that implementing good CRM and getting your team’s buy-in doesn’t always come easy. Contact the Concierge Service at Automation Agency and get the help you need. Our in-house experts can assist you in selecting and integrating the most suitable CRM that helps your decision-making.
