From production, through marketing, and down to closing the sale, CRM can improve every aspect of your business. Here are the main advantages of this powerful system.
Business owners face a massive challenge.
There are so many aspects to manage and coordinate in their business that it’s easy for them to get overwhelmed. Whatever the scale of your business may be, juggling your products or services, customers, sales process, and marketing strategy is no light task.
Fortunately, modern-day technological solutions provide an excellent answer to these challenges. And Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, systems are one of such solutions.
A quality CRM can improve your sales and cut down many costs while seamlessly integrating into your business operations. One of its most significant aspects is that it provides you with a large-scale overview, as well as a detailed look at what’s going on in your business.
No matter what your industry is, your CRM will work to your advantage, allowing you to plan and manage your processes on varying timescales.
The connection that your company has with customers is a crucial aspect of the business. Even if CRMs didn’t offer any other benefits, their functionality regarding customer service would be enough to make them invaluable.
A reliable CRM can be quite extensive and provide value to every one of your departments. CRM can create extensive logs, generate process templates and reports, manage your email campaigns, and tap into existing trends to help you predict customer behaviour and plan for the future.
Most importantly, all of these benefits can reduce your operational costs by a significant measure.
Here’s how a good CRM can reduce your company’s costs while boosting your efficiency.
10 Ways CRM Saves You Money
1.Lower Sales Expenditure
Your sales reps work hard. They are always on the move, meeting with customers in person to maintain relationships that are already established or nurture new ones.
But these reps also need to keep track of sales numbers, customer information, and your current inventory in order to do their job as competently as possible. Your sales division also needs enough data to make the long and short-term plans required to produce repeatable results.
Naturally, some of those activities have additional costs attached. But your CRM can help lower those expenses.
A good CRM platform can improve your sales processes in various ways. For instance, it can provide a thorough insight into sales numbers that your team can use to create and adjust their strategy.
With proper organisation of contacts, available dates, and detailed schedules, your reps can become much more effective, spending less time on closing deals.
2. Reduced Paper Cost and Waste
Rather than keeping your data in endless printed documents and folders, you can take advantage of digital storage and do away with paper almost entirely.
This particular benefit scales with the size of your business.
While a small company can get by on a single package of paper every year, larger businesses can often have gargantuan paper expenses. The worst part is, all of that printed material ends up in your shredder and trash bin after some time.
At a time when many companies are competing for who will be the most “green”, reducing paper waste is the responsible thing to do, as well as a smart PR move. CRM can minimise your company’s paper usage, helping you save money and build a respectable reputation at the same time.
3. Minimised Customer Service Costs
Better CRMs will often have options for creating an SSP or self-service portal. These portals allow your customers to take care of the less complicated issues that would otherwise require action from your customer service staff.
In other words, your support desk no longer has to take on a plethora of smaller tasks that will only bloat your team’s workload. Customers can apply for services, submit applications, and handle similar procedures on their own via CRM.
Simultaneously, the high level of organisation enabled by the system means that all customer-related work will be done reliably and efficiently. In practical terms, this will boost customer satisfaction and your company’s reputation.
The end result is higher customer retention, more referrals, and an overall smoother customer experience.
4. Lower Production Costs
You can take advantage of the analytic and accounting power of a CRM system to manage what goes on both in your stock and manufacturing.
CRMs can also give your production an edge through extensive reporting. By comparing sales numbers for different products, you’ll be able to better optimise the production, focusing on whatever products sell best.
Another thing that a CRM can do is keep track of your surplus, which means you’ll never end up producing something that already has an unsold batch laying around. All of these benefits translate to a more dynamic, better-optimised, profitable production process.
5. Removed Duplicate Customer Records
Duplicate customer records can spell trouble in many ways. The more apparent way is how duplicates lower your company’s performance, but the other, and possibly even worse, effect is that they open up the possibility of fraud.
As a precise, automated system, your CRM can significantly reduce customer and lead record duplication.
CRMs function on the principle of total transparency. This means all team members can access the accounts and compare contact details and previous results. By managing records correctly, your CRM helps you avoid data duplication in your records as well as in practice.
And if you employ the technology properly, you won’t get into those awkward situations where a sales representative contacts someone who had already spoken with a different rep.
6. Automated Marketing Outreach
CRMs can handle every bit of vital customer information, making it possible to create tailor-made, specific messages that will speak directly to customers in various groups. The way a CRM does that is through segmenting your customers.
With the help of a competent CRM, your marketing team can focus on making your messaging more individual, targeting each customer with pinpoint accuracy.
However, that’s not all.
Once you have launched several campaigns, your CRM can compare the marketing and sales data. You can get an extensive analysis that will show you what approach works best.
Instead of spending countless hours doing data analysis in-house or relegating the work to a specialised agency, you can rely on your CRM to give you the relevant information in a handful of clicks. You’ll then end up with highly targeted campaigns that will require you to invest only in precisely determined areas.
7. Customised Money Saving
A CRM system can come in a boxed version with features that are universally applicable to every business. However, your options will more often be made specifically for your company, with solutions that fit into your individual model.
The customisation options are an invaluable aspect of CRM. Instead of a blanket solution, you can make your CRM address particular pain points and costs that are most relevant to your business.
8. Creating More Accurate Forecasts
The ability of a business to predict market trends and recognise patterns is critical in a highly competitive environment. Get it wrong and your company could face an imminent crisis. But if you do it right, your business can quickly outgrow the competition.
With a good CRM, data collection and analysis is made relatively straightforward. You can review emerging patterns in regards to seasonal or regional sales spikes, which allows you to understand the supply and demand dynamic in more detail.
And with the extensive data backing your forecasts, you can direct your marketing budget so that it has the most impact in the proper areas. The result is that your suppliers can predict inventory needs and the sales team can have a firm grasp on what will be available from your stock.
In other words, you can make every step of the way balanced and planned out, from production to closing deals. And with the help of your CRM, you can do all that well in advance.
9. Scaling With Your Business
Another immense benefit of a CRM platform is that it’s scalable. This means that, as your business grows, the system can grow with it. It’s because the best CRMs have a robust code architecture that allows them to be adaptable to different scenarios.
Simply put, even when your company grows well beyond its current scope, your CRM will be able to keep up the pace.
This means you won’t need to spend additional funds on hiring professionals to rewrite the code or migrate to an alternative system. The company’s potential will be free to keep on growing and at minimal cost increases.
10. Less Frequent Mistakes
Mistakes are certainly not unheard of in the business world. In fact, the larger the company, the greater the chances of missteps.
As an automated system, a capable CRM all but eliminates the likelihood of mistakes, which has a positive cascading effect on the rest of your business.
The system will make mixing up various information almost impossible while minimising the possibility of human error. Besides avoiding costly pitfalls, your CRM will improve efficiency and make your service much more reliable.
Use the CRM to Your Advantage
When you take all of the benefits into account, there’s no doubt that employing a CRM can drastically improve every business process. Even better, with each improvement, your customer satisfaction will grow, leading to even more new prospects and clients.
The best decision you could make would be to decide on a quality CRM and start migrating to the system as soon as possible.
But that might be the most challenging part.
Luckily, Automation Agency can make the transition seamless for your business. We can take your vital data stored in CSV files and import it into your new CRM with all of the lists, tags, and sequences you’ll need.
Let’s get started on improving your business. Contact us on this link and our Concierge Service can set up your CRM precisely the way you want it.
