What is CRM? A Beginner’s Guide to CRM Software | Keap

Chapter 

04

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How Does CRM Make Sales and Marketing Easier?

A CRM platform amplifies your sales and marketing, without building huge teams or blowing your advertising budget. If your CRM is coupled with sales and marketing automation (like Keap), you can create a sales and marketing engine that takes sales to a whole new level.

Sales

Sales CRM software streamlines the entire sales process with improved visibility, prioritization, and follow-up.

Greater Visibility

A CRM provides the visibility that your sales team needs to be most effective. Having all lead and customer data in one place facilitates easy handoffs between teammates if the account owner changes–everything about an individual or company is documented and accessible.

As a sales rep, you can see exactly what a lead has done, which allows you to personalize your conversation and encourage the appropriate next step. For example, you see that a lead has watched your overview video and checked out your case studies. When you speak with them, you can encourage them to sign up for a webinar or consultation to learn more.

CRM systems, in conjunction with VoIP telephone systems, improve visibility for inbound calls, too. When a lead calls a sales rep, their phone number is recognized and their record appears on the sales rep’s computer screen instantly.

Greater visibility is also available to sales management through a CRM. A sales manager can easily track individual sales rep activities and performance as well as monitor the entire sales pipeline.

Clear Prioritization

A CRM helps the sales team prioritize their outreach efforts through lead scoring, which calculates a lead’s interest in your product or service. Leads with the highest lead scores are pushed to the top of the sales team’s tasks.

Your CRM can also prioritize outreach to customers. Records with approaching contract renewal dates and customers who are likely to be interested in a new product can be flagged for sales team follow-up.

Better Follow-Up

Amazing follow-up (and more sales) is made possible with a CRM. By automating follow-up with leads and clients, you no longer have to manage sticky notes on your desk or copy and paste the same email to every new lead. Your system initiates follow-up at the right times, creating a consistent customer journey and converting more leads into clients.

Marketing

CRM in marketing is often game-changing, as it offers powerful insights, personalization, and testing opportunities that ultimately lead to increased sales.

Insights

With data consolidated in a CRM, it’s possible to analyze patterns and find insights that lead to greater profitability. For example, a business can evaluate what characteristics are common in their ideal customers with the largest lifetime value. This allows you to spend your advertising dollars more efficiently and prevent budget going to leads that likely won’t be interested in your product or service.

Insights from your data can also help you increase revenue. For example, if you identify common purchase combinations, you can create packages or bundles to increase sales. Similarly, your data can tell you when customers are most likely to repurchase. You can plan follow-ups and offers to align with likely repurchase timing.

Segmentation/Personalization

CRM makes sending the right message to the right person at the right time a reality. With your CRM connected to a sales and marketing automation tool, you can send emails and text messages based on a customer’s recent actions.

Let’s say a lead who hasn’t engaged recently just clicked a link in an email you sent announcing a special promotion. You might want to tag that lead as “re-engaged,” follow up with an email containing a compelling customer story, and create a task for a sales rep to call them.

Personalization offers a huge advantage in winning more business: 76% of consumers say that personalization prompted consideration of a brand and 78% say that personalized content made them more likely to repurchase, according to a study by McKinsey. All of that data in your CRM database can be used to build deeper customer relationships through personalized communications. With marketing automation, you can personalize your messages at scale with emails that dynamically pull in info stored in your CRM, as well as emails that are automatically triggered by specific actions such as signing up for a consultation.

Testing for Improvement

Testing is the key to improving your marketing. A robust marketing CRM allows you to test just about anything you can dream up: different promos, text messages, ads, how frequently to call a lead, etc. Rather than going just on your gut, data from testing proves which option is most effective in driving maximum profitability.