Understanding why CRM is more than just a sales and marketing tool

Traditionally, the importance of CRM has been as a sales and marketing tool. However, some of the biggest gains for your business can come from other areas, such as operations, customer service, supplier management, and partner relationships. Listed next are some key business functions and how each one can benefit from a CRM system.

Marketing

The marketing team will be able to segment prospects and customers and have visibility of every lead and deal—mapping out the journey from lead to sale. This will provide a clear understanding of the effectiveness of all marketing activities and help to measure the return on investment (ROI) by tracking leads and deals generated from each event or campaign.

Sales

Sales managers will understand their pipeline much better and be able to forecast sales more accurately. The sales team will benefit from reduced admin, a better understanding of their clients, and the opportunity to spend more time selling and less time inputting data.

Customer service

A customer might raise an issue via one channel such as Twitter or Facebook, but customer service may switch to email, phone, or live chat to resolve the matter. By pulling together the communication from multiple channels into a single platform, we provide the customer service team with all the information they need to resolve the query. We can ensure that whoever is speaking to the customer has access to the current status, next action, and notes, which will make the customer feel valued and well looked after.

Customer success/account management

Having visibility of support requests, deals, and all communications history will enable the account manager to review all the information they need prior to making a call or visit to an existing customer. They will be prompted when the next call to each client is due and provided with structure to make sure they ask the right questions to measure customer happiness and retention and to identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell related products and services.

Operations

Once a deal has been won, we can automatically share these details with the operations/delivery team so that they can fulfill the order or job.

Finance

We can use the system to notify the finance team when a deal has been won, an order fulfilled, or a job completed so that they can raise the necessary invoices.

We should also consider integrating the CRM with our accounting/invoicing software so that these processes may be streamlined and automated further.

Supplier management and partner relationships

Using the CRM for tracking meetings, calls, and emails with suppliers and partners will help teams manage these relationships better.

Follow-ups can easily be created, and reporting enables a comparison of the efficiency of suppliers and also the success and activity of partners.

This inclusion of other business areas will help you deliver more value with the CRM, improve internal communication, and increase buy-in from the respective stakeholders.

So, having considered the areas we wish to improve with a new CRM, it is now time to be specific and to set some goals.