CRM systems can be very beneficial for businesses of all kinds. Whether your company is small or big, works with other businesses, or works directly with customers, they can help you earn money and save time.
CRM software helps businesses monitor their customers throughout the buying journey and nurture relationships in the post-purchase stage. It collects and analyses customer data, turning it into actionable insights. It also helps automate workflows, streamline communication, and boost customer experience.
The main features of B2B
Why is this kind of software a perfect fit for B2B companies? Before we answer that question, let’s take a look at a few key features of B2B organisations:
- B2B sales cycles tend to be much longer than B2C cycles
- They’re normally reaching out to a small target audience
- They deal with fewer leads
- The buyer’s journey is more complex than in B2C
- Their customers make buying decisions based on reason and thorough analysis, not emotions.
- There are usually multiple highly competent decision-makers involved in B2B purchases.
- The average deal value is higher than in B2C.
It’s worth noting that a CRM system can also be very useful for B2C businesses, as it can support B2C-specific processes across various departments. However, how can it benefit a B2B company, and how will introducing CRM software into your B2B organisation affect your business?
Sales benefits
The greatest benefit of CRM is gaining access to a large body of crucial customer data. The software can collect and process this data to generate actionable insights that help salespeople make quick, informed sales decisions.
Contact management
Take contact management, for example. It’s a key aspect of any sales process, especially in B2B, where closing a deal often means reaching out to the same lead at different stages of the buyer’s journey. A CRM system provides a neatly organised database containing chat/call history and leads across multiple channels. And it’s all accessible from a single dashboard. This eliminates the noise in multichannel communication and dramatically simplifies the process.
Lead qualification
CRM can also be useful in lead scoring and prioritisation. It delivers accurate data on the lead’s position in the buyer’s journey and estimates its potential to progress. This is done based on different parameters in their online behaviour, including social media activity, browsing history, and interactions with your website or web shop.
This way, salespeople will always know how to set their priorities, who to reach out to, and when to approach the lead. Reliable information on whether the lead is in the awareness stage or close to making a definite decision is vital in this context.
Tracking leads’ progress
It’s also much easier to monitor a potential customer’s progress inside the sales funnel. This helps recognise how active the lead is and determine the right timing for a follow-up message from the sales department.
Furthermore, customer data is continually updated throughout the post-purchase phase, making it much easier to recognise the optimal moment to offer a contract renewal or attempt an up-sell. Thus, you’re very likely to see your customer retention rates go up.
Remember: without CRM, 79% of marketing leads never convert to sales. That’s why it’s so important to maximise the efficiency of your sales team. It’s also critical to align your marketing and sales teams properly so they can make the most of each other’s efforts. We’ll see in a minute how a proper CRM system can make that happen too.
Marketing benefits
Before that, let’s see how CRM can improve your marketing overall. Again, we return to the fact that CRM software provides you with crucial customer data. This helps your marketing efforts in multiple ways.
Targeting issues
Firstly, it will improve your targeting. You’ll be able to target people who are potentially interested in your product or have shown that sort of interest in the past. This is easily done when you have access to demographic data, geolocation, and customers’ online behaviour. This way, you’re saving tons of money because your ads will be only shown to the right people at the right time.
Personalisation
CRM systems help with the key aspect of digital marketing today—personalisation. This applies to B2B and B2C alike. In fact, 93% of B2B marketers claim that personalising content has helped them increase their revenue. In addition, 42% have reported room for improvement in this area.
Thus, companies will continue to invest in hyper-personalised experiences and messages. CRM software can help you not only target the right people but also deliver the right message. And it does it again, thanks to the large amounts of customer data. For instance, approaching prospects at different stages of the buyer’s journey with ads and content tailored to each stage can make all the difference in the world for the success of your marketing efforts.
Sales & Marketing alignment
Finally, CRM does a great job of strengthening the connection between sales and marketing departments. During their day-to-day activities, both departments can gather information that is valuable to the other.
For instance, the sales team learns firsthand what triggers customers to buy, and this information is very useful for the marketing team. On the other hand, the marketing team collects information on which content or message prompted a particular lead to show interest in the product, which can be crucial for the sales rep. With CRM software, both these teams have easy access to a detailed, well-organised body of data they gathered over time.
Customer Service
Now that you have all the info about who your customers are, their journey, and any potential issues they’ve had, this can be very beneficial for your customer support. CRM software can provide this crucial intelligence to customer service reps at any time, enabling them to deliver quality service tailored to each client’s needs.
Why is this so important? As we’ve already seen, consumers’ expectations regarding personalised experiences have grown substantially. This especially applies to B2B vendors since they usually work with a few mostly high-value clients who expect only the best for their money.
Furthermore, CRM will provide reps with a simple, unified, elegant overview of customer information, which will surely help them provide better service. In fact, 84 per cent of customer service professionals claim that a unified view of customer information is key to providing a great customer experience, which in turn increases customer retention rates.
Moreover, customer service data is very valuable to sales and marketing teams. Data on customers’ most common demands, processed and turned into actionable insights, can be crucial for both sales and marketing processes. Here, once again, CRM can help strengthen the connections between different departments and provide easy access to a large shared pool of data to anyone in the organisation who can benefit from it.
Organisational matters
CRM can be important in resolving many organisational problems in your company. Its strength in this respect comes from its ability to automate various processes and activities.
Automation
For example, it can automate data capture. This means you don’t have to rely on salespeople or customer service reps to manually enter and sort all the data, which often leads to errors and confusion. A CRM can automatically gather various types of contact info, match it, recognise duplicates, and produce a clean, organised, error-free contact list. This is extremely important in B2B organisations, which must carefully nurture every lead.
It can also automatically capture and organise other types of data, such as price and inventory updates. A unified, simple overview of contacts, leads, inventory, prices, transactions, and ongoing activities makes life much easier for everyone in the company.
Task delegation
Moreover, a CRM system handles automatic task delegation. It speeds up and smoothens workflows, both inside a single team and across different departments, eliminating many organisational obstacles and hiccups.
The software automatically follows established protocols: when one task is complete, it assigns the next to the next employee, notifying them of what they’re supposed to do and briefing them on what’s been done so far. It can even prioritise tasks based on objective data and previously determined protocols.
Monitoring employees’ performance
Installing CRM software will also benefit business owners, executives, and managers. In addition to collecting customer data, a CRM collects and digests a lot of information about employees’ performance.
It’s all in one place—their activities and accomplishments, workload and efficiency, and customer feedback. By thoroughly reviewing the flow of work processes, you can identify potential gaps caused by flawed protocols that need to be fixed.
Some final thoughts
Finally, gathering all this data in one place will enable you to make well-informed, data-driven decisions regarding different long-term strategies. Having all this feedback on consumers’ concerns and demands, your product’s strengths and weaknesses, and your team’s effort and performance can be very valuable.
It’s more than just the four mentioned areas: sales, marketing, customer service, and organisational issues. You can also use the collected info to improve product planning, rethink your recruitment strategy, or modify your target market.
CRM will bring many benefits to your B2B organisation by providing large amounts of customer data and automating your workflows. It will make long sales cycles easier for both buyers and vendors – for buyers by providing a great customer experience and for vendors by increasing the likelihood of closing the deal.
