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 through every phase of 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 value of a deal is higher than in B2C.

It’s worth mentioning that a CRM system can also be very useful for B2C businesses, as it can help with B2C-specific processes in 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 turn it into actionable insights that help salespeople make quick and 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 usually means reaching out to the same lead several times in very 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 that occurs in multichannel communication and simplifies the process dramatically.

Lead qualification

CRM can also be useful in lead scoring and prioritisation. It delivers accurate data about the lead’s position in the buyer’s journey and estimates its potential to move forward. 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 and when to reach out to, and how 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, the customer data is continually updated throughout the post-purchase phase, so it’s much easier to recognise the perfect moment for offering a contract renewal or attempting an up-sell. Thus you’re very likely to see your customer retention rates go up.

Remember, without any CRM implementation, 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 team properly so they can make the most of each other’s efforts. We’ll see in a minute how a proper CRM system can also make that happen.

Marketing benefits

Before that, let’s see how CRM will improve your marketing in general. Again, we go back to the fact that CRM software supplies 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 info, geolocation, and the online behaviour of the customers. 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 that they have room for improvement in this area.

Thus,, companies will continue to invest in hyper-personalised experiences and messages. CRM software can help you not just target the right people but also target them with the right message. And it does it again thanks to the large amounts of customer data. For instance, approaching prospects in different stages of the buyer’s journey with ads and content tailor-made precisely for that stage can make all the difference in the world regarding 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 obtain information that can be valuable for 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 about what sort of content or message made a particular lead show interest in the product, and this 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, having all the info about who your customers are, their journey, and which potential troubles they’ve had can be very beneficial for your customer support. CRM software can offer this crucial intelligence to customer service reps at any time, enabling them to provide quality service tailored to the needs of a specific client.

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 percent of customer service professionals claim that a unified view of customer information is key to providing a great customer experience, which is key to increasing customer retention rates.

Moreover, customer service data is very valuable to sales and marketing teams. Data about customers’ most common demands, processed and turned into sensible insights, can be crucial in both sales and advertising 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 write down and sort all the data, which often leads to errors and confusion. CRM can automatically gather all kinds of different 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 arrange other types of data, such as updates to prices or inventory. 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 the established protocols, so when one task is done, it automatically assigns the next one to the next employee, notifying them about what they’re supposed to do and briefing them about 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 reviewing the flow of work processes thoroughly, you can check for potential gaps caused by flawed protocols that need to be fixed.

Some final thoughts

Finally, gathering all these data in one place will enable you to make well-informed, data-driven decisions regarding different long-term strategies. Having all this feedback about consumers’ concerns and demands, about your product’s strengths and weaknesses, and your own 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 surely bring many benefits to your B2B organisation by providing you with large amounts of customer data and helping you automate your workflows. It will make the long sales cycles easier for both the buyers and the vendors – for the buyers by providing a great customer experience and for the vendors by increasing the chance of closing the deal at the end.