The business-boosting benefits of embracing a unified CRM. In the digital age, customers have access to an ever-growing choice of channels and touchpoints. While cold calling and sending out one-size-fits-all email communications once proved effective, people command far more from today’s brands and businesses. Niche or sector aside, offering your customers a high level of value and service across the board is vital—if you don’t do it, your competitors will. More businesses than ever are turning to customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to succeed in today’s competitive commercial landscape. But while CRMs offer a wealth of benefits and business-boosting insights, many companies only use them to manage their sales activities. CRMs have the capability of managing customer interactions across every facet of the business. By taking a unified approach to your customer relationship management efforts, you will gain an all-important edge on the competition. Let’s explore the reasons why. “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.”—Henry Ford Unifying sales & marketing As digital transformation continues to change the way customers interact with the world around them, sales and marketing departments need to work together. The two departments are no longer mutually exclusive. Effective sales and marketing teams work in unison to capture leads and encourage customer engagement at every key stage of the sales funnel—from awareness to conversion. By collaborating closely, sales and marketing teams will significantly increase their chances of seizing valuable opportunities across the board and, by being more relevant, personalised and timely ultimately drive more revenue to the business. Alignment across departments is vital to sustainable business growth. A unified approach to your CRM will make this a reality through centralised access to real-time data, lead information, and automated workflows. Improving organisational insights & analytics Rather than only gathering sales-centric, CRMs can capture a wealth of invaluable insights across your entire business. So above and beyond tracking sales performance, marketing campaign engagement and ROI, you can also monitor and measure customer satisfaction rates, the cost of servicing customers, customer lifetime value, customer services ratings, business performance by product lines, divisions, departments and so much more… This empowers you to discover strengths or weaknesses you didn’t know existed and build an even stronger more resilient business as a result. With CRM, you’ll be able to understand:
  • What investment you can make in sales and marketing to grow your business
  • Which of these investments deliver results, which don’t and why that is, so you can make informed decisions
  • All of the touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey, from marketing to sales to customer service etc.
  • The cost of delivering what you do, so you can drive greater efficiency and control costs to build an optimal business with strong long-term health
  • What strategic decisions are best for your business
If you truly want to understand the crucial performance metrics of your business; if you want to be able to adapt and make informed decisions about where to channel your investment for maximum impact, you need CRM. CRM will give you a clear view of how well your business is working and inform your investment and cost-saving decisions. And it will help you define the right levers to drive greater business success and improve profitability. Working with robust & reliable data Building on the previous point, business-wide CRMs offer more robust decision-making insight than solely sales-based platforms. Rather than working from fragmented data collected and updated by separate departments – and trying to consolidate those various data sources to make informed decisions, unified or business-wide CRMs offer centralised access to relevant, reliable, and robust analytical insights, in real-time. Everyone within the business gains access to the same valuable data that’s free from discrepancies, corruption, and interdepartmental friction. When everyone works together from the same platform using insights that provide real value, everyone will gain a more balanced profile of potential leads, customers, and internal initiatives. Better & more valuable customer relationships By looking at the bigger picture and working with the data to help you do so, you can get deeper under the skin of your audience. Unified or business-wide CRMs offer deeper, more balanced customer or prospect data based on brand interactions, search and purchasing behaviour, user demographics, buying history, and consumer pain points. If everyone within the business has at-a-glance access to this broad and invaluable range of insights, you will be able to speak to your customers on a more personal level. This will increase engagement, improve your conversion rates, and, ultimately, boost your bottom line. Not only will your sales reps be able to craft content and communications that offer direct value to your prospects, but your marketing and customer services teams will, too. By reaching out to your audience with personalised incentives, promotions, and content at the times where they are most likely to engage, you will also build brand trust, increase customer loyalty, and accelerate the growth of your customer base. Consistently high customer satisfaction Did you know? Customer experience (CX) and service is now considered the biggest brand differentiator, surpassing price and product in terms of consumer priority. If you want to consistently deliver real value to your customers (both prospective and existing) and win on today’s commercial battlefield, offering a seamless experience at every stage of the journey and across every single touchpoint is no longer an add-on—it’s essential. A unified or business-wide CRM will empower you to get to know your customers better and give you the tools to foster a sense of transparency across the company. When everyone works as one, engaging with accessible and reliable data, big things will happen for your business. You will deliver exceptional customer experiences across the board, and, in turn, you will push yourself ahead of your competitors. Rather than restricting yourself to a single department, you should use a CRM designed to offer your entire business value. Operating with a sales-centric mindset only will stunt your growth and development. Workbooks’ CRM is built to offer company-wide success, winning more customers while improving productivity and efficiency across departments. It’s the solution for sustainable success in a cutthroat digital age. To find out more about Workbooks’ CRM solutions, please contact them directly.