A good CRM application can help you to get ahead in the digital race while reducing business costs. While we often constraint a CRM software’s reach to only sales and marketing, here are 8 uncommon ways in which a CRM software can help you improve your habits and save a lot of money.
Plan your task and activities ahead: you do not need to be a Sherlock to know the benefits of planning your tasks ahead so that the execution is smooth. However, how does a CRM software fit in this? A CRM Solution helps you to record various tasks that are lined on a day-to-day basis, prioritize them and set alerts and reminders so that you do not fall back on your deadline. Be it follow-up with a customer, sending an invoice, collecting POs, you can not only set up alerts, but also automate them so that you are able to perform at optimal and give exceptional support to your customers.
Log everything: Your CRM database is as good as your official diary that you use on a daily basis and keep it updated with details of customers, their follow-ups and feedback if any. When you and your Sales team start to use a CRM software to log everything, you create a central depository which any team member, dependent departments can view and know the case. The transition between outgoing and incoming sales personnel is smooth and miscommunication too, starts to become negligible. The option to make notes private or share public helps you be less dependent on paper and be promptly reminded of anything important.
Avoid the print button: In a bid to keep all information in one place, there is a lot of data created by printing papers. These lead to 2 disadvantages – storage space requirement and unsecure data. With a CRM Software,
avoid printing option by saving all your mails, documents and project in one place with employee mapping feature so that whenever you need it, you can access it easily.
Share electronically: Use a CRM system to share documents and emails. You can trace the information regarding data access and edits easily since it is stored at single place, and mapped to employees who can view and edit the data. In addition to this, you save time on not having to send an email to one another.
Use electronic templates: Most of marketing business users spend lot of their time on making individual template for sales offers, advertising, invitations etc. If you allow an electronically library available for the organization then you will not only save time but also money. Employee can focus on their priority task and they do not need to spend time on making new templates. One more benefit is that you ensure uniformness in all templates. With a CRM software, you can edit and save these templates while creating marketing campaigns in the software itself and testing its results.
Reporting: While a lot of people are comfortable using excel and spreadsheets for reporting purpose, it tends to be time – consuming to extract the data, filter and present it. A good CRM application gives you access to interactive reporting on your fingertips. You can easily pull the reports and analyze data that will help you in decision-making. This helps to read, compare and identify trends Y-O-Y or M-O-M for sales and marketing at one glance.
Contact information: It is time-consuming for each employee to find the correct information of the customers fast. Hence, it is necessary to store all customer and contact data in one centralized system so that you can search for all information at one go. Even if you have only an email addresses you can search using that and all of this with their history, the queries generated in the past, solution provided to them and possibility for cross selling. All this can be got in real time and on the go.
Mailing lists: It allows you to start building your own prospect list that you can categorize in groups in the CRM, e.g. group between hot, warm and cold leads and use the hot leads mailing list to send a customized mail. This will help in nurturing leads, cross-selling and identifying areas of better customer service.
