A successful business needs to make a profit, and hopefully, a good, healthy profit. In order to achieve this, you need excellent products and services.
While the quality of products is essential, the type of experience and interaction customers receive from your brand can make or break your business. To best serve your customers, you must first understand them and anticipate their needs.
This is why more and more companies are investing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to access customer data in real-time. Such tools not only give you access to data but also enable you to systemise and add processes. This then leads to greater transparency and consistency and improves collaboration within your company.
According to a Nucleus Research report, investments in CRM yield an ROI of $8.71 for every dollar spent. However, such returns are not gained automatically. Read on to find out how you can capitalise on CRM to make money.
1. Increase Employee Productivity
In any organisation employees are arguably the main driving force. They are responsible for the production or delivering services, marketing, interacting with consumers, and developing brand perception externally. For an organisation to succeed, employee productivity must be optimal.
However, according to Gallup's State of the Local Workplace report, 85% of employees are actively disengaged or not engaged at work. Due to the reduced productivity, over $7 trillion is lost. One of the main benefits of CRM software is that they help boost employee productivity.
With such a solution, you will be able to bring different processes together under one system. Therefore, the time needed for training will reduce significantly while improving efficiency, thus increasing productivity.
At times, organisational productivity is low because of time-consuming, redundant processes as different members of your team handle the same process. CRM systems facilitate communication and coordination between departments, thus eliminating such redundancies. Increasing employee productivity, especially for your sales team, can yield astronomical results.
2. Upselling and Cross-Selling
Increasing your pool of customers is a great way of scaling your company. However, your business will never achieve its full potential until you unlock the full lifetime value of each customer. Increasing customer retention by 5% can translate to an increase in profits of up to 25%. And, you have a 60% to 70% higher probability of converting an existing customer.
There are two key methods you and use to increase the average purchase value for each customer. These are upselling and cross-selling. Upselling is a method of increasing purchase value by encouraging customers to buy add-ons such as warranties or similar yet higher-value goods. It can increase revenue by an average of 10-30%. And, for businesses that actively utilise upselling, it is responsible for 70-95% of revenues.
On the other hand, cross-selling involves offering customers goods that are related to or compliment what they have already purchased. Think of it this way, a customer who has purchased a mobile phone is more likely to buy a screen protector than the one buying a suit. With CRM software, it will be easier for your employees to cross-sell and upsell. The system will generate and recommend related products and services for each customer based on their purchase history.
A CRM tool is effective for post-sale cross-selling. However, to get the most value out of CRM-based data analysis, think of cross-selling and upselling as more of a tool for satisfying your customers than generating sales. It should be about identifying and meeting each customer's needs. In doing so, customers will develop a deep connection with your brand, thus allowing you to draw their full lifetime value.
3. Targeted Marketing for New Clients
The days when good products sold themselves if they ever existed are long gone. With many businesses competing for the same audience, marketing is an integral component of success. Effective marketing is not just about reaching a wide audience but the right one.
Fortunately, in the digital era, there is a ton of data available for companies to determine the appropriate target market and marketing channels. CRM systems sift through such data and target the customers that are most likely to buy.
Even within your target market, there are different customer groups with varying needs that require unique marketing approaches. CRM software segments your customers based on personal likes and dislikes, responses, previous purchases, social media activity, and e-mails opened, e-mails replied. This allows you to develop targeted ad campaigns suitable for each segment, thus improving conversion rates.
4. More Regular and Meaningful Communication
At the heart of customer satisfaction and developing meaningful, long-term, and more importantly, profitable relationships is communication. Cultivating leads into buying customers and ultimately loyal ones, requires you to engage with them regularly and meaningfully.
With CRM, you will have data on each customer, allowing you to tailor communication in a way that meets their needs. Such personalisation makes customers feel valued, thus increasing the chances of continued engagement.
Transfer of customers from one salesperson or department to another often derails the sales process. With the data and personalized communication, transferring customers is troublesome with CRM software.
Getting the Best Out of CRM Software
In a consumer-driven market, each customer wants to feel unique and special. As such, customer relationship management is a bare minimum requirement for organisational success. CRM software makes the process easy by bringing all the crucial aspects of customer relationship management into one platform. However, it's not just about having CRM software, but the right partner.
Act Today is a CRM sales and service that offers an efficient, reliable, and cost-effective CRM tool suitable for small and medium-sized businesses. Contact us today to speak to a CRM specialist.
