CRM Magazine recently found that a whopping 91% of businesses with ten or more employees currently leverage CRM—and it’s easy to understand why. It’s almost impossible to remain competitive in today’s landscape without the use of a CRM solution.
Leveraging CRM facilitates decision making for everything from the way you manage your business and align your teams to the quality of your customer service and your company’s operational costs. This is because CRM provides businesses with a wealth of knowledge at a granular level that they can harness to improve processes and decisions at every stage. As we all know, increasing the effectiveness of your decisions directly impacts your company’s performance, which in turn influences sales growth.
So how does CRM work to improve decision making? The answer to this depends on where and how you implement insights from CRM data.
At the sales level, CRM can help you manage your sales team, affecting sales capability and productivity. Recent research conducted by Workbooks found that 66% of UK SMEs felt that CRM improved the productivity of customer-facing employees by providing them with the data and tools they need to excel.
Businesses can use features such as real-time reporting and activity tracking to manage teams and ensure that salespeople share a common methodology and follow best practices. This also assists in improving individual performance by identifying areas where an individual or the team as a whole may be lacking.
Recognising the precise development needs of your sales team helps you make better decisions to improve execution, increase performance, and conduct training and coaching more intuitively to maximise returns.
You can also use features such as automation to manage repetitive tasks in areas like lead management and allocation. Automation reduces administrative burden, making your salespeople more efficient and productive—traits that directly impact performance.
You can also leverage CRM to improve forecasting by conducting in-depth analyses of historical information. Doing so allows you to adjust and develop future forecasts as well as create proper targets and goals. When your sales team members can accurately predict how much their pipeline converts, they can make better decisions, improve their negotiation tactics, and perform more efficiently.
Recent research conducted by Workbooks found that 62% of UK SMEs felt that CRM also enhances the customer experience. Businesses must deliver value to their customers and build strong relationships to neutralise competition and increase retention rates—and CRM can help you do just that.
CRM enables your company to make more effective decisions about the customer by placing all the information about them in one convenient location. CRM can also function to help customer service teams track and manage support tickets and cases. Having all of this information in one place and providing your team with the necessary tools to effectively manage customers gives them more control and access to valuable insights.
For example, by using CRM, your customer service team will learn to get better at identifying and managing recurring issues, leading to better decision making. This not only saves your business money by letting you efficiently address issues at their source but also improves customer satisfaction.
CRM can have a profound impact on many aspects of your customer experience, facilitating high retention rates and repeat business. Your customers must truly understand the value of your business on a personal level to want to remain on board with your company and recommend your services to others. With the help of CRM, you can provide your clients with an exceptional customer experience that will leave them feeling proud and satisfied. This makes a world of difference.
A company that has control over its operational costs is better positioned to grow and thrive. Nearly 49% of UK SMEs surveyed by Workbooks felt that CRM was effective at reducing operating costs. This is because the insights gleaned from CRM enable your company to make smarter choices around operations as well as where and how to invest funds most effectively.
Learn more about how French Duncan reduced time spillage with Workbooks
Whether it’s marketing automation, improving the functions of your teams, or unifying data, CRM can help your business save money. If you’re currently operating with an expensive outdated legacy system, leveraging CRM can allow your company to rid itself of the costs and hindrance associated with such systems.
By reducing unnecessary expenditures, you can make more effective investment decisions and allocate more funds towards strategies and systems that directly impact revenue, business growth, and expansion.
Recent research conducted by Workbooks found that the vast majority of UK SMEs are already using CRM, and 60% of those who aren’t currently using it are planning on rolling it out in the near future.
Businesses operating in today’s landscape need CRM to flourish. Fortunately, more and more organisations are beginning to understand the vast array of benefits that CRM has to offer and that implementing it can have profound effects on their bottom line.
CRM provides businesses with valuable insights into their customer base and processes, which improves decision making and increases growth potential. It provides companies with a level of agility, efficiency, and effectiveness that translates throughout all activities, ultimately impacting the business’s overall success.
If you’re considering implementing CRM to gain more control over your processes and make better business decisions, rest assured that you’re making an excellent choice for the future of your company.
To learn more about how CRM can help you make better business decisions, read our white paper CRM to Grow your Business – A Guide For Management or contact one of our team on: +44 118 3030 100
DOWNLOAD THE WHITEPAPER
