Integrate CRM Philosophy into Your Business Strategy
Intro in Disruptive Landscape
Currently, companies get thousands of customers records via various channels (CRM, social media monitoring, etc.). However, they still looking for a recipe how to capture a high-value audience and build-up strong, lasting relationships. The power has shifted from business to clients, so for bringing the value proposition requires far more than a mere CRM implementation.
Without further adieu, for proceeding with efficient and prolific business, you need to develop your business strategy on the basis of CRM you use, tune up every department, and train the team, so the user adoption was as quick as possible. To ensure every phase works in harmony to produce a refined, calculated result, dive into CRM philosophy and showcase the acquired knowledge to your staff.
Classical Perception of CRM
In some way, CRM platforms become the cost-reducing initiatives. They were designed to cover business processes from the top-to-down. Sharing a single database of customers, CRM synchronizes the management of sales, marketing, support, and other departments. Despite encompassing all functionalities, the solution fails in managing the multiple areas of the company.
CRM Philosophy: Technology vs. Data vs. Process
As the functionality or realization of technology evolves, CRM becomes seen rather a process than just a tool for information storage. The software facilitates the work of sales and marketing teams in managing sales cycles. With CRM, you may develop relationships with prospective, current, and past customers, as well as the sales pipelines, communication, and analytics to proceed in deal closing.
The amount of data is overwhelming, and its management requires a separate strategy with pre-defined rules for record entry and update. This all sums up the drive here - CRM philosophy comprises various aspects - technology, data, and processes - that are equally vital to building customer relationships and running a profitable business.
CRM Designed for Sales Only?
Let’s unpack the definition of CRM from Investopedia: “Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the principles, practices, and guidelines that an organization follows when interacting with its customers. From the organization's point of view, this entire relationship encompasses direct interactions with their clients, such as sales and service-related processes, and forecasting and analysis of customer trends and behaviors. Ultimately, CRM serves to enhance the customer's overall experience.”
So far, CRM is implemented and customized to assist and facilitate the company sales procedures and empower sales team with tools to close more deals. The feature set of the platform you chose should be logical, simple and comply with set objectives. Another aspect to include into CRM initiative is the implementation time and employee training.
For these reasons, you can maximize success by proper leveraging of efforts. So, your CRM implementation guide should contain CRM strategy, well-thought choice of solution, team training and explanation of the CRM philosophy regarding your business plan.
Value of CRM for Other Departments
Logically, raises a question: how to achieve a delicate balance between sales reps needs and requirements of other departments? With a CRM, you receive a centralized customer base with constant updates and analytics, plus if the solution is comprehensive for your salespeople than other employees will interact with the software.
Once you formulate the business strategy, it is advisable to populate it across the company. Having a clear idea of direction, your team will be inspired to show better results and also will enter/get the necessary data from the CRM. Besides, the whole your staff can save time on collecting data for reports and use the CRM to accomplish these tasks.
Board It up
Fast-forward to the present, and things are much more exciting. Along with the functionality upgrade changes the CRM philosophy. Now, the balancing between must-haves and nice-to-haves, collaboration and independent work erases. The CRM can serve sales, marketing, finance, support and customer service departments nearly on equal terms.