Why your business needs a CRM

Are you still keeping customer details in a simple database or spreadsheet? Nik Rawlinson explores the benefits of an integrated customer relationship management system

Customer relationships are at the heart of business, and there are several customer relationship management (CRM) platforms that can help you build and make the most of them, regardless of which sector you’re in. If you’re not already using a CRM system then here’s why you should be – and if you are already using one, we’ll look at some applications and benefits that you might not yet have taken advantage of.

The first big benefit of a CRM is that it frees staff from administrative tasks, so they can focus on more productive things. “With a CRM, your team will never have to spend time logging emails, calls, meetings and interactions – all of this information will be automatically collected and aggregated within the system,” explains CRM specialist HubSpot (pcpro.link/335hubspot). The productivity gains from this alone could easily cover the cost of a subscription CRM service. It’s not just about efficiencies, though. A CRM system helps you serve customers better. In very small businesses, customers might communicate with a single person, who can gain an understanding of their needs and plans – but as the company grows, that relationship is often lost. Customers end up talking to representatives who don’t know the ins and outs of their businesses, and who aren’t clued in on what interactions they’ve had before. It’s hardly an encouragement for them to do business with you.

“Important conversations are hidden in emails, scattered around in spreadsheets, lost on Post-it notes, leading to patchy and inconsistent interactions with customers. All of this leads to – simply and plainly – you losing money,” warns CRM firm SuperOffice (pcpro.link/335superoffice).

A CRM lets you keep track of all of these things, so your organisation can speak with a single voice and provide a consistent service, whether you’re working with new leads and existing customers. As well as providing a better experience for customers, this opens the door to cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

“Look at what your customers have bought before and offer them other relevant goods and services that might be useful,” recommends

“The first big benefit of a CRM is that it frees staff from administrative tasks, so they can focus on more productive things”

Marketing Donut (pcpro.link/ 335donut). As long as you’re offering things that they actually need, then “they will see this as good customer care, rather than an intrusive sales pitch”.

Improving your relations with individual customers is a good thing – and collecting together information about your whole clientele allows you to discover trends and better understand your entire market. As the Harvard Business Review notes, you can “identify the most valuable customers over time, and increase customer loyalty by providing customised products and services” (see pcpro.link/335hbr).

Building relationships through relevance

When we say that a CRM can help you understand your market, that doesn’t just mean defining a homogenous set of customers. Differentiating between customer types allows you to devise tailored strategies for increasing sales in each segment.

“With a CRM system, marketing campaigns can target your potential customers with only relevant information for them,” said Christopher Sirk at CRM.org (pcpro.link/335crmorg). “This can be based on their previous search or purchase histories or demographics. This is a great way to begin the customer journey.”

Tailored strategies mean you don’t waste money and effort promoting irrelevant products or services either to customers who won’t purchase them, or via channels their leads won’t encounter. More importantly, they ensure your offerings are relevant to the customer, which is crucial to retention in the modern marketplace.

“The ‘loyalty era’ of marketing, as we’ve known it, is waning,” noted John Zeally in the Harvard Business Review. “It was built in part on the notion that consumers will keep buying the same things from you if you have the right incentives [such as rewards, rebates or discounts]. Yet according to recent consumer research from Kantar Retail, 71% of consumers now claim that loyalty incentive programmes don’t make them loyal at all. In this new era of digital-based competition and customer control, people are increasingly buying because of a brand’s relevance to their needs in the moment.” (See pcpro.link/335hbr2.)

That doesn’t mean that loyalty is a lost cause, only that you need to make meaningful connections to foster it. Josh Perlstein, CEO of data-led CRM agency Response Media, observes: “Brands have the unprecedented opportunity... to use what they uniquely know about their consumers to create emotional connections. As a brand, you want consumer attachment because it leads to brand advocacy. Brand attachment stems from an experience (or experiences) consumers had with a brand, alignment of values or solid value exchange. Whatever the connection, it is your job to find it, nurture it and develop the relationship, which leads to brand attachment. Your business depends on it” (pcpro.link/335forbes).

All of this is much easier when you’re using a CRM: it allows you to centralise customer intelligence, regardless of the point of collection. Every team member has an overview of a customer’s likes and desires, the imperatives that drive the customer’s business, their past purchases, and more. Diverse parts of the organisation can build upon the advances made and information acquired by any other. All this can be leveraged to keep your brand relevant to your customers, and ensure they’re not motivated to look elsewhere for a business that can satisfy their needs.

Making your data work for you

TOP A CRM system lets you set up a customised dashboard for every customer

ABOVE You can gain valuable insights into every customer interaction

As well as segmenting customers by their various needs, a central CRM system lets you track the different states of all your ongoing relationships. As Sirk puts it, CRM “allows you to see where in the customer lifecycle or journey your customer is, and segment customers according to interactions with your company”. Having brought together all this the data, a CRM can also present it an accessible manner – a capability whose value shouldn’t be underestimated. “Using spreadsheets or disconnected systems to manage your customer relationships and “With a CRM system, data means inputting or importing data manually, marketing campaigns can figuring out what’s target potential customers with only relevant information for them” important, lacking historical context or the full picture of a customer relationship to derive proper insights, and then trying to create a graphical way to present this data,” warned Salesforce (pcpro.link/335salesforce). “CRM does most of this for you. Once you have invested in the platform, you can set up a customised dashboard for every individual to help translate insights into action.” CRM data thus helps businesses to strategise next steps for different

FOUR OF THE BEST CRM PLATFORMS

HubSpot CRM Free

CRM Free is split into multiple “hubs” for managing marketing, sales, operations, customer service and content management – and, as the name suggests, there’s a free tier for anyone who wants to try before they buy. In fact, the free plan may be all that small companies need, as it allows you to store up to a million contacts and companies, integrate live chat and bots, schedule emails, manage advertising and more.

As you would expect of a fully featured CRM, HubSpot’s free offering supports tailored views and functions for different users with an organisation, so salespeople, marketers and business owners can all work with the same data for different purposes. Add a contact to the database, and HubSpot can automatically fill out the record with data pulled in from 20 million businesses, and all leads are tracked within the system to give a live view of ongoing interactions with customers.

Should you decide to upgrade for more advanced features, packages are offered for starter, professional and enterprise users, allowing organisations to manage their bills as they grow.

Monday.com

Monday.com bills itself as a “work OS that lets you shape workflows, your way”. It includes modules for project management, HR, operations and other functions, alongside managing sales and CRM. The various components can be linked so that, whichever best suits the needs of any stakeholder, they can all collaborate with a single goal in mind. With custom dashboards to visualise data, Kanban boards to manage workflows and integrated document sharing, it’s conceivable that many organisations could happily work wholly within Monday.com.

To help you get started, Monday.com offers over 200 ready-made templates and workflows, covering everything from lead management and campaign planning to contact tracking and centralising supporting materials. It’s extensible, too, with over 100 add-ons enabling common business functions such as document signing, backup and hooking into third-party services such as Google Ads, Mailchimp and LinkedIn.

If you want to try out the service, the free individual plan accommodates – despite the name – up to two seats, with unlimited boards and documents. Beyond this, the paid-for Basic service comes with 5GB of online storage and a single dashboard; Standard adds 250 automations and 250 integrations per month, plus five dashboards; and Pro increases each of these allowances, as well as mixing in time tracking and private boards. These plans cost £7, £9 and £14 per seat respectively, billed annually, with a three-seat minimum at each tier.

Salesforce

Salesforce is one of the biggest and best-known CRM providers of all. It’s so closely associated with the sector that the company’s official stock symbol is CRM. But Salesforce isn’t just about collecting and managing customer data: in recent years the company has expanded its portfolio to encompass the Tableau data visualisation platform and Slack, among other assets.

As with other platform-based CRM tools, Salesforce’s products work together so that businesses can develop a tailor-made solution for their operation. Salesforce Sales Cloud will sit at the heart of many operations, allowing individual users to manage their own accounts, with oversight of contacts, lead management and tracking of internal conversations. Data can be organised using dashboards to give at-a-glance feedback on current performance, and to surface the insights businesses require to make real-time decisions.

Pricing starts with an Essentials plan for small businesses with up to ten users at £20 per user per month, billed annually. For more advanced features, including lead generation and collaborative forecasting, you’ll need to investigate an upgrade: Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited plans roll in progressively more tools at £60, £120 and £240 per user per month, respectively.

Zoho

Rather than producing a single CRM product with different tiers of features and pricing, Zoho offers a range of products to suit different organisational profiles. The headline product is Zoho CRM: currently used by more than 250,000 companies, including Amazon India, Bose and Suzuki, this system includes social media monitoring, live web chat and integrations with more than 50 telephony providers, allowing users to make and log calls while simultaneously accessing customer data.

It also works with companion products such as Zoho Meeting, which means presentations can be planned through the same tool, eliminating the friction of working across disconnected products from multiple providers. Prices start at £12 per user per month, billed annually, but if you need integrated AI and BI you’ll need to upgrade to Enterprise or Ultimate respectively, at £35 and £42 per user per month, billed annually.

For smaller businesses, Zoho Bigin is a pipelinecentric CRM, in which your business is broken down by task – such as sales, services or marketing – so data relating to each can be kept separate when in use, to help maintain focus. It costs £5 or £10 per user per month for up to 50,000 or 100,000 records respectively, although businesses with fewer than 500 records can get started gratis on the Free plan, which includes lead and contact management, deal management and charting.

customer groups, and to deduce which are likely to exhibit similar purchasing patterns. This in turn helps generate better data on which to project sales and income.

This last point is key. Such insights, as Lee Davis and Cassie Bottorff write at Forbes (pcpro. link/335forbes2), can “help businesses more accurately forecast, and take the guesswork out of planning for the future. You can leverage insights about your customers, pipeline, sales performance and forecasts from data analytics tools to decide what product to make next, or how to improve customer service.”

The overall benefits

“If a CRM only helped you organise and track your customer data, or only saved you time, or only made it easier to build and nurture relationships, it would be a valuable solution for your business,” Mailchimp explained. “When you combine all of those things, a CRM begins to serve an even more important purpose – it helps you develop a better understanding of your audience and, in turn, your business.”

When a business understands itself at least as well as it understands its customers, it’s more likely to spot inefficiencies to be remedied, and opportunities to be exploited. It’s all a lot easier with the help of CRM.