So your sales team has done everything they could to convert a lead into a buyer — sent out emails, queued nurturing follow-ups, and even shared discount coupons. And, yet, all they get are crickets from the lead. 

In such a case it makes sense to blame the marketing team for sending such poor quality leads, right? 

Except, this age-old marketing vs sales squabble isn’t the right culprit.

Did you know that these leads were already familiar with your services? One of them downloaded a feature brochure they are most interested in. And another even checked out case studies for their industry. 

The real problem is a lack of collaborative data. Should the sales team know a lead’s touchpoints with marketing campaigns, they would be able to 

  • Drive personalized conversations
  • Increase the odds of conversion significantly.
CRM benefits

A powerful CRM might just be the solution to better align the teams and get a unified customer view with all the data accessible to everyone. And, this is just the tip of the iceberg as the benefits of a CRM go deeper. 

In this article, let’s look at the benefits of CRM for aligning your sales and marketing teams, achieving better sales conversions, and growing your bottom line.

How does CRM software improve your buyer’s experience

 

Long gone are the days when a buyer’s journey extra long because they had to keep repeating themselves as they were tossed between different teams. Today, customers expect to interact with one team and have a seamless experience without having to repeat themselves to different functions of your company. 

This means being aware of what a lead talked about with the marketing team or how they’re interacting with marketing campaigns is indispensable. 

Thankfully, a CRM can help you get rid of siloed teams. A holistic CRM software provides

  • A unified view of prospect interactions with your business.
  • All the information necessary that helps gain your prospects’ trust.

Think how much faster you will gain your prospects' and customers' trust when you engage with them in contextual conversations, remember what is important to them, and respond quickly to their concerns!

 

CRM benefits

Second Eclipse’s Co-Founder, Marc Rioux, shares, “some of the most useful data tracked in a CRM is not the pipeline or leads but the metadata about that information.”

“For opportunities, it can be metadata like days since the last activity, how many times the close date has been changed, how old that opportunity is, how long that opportunity has been in that stage,” Rioux continues.

Naturally, all this precious data helps you elevate your buyers’ experience as they engage with you. Consequently, they end up buying from you – often becoming repeat customers if the experience is truly remarkable. 

Ultimately, better conversion and customer satisfaction rates follow – improving your bottom line.

With that, let’s look at each CRM benefit individually so you can understand the full potential of using a CRM tool.

Enhancing the buyer experience: 6 key benefits of CRM

 

1. Enhance prospecting with high-quality leads

A powerful CRM assists with prospecting by allowing you to segment the leads based on their behavior, interest, and location.  For instance, you can segment leads based on those that have visited your pricing page and send targeted messages with offers that’ll interest them.

Second, you can capture lead information using web forms and saving it in your CRM for further nurturing.  Another CRM benefit is the integrated chatbot that most CRM vendors, such as Freshsales (formerly Freshworks CRM), offer.

This allows you to automatically welcome a lead to your site with the smart bot asking questions (for instance, what are you here for today) and answering queries around the clock. 

Not only does this reduce your response time, but it also helps you further segment leads and identify high-quality ones. 

An AI-powered CRM also assigns a predictive score for each lead based on their engagement with your business, telling you how likely a lead is to convert. Armed with this, your salespeople would know which leads to prioritizing and when.

Talk about identifying and targeting only high-quality leads!

CRM benefits

2. Focus on the right deals

An AI-powered CRM gives you a visual overview of all the deals in the pipeline, with tags such as ‘likely to close,’ ‘at risk,’ and ‘gone cold.’

Having this visual picture allows you to 

  • Track the progress on each deal throughout the sales pipeline
  • Gain a quick understanding of the status of deals
  • Focus on the deals that will bring you the most profit
  • Identify and resolve bottlenecks in the pipeline
  • Determine which deals are likely to close and where you need to dedicate more resources

In the same vein, a proficient CRM tool employs artificial intelligence to study all the interactions with a specific lead and pair the info with historical data of what’s worked with similar leads in the past. Using this information, AI recommends the next best actions to take – maximizing your odds of closing the deal.

 

CRM benefits

“Our sales managers use CRM to convert more marketing leads to real contracts. We’ve noticed that the CRM system helps identify, add and categorize new leads quickly. Our sales managers have a possibility to prioritize orders and close more deals.”

– Maryna Astapchyk, Business analyst, Elinext.com.

3. Stay on top of sales activities

Did you know that 82% of the buyers expect an immediate response from businesses? And, here’s the shocker: 62% of these buyers consider ten minutes or less as immediate.

Fortunately, one of the benefits of a CRM is helping you keep up with customer expectations including immediately getting back to them. How? By leveraging a chatbot as we’ve discussed.

For queries that require human intervention, the chatbot can direct the query to a specified sales rep. A CRM with an auto-assign feature can also help you organize your team by assigning territory-based leads to specific sales reps, further reducing the lead response time.

For example, a real estate business would have property listings and projects in multiple cities. This means, their system would contain enquiries for various regions. The auto-assign feature would direct all leads from region A to realtor 1, while those related to region B can go to realtor 2, and so on.

 

CRM benefits

 

Similarly, you can use workflows to automate mundane processes. 

For example, Doozer, a Freshsales user, uses lead qualification workflow to automatically send an intro email with a Calendly link to prospects who share their contact info on their website form. If a lead doesn’t respond, another workflow is triggered that automatically follows-up with them.

Best of all, with an AI-powered CRM, you can schedule automated, yet personalized follow-ups at a time that best suits your recipients.

 

“My biggest benefit of using a CRM is that it remembers my follow-ups which are weeks or months down the road. That happens a lot in real estate.

I have clients with leases expiring in 6 months or needing to relocate before school starts. It’s a big advantage to have a reminder to come up with details about conversations from months earlier.

My clients know that I am on top of their needs. Even if I write the scheduled call in my planner, there is no room for the notes and history I need to make my calls valuable.”

– Eric Nerhood, President, Premier Property Buyers.

4. Improve conversion rate

A CRM system can help you boost your conversion rate in several ways.

For one, by tracking your prospects’ behavior on your site, you can tell where they’re dropping off and where they are entering your sales funnel. You can use this data to minimize the drop-off points and maximize the converters, therefore, improving your website experience for more conversion.

 

CRM benefits

If we know where most of the buyers are coming from, we can then invest in that traffic to get more buyers. If we know where most people fall off in the buyer’s journey, we know where the leaks are in the path. We can then plug in the holes to increase the number of buyers, and hence our profits as business owners.

– Vaishali Nikhade, Business Strategist.

Secondly, a CRM provides a unified view of all customer activity – conducted by both the sales and marketing teams. This is not just limited to their contact details. But, the complete lead information including 

  • Prospects’ behavior on your site, in-app
  • Emails, call recordings, and chat conversations
  • Marketing materials they downloaded and engaged with
  • Salesperson’s notes, upcoming appointments and meetings
  • How likely they are to convert
  • Suggestions for the next best actions

And more! 

This 360-degree view aligns both teams so that everyone has all the information on each lead. Subsequently, they can have engaging conversations with prospects with the right context and lead information.

CRM benefits

For instance, if a lead has been talking to salesperson A about a feature, salesperson B can easily pick the conversation from where it was left by accessing agent A’s notes in the CRM.

 

"A CRM tool helps build better customer relationships because a customer no longer works with one person at a company. For example, in the SaaS world, a customer might have between 5-15 different people on a call dedicated to their account. 

A CRM allows all the players to see the communication, notes, and activity everyone else has with the customer, so they are caught up, make real-time recommendations for the customer, and do not have to repeat themselves."

– Marc Rioux, Co-Founder, Second Eclipse.

5. Increase deal value by upselling and cross-sell at the right time

You’re 60-70% more likely to sell more to existing customers. In contrast, your chances of selling to new prospects stand between 5-20% only.

However, cross-selling and upselling are only a success when you target the right people at the right time.

With a CRM giving you visibility on your customers’ website and in-app activities, you can see who might be interested in buying more from you. For example, you can tell that a beginner package customer is likely ready to upgrade to a higher-tier package if they visit your pricing page.

Moreover, if you pay attention to your customer’s interaction with your product, you can upsell/cross-sell further.

Case in point: a basic package customer trying to access advanced features.

CRM benefits

6. Boost customer satisfaction

With your teams aligned and interacting as one team, reduced response time, and contextual conversations engaging customers, there’s no reason why customers wouldn’t be satisfied.

In fact, a CRM can help your entire team come forward with a single brand voice as everyone can access prospect information, customer’s past behavior, questions, and interactions with your business.

 

“Given that retention [and customer satisfaction] efforts often cross multiple departments (support sending out QA polls, AE reaching out on a birthday, IT responding to a feature request), having all communication in a single system allows the organization to present a united front and move toward the same goal.”

– Kyle Buzzard, SVP of Sales, Anura.io

On top of this, the sales and marketing alignment means both teams can use each other’s data to:

  • Understand the target persona better
  • Tweak marketing campaigns and personalize messaging based on what interests leads and
  • Empower sales enablement by creating the required content and resources

All this ultimately helps you close more deals and grow revenue.

 

Choosing the CRM software

Business use case

Assess your company size and requirements from the CRM. While choosing a CRM, make sure it fits right into your business ecosystem and solves all your sales challenges.

Budget

Once you understand your business requirement, determine the pricing structure that’ll suit you best. Watch out for hidden costs in terms of support, maintenance and implementation.

Scalability

When your business grows, so do your requirements. An advanced sales CRM with pay-as-you-grow pricing should support your business needs as it scales. 

Ease of use

You need a CRM that makes your life easier. So choose a sales CRM that is simple and intuitive. It shouldn’t make you roam around the software to get work done.

Customer reviews

As you narrow down your list of ideal CRMs, make sure to check trusted review websites, such as G2 and Capterra, to get first-hand reviews from the existing customer base.

Looking for a CRM?

Try Freshsales (formerly Freshworks CRM), a cloud-based CRM for your sales and marketing teams. Freshsales helps businesses scale faster and puts refreshing business software in the hands of small businesses, as well as enterprises. 

If you’re looking for an easy-to-use, ready-to-use CRM (plus a 21-day free trial to start off with), we’re here.

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