Signs You Need to a CRM System
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is the software a business or other organisation uses to administer its interactions with customers. Many businesses often operate with disjointed data stored in various spreadsheets, emails, and physical records.
A CRM system provides businesses the ability to store all of their customer data in one location, easily accessible to all members of staff across the organisation.
Implemented properly, a CRM system will manage your customer and prospect data and tracking your interactions. This’ll help your sales team win you more customers by boosting the ability to close deals, improve your customer service and automate your marketing.
Discussed below are some of the signs your organisation needs a robust CRM system to improve engagement across the customer journey and bring structure to your sales process.
Siloed data
Siloed data is data that’s controlled by one department or business unit and isolated from the rest of an organisation. For example, if the marketing department has access to a database containing up to date customer data, when the sales department doesn’t have access, the data is siloed. It can often lead to disjointed communications, overlapping of the workload and increased inefficiencies.
Consolidating your organisation’s data to create a Single Customer View isn’t something that can be done easily as it’s quite a complex process. Merging data that is dispersed across an entire organisation can be tricky, but in doing so it allows information to be accessed and updated by all departments, improving workflows.
You struggle to find customer data
When customer data is stored in various different sources within an organisation, it can become difficult to find details with ease. Customer data could be located in multiple spreadsheets, leading to confusion as to which data is most up-to-date or accurate.
A central CRM system allows employees to search all customer records in one location, making it easier to get the information needed, while also reducing the number of duplicate records.
This ultimately saves time for sales, marketing and support teams, while also improving engagement with customers.
Time is being wasted
Manually updating Excel spreadsheets, editing formats, duplicating workload are all ways sales teams are wasting time and energy which could be better utilised on more urgent matters.
With an appropriate CRM system in place, your team will be more productive and time efficient, allowing them to focus on building customer relationships and converting leads into sales.
Difficulty creating reports
With customer engagement data located in different locations across the organisations, reporting becomes an exhausting task for employees.
Reports often have to be created manually using the data stored in various different locations within the business. CRM systems have the ability to generate automatic and accurate reporting, especially if the system is linked to the customer buying journey. This leads to precise sales reports, allowing management to make more informed decisions in the long run.
Missed sales opportunities
Struggling to keep up with leads is a major sign that you’re missing out on sales opportunities. Without easy access to customers and sales prospects, your sales team will struggle to engage with customers in a timely and effective manner.
Follow ups often get lost in a sea of emails and spreadsheets when data isn’t consolidated. A CRM system will ultimately help your organisation keep track of all prospect interactions, while also allowing for sales team collaboration and continuity.
A CRM system can effectively sort, analyse and prioritise your sales leads so that your sales team can focus on the opportunities that are likely to close.
Is your organisation considering upgrading its CRM system? Be sure to get in contact with us today on +353 1 8041298!
