Don’t miss more articles by The CRM Team

Don’t miss more articles by The CRM Team

Don’t miss more articles by The CRM Team

What is CRM?

Many people think that CRM is software. But it’s far more than that. 

Customer Relationship Management is about blending technology and strategy to guarantee great customer experience.

1.  Marketing

2.  Sales

3.  Delivery

4.  Service

A bitter let down

A guy in our office recently ordered a cell phone from a tele-sales company. Their marketing was excellent and they had created a strong brand that he trusted. The salesman on the phone was very knowledgeable. His easy manner made buying a simple process.

But when it came to receiving his phone, he had a different experience. On opening his package, he realised the phone was completely different to the one he ordered. When he contacted the company to correct things, nobody seemed to care. It took him a long time to get the company to deliver the phone he’d actually bought. When they eventually did, he vowed never to buy from them again.

Customers are lost through experiences like this.

It doesn’t matter how good certain teams in your business are, without consistency across the four touch points, you’ll always hemorrhage customers and revenue. This is where Customer Relationship Management comes in.

CRM gives you this consistency. A good, functioning CRM system provides great customer experience – right across your business. And because customers have a good relationship with you, you’ll be able to keep hold of them. This creates up-selling and cross-selling opportunities. Selling to current customers is far easier than attracting new ones.

Great customer relationship management doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a journey. But it’s a journey every company needs to be on.

At The CRM Team, we are experts on this journey. Whatever stage you have reached, we can assist you to get to the next one. See which stage you are at.

Don’t miss more articles by The CRM Team

Building profitable relationships – here’s what you need to know about relationship selling

I’m reaching out – but leads aren’t reaching back. Is it my approach? Is there another way to connect better or more meaningfully from the get-go – one I haven’t thought of?

If this feels familiar, read on.

The rise of relationship selling

It’s been quick, but radical. The nature of the sales game has changed – profoundly.

Gone are the days in which cold calls – or emails – could be relied upon to get you the connections you need. In fact, selling through any ‘cold’ contact is becoming more and more difficult.

Today’s sales landscape is, more and more, about one thing – trust. And not only the kind of trust that is built up over years of working together, but up-front, just-starting-out trust. And the way to get that trust going is: through relationships.

Consider this: A warm referral is four times more likely to result in a sale than a cold call.¹

This is the world of relationship selling. Let’s explore it in more detail.

1. Identifying the right leads

This is a traditional step – and still necessary. However, it’s being remade through modern CRM solutions.

With LinkedIn integration and machine learning capabilities, it’s possible to not only quickly identify who matters most, but who is most likely to buy, and how you can leverage your connections (or your colleagues’) for a warm introduction.

Then, once you’ve got a foot in the door, it becomes possible to make the most of that new connection: to find other meaningful contacts at the same company – and elsewhere, too.

2. Keeping it meaningful

We’re all inundated with digital messaging every day. In this hyper-saturated space, the only way to stand out is through relevance. By understanding a potential customer’s unique pain points and challenges – and offering them a tailored solution – you show interest and build trust.

One way to do this? Keep track of what your connections share on LinkedIn and the discussions they participate in. Have they shared particular news articles? Commented on trends? With insight into this, you’re far better to understand their specific wants and needs.

3. Getting the timing just right

Contact a prospect or current customer when they’re overburdened with other things? At best, you’ll get silence. At worst, you’ll hurt the relationship, adding just one more pressure they need to deal with. You can leave the approach to chance or intuition, or you can get data-savvy.

How? By evaluating the health of your relationship, based on transactions, sentiment, social network messages, emails and the frequency and level of those interactions.

Predictive analytics allows you to identify not only where new business opportunities lie and which accounts to reach out to, but where potential risks for each account may lurk.

4. Have the right info ready to go

Managing many accounts – and doing it well – is tricky. Some people you interact with all the time. Others go quiet, only to make contact at an unexpected time.

When a customer feels they’ve caught you off guard or that you’re not ready to help just when they need it can mean a relationship red flag.

However, by keeping content ready to go when your customers are, you emphasise your interest and commitment. Moreover – you’re now able to tell when someone interacts with your content or if it’s been shared with other decision-makers, adding new leads to your book.

5. Get your priorities straight

It’s easy to lose focus – or to focus on the wrong client, at the wrong time. Trying to keep track of where every customer is in the buying process is impossible without a top-down, data-driven view.

Wading through emails and correspondence doesn’t work. And it saps time. However, it’s possible to easily prioritise tasks and opportunities with the right technology. Need some guidance as to what to do next? With machine learning and analytics, that’s possible, too.

The sum-up

Relationship selling is remaking everything – from how connections are formed and nurtured to how they’re grown and leveraged.

Today’s always-on world of business means that impersonal, untailored contact is ignored more and more – it simply forms part of the mass of unasked-for communication we’re all faced with each day.

The solution: trust.

By leveraging your existing connections, you move from a cold caller to a known caller. Moreover, with better insight into potential customers’ pain points and needs, you’re not only trusted, but able to offer more relevant, targeted products, at just the right time.

At every stage of the sales process, relationship building is coming to take centre stage.

To find out more about how you can embrace relationship selling in your sales process, check out our Microsoft sales solution.

1 http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/press-room/2015/recommendations-from-friends-remain-most-credible-form-of-advertising.html

Don’t miss more articles by The CRM Team

How do we know? Because each stage you reach on the CRM maturity journey directly impacts your revenue. We’ve helped companies like yours do this time and time again. Whatever stage they’ve started at.

See where you are now, and where could you be.

You may hear this in the office: ‘Nobody click save on the sales excel doc for the next 10 minutes. I don’t want another conflicted document’. 

Your customer contacts are in different places. Some are in your email program, some are on business cards, some are on your phone, and some never got captured. While things seem to be functioning now, if the business grows there is no way of scaling processes.

Targeted marketing happens sporadically. When you do run a campaign, somebody has to import email addresses manually. If you outsource your marketing, you aren’t getting meaningful data back. Sales may go up after spending money on a campaign, but you don’t know which elements were the impactful ones.

You know that things ought to be better, but you are not quite sure how.

Because of this, you are wasting many hours collecting duplicate customer information. Worse still, you aren’t sure which information, in which system, is the most up to date. You wish there was a way to have a single, accurate customer record – right across your business.

You may be hearing this in your office. ‘Everyone! If you don’t send me your customer information today, they won’t be invited to the event.’ 

You want to be able to learn from all the data you collect, but you can’t. If you do get insights, they are only at a departmental level. They are not available to the rest of the company. And because of this, you are missing out on many up-selling and cross-selling opportunities. Your customer service could also be better.

You are beginning to be confident that a customer will get a consistent experience. Marketing, sales, fulfilment and service can all see the complete record on a customer.  Not only that, you are tracking customer information across your business. Emails, calls, appointments, comments, surveys can all be seen in one place. Data from your ERP, marketing software, etc. all links up in one portal.

Every interaction is acted upon. E.g. Somebody tweets about a service issue. This gets logged by the marketing team and flagged with the service department. Because you have an over-arching system, this sort of co-ordination between departments is easy. The resultant customer experience doesn’t feel disjointed, but consistent.

You may hear this in the office: ‘Score! I just came back from the call-out and sold them a new machine!’ Because your CRM system prompts servicing engineers with upgrade opportunities, your up-sell numbers are increasing. Invoices are generated instantly. And because stock levels are accessible remotely, the customer gets realistic delivery dates.

As your system matures, you are able automate more of you processes and reporting. Staff spend more time on the things that matter and you have a better handle on what’s happening. This increased efficiency has a beneficial knock-on effect on your bottom line.

You can see the experiences a customer has in different departments. And when things go wrong, you have processes in place to intervene. When customers show certain buying patterns, promotional campaigns trigger automatically.

Accurate sales forecasting has reduced your inventory costs considerably. You are hearing things like this in your office:

‘Maximum revenue occurs when we offer these promotions, targeted at that set of customers’. 

Even though your business is large, it still feels very agile. Your processes are more efficient and your opportunities are increasing. Your bottom line is improving significantly. You wonder how businesses operate in any other way.