CRM lead generation involves using a CRM (customer relationship manager) to nurture relationships between you and your leads (potential customers) and existing customers. With a CRM you can manage client or customer information for any size business with greater efficiency and autonomy. Using a CRM for lead generation means closing more deals, increasing sales, and improving real-time decision making and long-term forecasting.
Business owners who utilize CRM lead generation forever alter the effectiveness of their business. Did you know that sales staff only spend about 36.6% of their time actually selling? What if you could institute an intuitive and convenient system that would allow you or your salesperson to spend more time building relationships and closing deals? As a business, your most important asset is your customer or client. Without a CRM, the details regarding these individuals are spread amongst you, your marketing team, your sales force, your accountant etc. - in their brains, inboxes, and stacks of invoices. Centralizing, sorting, and filtering all customer and sales information is what a CRM does best. Proper CRMs like those from Hubspot allow you to manage relationships and sales funnels without fighting overly complicated spreadsheets and hours of data entry. Organization is effortless with a CRM - you can manage your sales funnel with total visibility. You can also see all of the details related to a lead in one place including notes, interactions, and touch points. This allows you to visualize and make sales forecasts.
A proper CRM centralizes and brings all of your customer information together in one place. This is the first step toward increasing the efficiency of your business. Instead of employees using multiple spreadsheets, binders or databases, they'll have all of the relevant information for any given customer right at their fingertips and in one place. A CRM does require you to enter customer data at some point, but there are ways that you can automate this process and how the information makes it into your CRM. Website contact forms are a prime example. Instead of manually recording interaction with an email every time a customer contacts you, you can feed their entries through a contact form to your CRM. The conversation then gets recorded and the sales process begins. From this point, anyone could go back, reference that conversation and seamlessly pick up the sales process.
If you're storing customer information in hard-copy books or binders you stand to lose that information or misrecord entries. One of the biggest benefits of a CRM is having the ability to organize, sort, segment, filter and apply conditions to all of this information. Not only is customer info stored and backed up within a CRM, but you now also have more advanced ways of interpreting it. CRMs really derive their power from these advanced filters and conditions. These allow you or any other user the ability to group contacts and customers into any type of segment. When you group customers into segments, you can then specialize the interactions or messaging to suit that grouping. Before a lead becomes a customer there's often a lot of nurturing that takes place. You want to make sure that your sales staff knows who's ready to buy. They also need to know and what type of messaging they need to deliver to close the deal.
You need a CRM if multiple employees interact with a contact or lead before the sale or deal actually occurs. If there are multiple points of contact, each person needs to know what communication the lead last received. Keeping track of multiple conversations in multiple places at multiple times increases your chances of closing more deals. Because a CRM provides a single access point for all customer details. You'll always know exactly where a lead is at in their journey to becoming a buyer. Everyone on your team will know which leads need more nurturing, communication or information and which leads are ready to buy.
You need a CRM if you want to automate some of the repetitive interactions that take place between you and your customer. By automating the more repetitive and mundane aspects of your business, you stand to save time and money and reduce overall labor. Here are just a few things you can automate with a CRM:
Analyzing trends is critical to your business's future growth and development. The problem is having the right information displayed to you in the right way. Without this, you can't see the trends. With a CRM all of your information for customers and sales is in one, highly filtered and organizable space. With all of this customer and sales info, you can now apply filters to make interpretations and predictions. For instance, knowing a customers lifetime value (LTV) is crucial. This allows you to understand how their repeated business factors into your bottom line and total ROI. Using a CRM means that you have a historical view of all existing and future customers.
If you're still not convinced that CRM lead generation is right for your business, you may be right. A CRM is not perfect for everyone. It's intended for those who are interested in scaling up their business by managing information, spotting trends and making decisions that benefit their future. Talk to us if you're unsure about a CRM and how it can help you. We can assess your needs and steer you in the right direction. As part of our commitment to our clients, we provide each with a CRM regardless.
