First Day on the Job
You’re a new salesperson, and your manager asks you to reconnect with a dormant customer who used to be very loyal to the company. Before reaching out, you want to learn more about the customer—their history with the business, their last touchpoint, their last purchase—but the salesperson who worked with the customer has retired. And she didn’t leave any records behind. How can you find the information you need?
This is where CRM, or customer relationship management, is vital.
CRM is most often accomplished with systems that help salespeople keep track of all sales-related activities. If your company has a CRM system, you, as the new salesperson, can access all the organisation’s information about the customer. What’s more, the previous salesperson’s meeting notes would be available, giving you the insight you need to start rebuilding the relationship with the customer.
In this lesson, you’ll learn more about what a CRM system is and what it can do. You’ll also explore how CRM systems can help you build relationships.
Watch the video to learn what CRM is and how CRM systems can impact your work in sales.
What Is CRM?
CRM stands for customer relationship management. CRM systems help businesses streamline company relationships and interactions. Their purpose is to simplify data collection and organisation, not only for sales teams but also for other departments that interact with prospective buyers.
Knowing your customer well is the first step in relationship-building. A CRM system can help make reaching out and building connections simpler for salespeople.
What Is a CRM System Used For?
Before the development of technology-based CRM solutions, sales teams had to rely on handwritten records and file cabinets to store information about customers. This method required extensive time and effort. Even when records were maintained, hard copies could still be damaged or lost. And sharing physical records between locations or even departments made teamwork challenging.
By contrast, CRM solutions keep all information easily retrievable in an electronic system. Customer information like contact preferences, preferred pronouns, and birthdays can be recorded, and salespeople can document communication history, meeting notes, and sales data. Most importantly, the records are easily updated, and all users within an organisation can easily share information.
A CRM system keeps your records and sales activities:
- Accessible. CRM systems make information easy to store, share, find, and update.
- Consistent. Multiple teams across departments can reference the same information.
- Updated. Sales team activities and pipeline changes are easily tracked.
- Organised. Most CRM systems come with dashboards and interfaces that make reporting and analysis easy.
A CRM solution stores information about contacts and makes it available not only for the sales team but also for the whole company. Combining information into a single system allows salespeople to get to know their contacts better with just one glance.
"How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose."
– Bill Gates
What Can a CRM System Do?
Even the most basic CRM systems can organise information to enhance relationship-building. More expensive options may have additional communication capabilities or extra features, but all CRM software solutions fulfill these basic functions: storing and organising customer data.
How Can CRM Systems Elevate Relationship-Building?
CRM software can automate manual, time-consuming tasks like data collection, organisation, and analysis. And that gives sales teams more time to cultivate relationships.
CRM solutions organise information effectively, but their real value lies in how they empower salespeople. With increased accessibility, analysis, and time, salespeople who use CRM software can do more for their organisation, their potential buyers, and their existing customers.
Expand each example below to see how a CRM solution can transform your sales process:
Creating Assignments
Imagine that you’re a sales manager tasked with assigning contacts to your team members and giving them all the information they need as they start reaching out.
Without CRM software, you would need to assign contacts manually and provide information to team members individually. Because there’s no way to see all assignments at once, you may accidentally assign two salespeople to the same contact or let an opportunity slip through the cracks. Sharing information between team members would also be difficult.
With CRM software, you can enter each contact as a record and document all relevant information within the system. You could make assignments to team members through the system, ensuring each contact has one salesperson. And whenever a team member needs to find data, they could search the same records that are accessible to everyone.
Thank-You Cards
Say that your manager, Lucky, suggests that the team send thank-you cards to all long-term customers. They ask you to come up with a list of contacts and addresses.
Without CRM software, you’d have to search through customer contact information by hand. And when Lucky asks if you could organise the list by how long a customer has had contact with your company, you’d have to do even more manual organisation.
With CRM software, you could easily create a list of contacts that includes names, addresses, and even contact preferences. When Lucky asks you to organise the list by the length of their relationship, you can rearrange the records in seconds. Now you have the time to handwrite personal greetings or even deliver them to important customers in person.
A Lost Order
Imagine that you’re managing a sales team during your busiest sales period. As you juggle incoming orders, you receive a call from a customer who says they were about to place an order with Vladimir when he suddenly stopped responding to their emails. You know that Vladimir recently left the organisation and is traveling overseas.
Without CRM software, it would be impossible to confirm the details of the order without contacting Vladimir, who is under no obligation to respond. You’re forced to ask the customer to repeat their order and replace it manually, harming their relationship with your company.
With CRM software, you could quickly find the customer’s record, confirm the details of their order, and update them on the status. Then, you could reassign them to another team member, maintaining your team’s standards of excellence.
Summary
CRM systems store important records and keep them updated. The software does the heavy lifting with customer data so that salespeople can do what they do best: connect with prospective buyers and customers.
CRM software can maintain records, manage leads, and support reporting. Advanced systems have additional capabilities for analysis, automation, and communication. An efficient CRM system can transform your sales team, streamlining time-consuming, data-related tasks so that salespeople can focus on relationship-building.
- A CRM system is only as good as the data a salesperson enters into it. Every member of a sales team needs appropriate training to maintain records within the CRM system.
You’re almost done with the course! Click on “Mark Complete ✓” to review your sales skills in the final lesson.