It isn’t every day that you come across a tool that plays a part in every single aspect of your company. For small business owners, tools like that are highly coveted, as they allow us to keep budgets nimble and our companies running smoothly.
Which is why having a small business CRM is crucial. A CRM does a lot to help you track, manage, and engage with your prospects and customers. But it also does so much more. When you know where to look and how to use data correctly, a CRM can inform not just your customer service, sales, and inbound marketing efforts, but all different facets and various departments within your business.
So, if you’re interested in keeping your business running smoothly and providing your consumer base with the right products and solutions, look no further than a CRM.
Let’s dive into exactly how a CRM touches and assists every department within your business.
Marketing
The more information you have in marketing, the better you can target the right people with the right content. And your CRM is crucial for making it happen.
A CRM keeps track of your prospects and customers by monitoring their behaviors and experiences. From there, you can evaluate this information and look for key patterns, such as which pieces of content your audience is most drawn to and what types of outreach materials garner the most engagement.
Think of a CRM as one more tool at your disposal for tracking your marketing performance. By pinpointing exactly what’s motivating action, you can double down on the efforts that yield the most impressive results and create content that can be more useful to your prospects.
Sales
Any tool that enables your sales team is a good tool to have, and your CRM is one of the best. A CRM creates efficiencies that your sales team can use to direct their focus and ensure they’re putting their attention where it matters: selling.
Use a CRM to create tasks and automate follow-ups and email campaigns so your sales team doesn’t have to perform them by hand. In addition to opening up time in their schedules for everything else on their to-do list (in turn allowing them to manage their time better and sell more products to more leads), it also offloads rote processes and keeps errors out of the equation. The result isn’t just more sales but more effective sales.
Customer Service
A bad customer service experience can end a client relationship before it’s even begun. And with so much riding on getting it right, it’s a good idea to use all of the information you have at your disposal to meet your customers’ needs.
A CRM allows you to easily track past behaviors and actions, providing you with background information that can be essential as you seek to provide a customer service resolution. It also shows your customers just how much you value their partnership, and that you’re willing to go the extra mile to get to know them better and ensure their experience is an optimal one.
Product Development
Your product development team needs to know the specific features and resources that your audience finds valuable. With a CRM, you can easily pull up your top customers’ track records to evaluate what they’ve found to be the most useful, as well as follow up with them as needed to find out what else they might be looking for. This kind of insight is invaluable as you look to expand your product line and improve your rollout processes. Your CRM offers information that you won’t be able to gather from anywhere else — or at least not quite so easily.
Software Development
Your dedicated software development team is there to help ensure that your website and software are always running smoothly for your customers. If a user is having issues, they’re also the ones who are on hand to rectify it.
A CRM provides an important advantage here since it provides your software development team with the ability to keep track of any and all software service issues that your users experience. And, your CRM can illuminate patterns that suggest a bigger problem, which can save your company big-time. Your software development team can pull records related to each customer who reaches out, which may cue them into a wider system issue, or at least a more productive solution that takes less time to solve.
Leadership
It takes a village to run a successful business, but that doesn’t mean that your leadership team is always completely up to date on new developments. A CRM gives leadership a window into your audience, including what they think of your product or service and what their experience has been like so far. Look at your CRM dashboard like a distillation of the insights and analytics that you already discuss with your leadership team, laid out in a simple format that offers essential information without requiring your brand’s leaders to spend hours interpreting the data.
As you can tell, there’s pretty much no area where your CRM can’t provide at least some benefit. If you haven’t invested in CRM software yet, look for a platform that includes just the right features for what you’re trying to achieve, with intuitive, built-in navigation that every department can use for their own purposes. And if you want to learn more about BenchmarkONE’s all-in-one CRM, schedule a walk-through of our platform today.