CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 
 

CRM is about delighting customers. The goal is to improve customer service, generate more sales and ultimately increase profitability.

At its simplest level, it's about capturing and using client information so that you can personalise the experience you provide to your customers. At its most sophisticated, it is part of a joined-up strategy to provide a 360-degree view of customer behaviour so that you can retain customers for longer and increase their spending over time.

If you believe that the most important metric in business is customer lifetime value (CLV) then you already believe in CRM. CRM is a philosophy enabled by software.

It’s about creating a customer journey from lead to advocate done with style. Creating an experience a customer wants to repeat and recommend to friends and colleagues.  It’s no longer a phrase to describe a customer database and contact system. 

CRM

The Importance of CRM

In B2B sales and marketing, the cost of customer acquisition can be astronomical. This means that it can take a long time for new customer relationships to become profitable.

Focusing on customer retention makes sound business sense. According to a famous study by Bain & Company and HBS, increasing customer retention rates by even 5% can increase profits by 25-95%.

We all intuitively know that time spent selling to existing customers will be more productive. It is likely you will get a 2-8 times better ROI than selling to new customers, yet as business leaders, we often fail to allocate sales and marketing resources accordingly.

Gartner says as much as 80% of your future profits could come from just 20% of your current customer base. If this is true, then your business needs a methodology for identifying these potential stars and investing resources in them proportionate to the potential returns.

Why "Old School" CRM Doesn't Cut It 

According to one 2020 survey, 52% of businesses say their CRM system isn’t functioning well enough and is losing their organisation revenue. They established that many businesses still cannot get a 360-degree view of the customer across multiple applications and data silos and, as a result, are unable to predict which customers are about to leave in time to do anything about it.

As a result, CRM software is evolving to better measure customer engagement - encompassing a much broader spectrum of applications. No longer just a contact database, it now encompasses your:

  • Website
  • Marketing & Lead Generation
  • Sales lead/opportunity tracking
  • Quotations
  • Customer Care/support
  • Surveys
  • Events
  • Process automation and more.

Why Most CRM Implementations Fail to Deliver

We have identified seven mistakes that businesses make when implementing CRM systems. We call them the Seven Deadly Sins of CRM – lessons from over 200 CRM implementations. If you are serious about implementing a CRM system, we believe this document will be invaluable.

 

CRM whitepaper book

CRM + Website = New Insights for Sales

CRM now includes your website - because in this connected world it’s key that you know which contact at which company is consuming what information. If your systems cannot deliver this, you and your sales team are now at a serious disadvantage.

After all, if your website is your digital shopfront, surely selling to those already on the shop floor is your priority? Calling cold prospects while customers and warm leads are delving deeper and deeper into your website and consuming your educational content, makes no sense.

On the other hand, when a CRM and a website are one system, a new world of opportunity opens up.

 

Intelligent website personalisation – Improving conversion

There is another new and exciting possibility opened up by the union of your website and CRM system; Website content can now be personalised intelligently.

If the website and the CRM system are one system, we can personalise the experience to our visitors’ role, sector, or relationship with us, for example.

Imagine your website understanding that a visitor is in a certain sector – say, engineering - and displaying an engineering version of the homepage on their next visit. Would that make your offering more attractive? Would it increase engagement and help you generate more leads?

Maybe you have different versions of pages for different roles or personas – business leaders, sales leaders, marketing leaders, or finance leaders all getting a tailored experience. Would that help you persuade and influence more powerfully? Could it help increase your conversion rates?

Maybe customers and prospects see a different version of the home page when they visit? The choice is yours.

An intelligent website understands your CRM database segmentation and can adapt accordingly.

 

More About Website Design

 

 

Engagement scoring – The new CRM metric

 

Imagine being able to know who is visiting your website or blog and being able to understand and score their behaviour. For example, a visit to your website home page may demonstrate very little intent to purchase (although it’s a start) but by the time the customer has delved deeper, investigated your offering in detail, watched videos, and read several blog posts, they have left digital footprints that tell us a story.

We can take that further. Individual web pages can be scored in terms of user intent – perhaps a home page visit scores two points whereas a visit to the pricing page scores 10, for example? Website and blog visitor engagement can be measured by the information they consume.

Without this visibility, your salespeople and account managers may be blind to the opportunities that already exist, while they work feverishly (and often fruitlessly) to create new ones.

 

Your Secret Sauce - Website + CRM + Automation

If your CRM system is divorced from your website, then you may be missing out on vital signals and opportunities may be silently slipping through your hands like sand. 

  • If your best customer visits your “How to Cancel Your Contract” page on your website, should you know about it?
  • If a warm prospect downloads your white paper, would that interest you?
  • If your hot prospect is looking at your Terms and Conditions page, do you think it would be a good time for a call?

 

 

 

Intelligent Personalisation – Improving Conversion

There is another new and exciting possibility opened up by the union of your website and CRM system; Website content can now be personalised intelligently.

If the website and the CRM system are one, we can personalise the experience to our visitors’ role, sector, or relationship with us, for example.

Imagine your website understanding that a visitor is in a certain sector – say, engineering - and displaying an engineering version of the homepage on their next visit. Would that make your offering more attractive? Would it increase engagement and help you generate more leads?

Maybe you have different versions of pages for different roles or personas – business leaders, sales leaders, marketing leaders, or finance leaders all getting a tailored experience. Would that help you persuade and influence more powerfully? Could it help increase your conversion rates?

Maybe customers and prospects see a different version of the home page when they visit? The choice is yours.

An intelligent website understands your CRM database segmentation and can adapt accordingly.

 

Personalising for the anonymous visitor

If an anonymous visitor (we don’t yet have in our CRM database) visits a page you designed for their industry, profession, or role, a smart website will now learn from that interaction and personalise the website content it shows that visitor.

By displaying content, blog posts, news stories, and case studies which are relevant to the visitor, your chances of engaging them should be enhanced significantly.

When your visitor next loads your home page it may be a different experience altogether – the content is magically updated to reflect exactly how you can help that type of person or business type.

 

 

 

 

 

CRM + Website + Automation – A Powerful Virtual Assistant for Your Marketing, Sales & Customer Care Teams

Understanding website visitors and their behaviour, we create an opportunity to initiate campaigns automatically.

Picture the scene… Your website visitor downloads a white paper. A video demonstrates that they are engaged – they are actually reading it and by the time they have finished watching that video:

  • the next white paper in the series is in their inbox with your compliments
  • the prospect has been tagged in your database as “warm”
  • their engagement score was uprated
  • a call has been scheduled for your sales team

CRM systems that cannot understand website behaviour and email interactions (and score that engagement) are now obsolete.

 

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