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Why do businesses need a CRM platform?

A constant debate has been brewing between management and the sales team. You know it will be helpful, but it’s hard to answer—why?

So, here’s a complete guide for you.

CRM or customer relationship management is a process of collecting, storing, updating and organizing customers' data. A while back, it used to be done in excel files, but today there are some outstanding tools to assist.

More than just plain numbers, these tools have turned your customer data into insights that are helpful for you as well as your customers.

How? We’ll be learning that right here.

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Here are 10 reasons why businesses should use CRM platforms and also why they are important.👇

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Importance of CRM Platform

CRM platforms are important as they help in collecting, managing, updating and tracking every customer’s data efficiently.

With the help of a powerful CRM tool, it becomes much more efficient for you and your team to understand your customer more efficiently and create frictionless communication with them.

That is the reason why 65% of businesses are now using a CRM tool within the first five years of their journey.

As your customer base starts to grow, as your team expands, and as you start transitioning into a more organized form of data management, using a CRM platform becomes very important.

The demand for CRM platforms is growing rapidly, and the market is predicted to reach $146 billion by 2028.

CRMs are among the fastest-growing digital software, and surely there are many reasons to use them for your business.

10 Reasons Businesses Should Use CRM Platform

1. Extensive contact management

One of the biggest struggles that the sales team faces is managing the contact of the prospects and the status of the lead.

In simpler words, when working with data from hundreds of customers, it becomes really difficult to manage their contact information and track their previous interactions with the team.

What the CRM platform does is, collects and manage all the information in a very organized way.

Your sales team can easily track every single customer and get their contact information in a few seconds.

Having access to this information really helps in establishing rapport with customers, which the top 71% of top salespeople believe is really important to grow your sales.

2. Efficient team collaboration

CRM is not just a sales or marketing tool. It’s a company-wide platform used to manage the data of customers.

Sales teams use it to generate leads, engage with them and track their status in the conversion funnel. The support team uses CRM platforms to stay in touch with customers and assist them in case of problems.

Marketing teams use it to understand customers efficiently and figure out how to reduce friction in the sales funnel and increase lead generation.

Lastly, all this data and workflow is used by management to understand the company's progress and spearhead the growth direction towards what needs to be updated.

3. Enhanced workflow

Being able to actually see the progress of a lead converting into a customer really helps in understanding what useful steps should be taken.

You may find that adding a support team or an onboarding team at the start boosts the conversion rate. Or you may find that the most efficient channel of marketing for you is email.

Finding these details and testing workflow theories are only possible when one has framed every stage of workflow accurately.

Having a CRM platform allows you to do that very efficiently and track the best way to increase your business KPIs.

This also helps in creating seamless communication and exchange of information within the team—that as you know improves the outcome of your business.

4. Better customer support

Do you realize the importance of your support team? 78% of customers say they are ready to do business again even after a mistake if they had a positive support experience.

It’s not just about solving issues that your customers are facing, but rather building a good connection between them and your brand.

To do so, your support team plays a huge role. And to assist them with their work, the CRM platform comes with various tools.

Such as one single dashboard to manage all communication channels, live chat, tracking customer history and more.

5. Supervised customer interaction

It is very important that your customers are satisfied with their purchase and buying experience. Your support and the after-sales team will play a crucial role during this stage.

89% of consumers are likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience.

Here, you must be able to create an organized system where your team knows how to interact, and at the same time, you can supervise their performance efficiently.

And that’s one of the many reasons why a CRM platform would be very useful for growing businesses.

It will assist you in providing support to your customers through all mediums, that is live chat, social media, emails and more—all through one dashboard.

This centralizes the whole support system and gives you an insightful overview (along with useful analytics) to assist your customers at every stage.

6. Improved customer segmentation

Customer segmentation is the process of dividing customers into particular groups or categories to gain the highest ROI and deliver the best experience to them.

On a regular analytical dashboard, you can track visitors and a few of their actions. Helpful but limited. On the other hand, a CRM platform allows you to track every single interaction of your customer to the end.

You can track which customer made an order, also signed up for your email and has a very high lifetime value. Normally, you might need multiple tools and then you’ll have to manually filter each one of them.

But when using a power CRM platform you can filter all this data with just a few filters.

How would this be helpful?

Let’s see that through an example. Through customer segmentation, you have identified customers who have high spending capacity and are loyal to your brands since they have subscribed to your emails.

You can further pinpoint brand advocates, by filtering contacts who have recently opened your emails.

Now that you have such precise data, you can run specific campaigns to help you get a boost in sales whenever you need one.

7. Generating actionable insights

We have been continuously breaking down how CRM platforms are helping businesses understand their customers better.

This can be in the form of customer segmentation or in the workflow. Whatever the case is, analytics from CRM platforms are not information but real insights that you can use.

Further, when this information is easily shared with individual teams, they can draw a much better understanding—hence creating a more efficient work system.

8. Automating daily tasks

Over the years, CRM platforms have evolved into a much wider role. They are no more just a tool, but a part of your workforce.

How? With an amazing library of tools and integration they offer.

If we take the example of Engagebay, the platform offers marketing automation, sales automation, and service automation.

Each one of them has dedicated tools to perform repetitive tasks on their own, once you set them up for your business.

You can literally build a complete business on automation starting from generating a lead, to converting a customer again and again.

9. Crafting better strategies

To improve your growth rate, it is important to work on insights regarding your customers. What do they like and at what stage do you see the highest conversion?

If you can understand your customer, craft a personalized strategy, and can replicate that over and over again—the results would surely be high ROI.

And CRM platforms have been one of the essential parts of this strategy building. They help you keep track of each one of your customers, manage their contact information and help you visually find the best way to increase conversion.

10. Higher productivity and efficiency

Be it a sales team or your marketing team. A lot of their work and time should be diverted towards making the business more efficient.

But if they are busy performing certain types of tasks regularly, they won’t have time on their hands to brainstorm new ways to grow their business.

CRM platforms as we know are also automation tools that take on all the repetitive tasks. It ensures that they are free from daily repetitive work and are allowed to come up with methods to grow their business.

In addition to taking on their work, the CRM platform also helps your team learn more about your customer through the data it collects.

The more your marketing and sales team learn about your customer—the better strategy they craft. This way, your business can take full advantage of your talent on board without letting them feel burned out.

Final Words

Running a business is surely difficult. There’s always a lot to be done and a lot to work on. CRM platforms are among the very important tools that help you in reducing some burdens from your workflow.

But the question is, does it bear good fruit? According to a Deloitte report, it definitely does. Using CRM platforms has delivered a 30% increase in lead conversion, a 30% increase in sales productivity and also a 38% increase in fast decision-making.

So yes, CRM platforms are important and there are many reasons why you must invest in them. If you are thinking of growing your business in an organized way, now would be a great time to get started with your CRM platform.

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Author Bio:

Divya is a marketer, nature lover & startup enthusiast. Founder of Unifiedist. She has an immaculate experience in GTM strategy & SEO. She always follows her instinct and travels with her Ikigai.

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