Customer relationships are the driving force behind increased revenue and your business's profitability. To scale, you need to seamlessly develop relationships with new customers while nurturing and maintaining existing customer relationships. Yet, the more customers and leads you have, the harder it becomes to keep track of the interactions, notes, and deals for each.

That's where many businesses in a wide variety of industries find themselves as they begin to see growth. The solution? A CRM platform tailored to manage client relationships for you.  

Whether you’re ready to implement your first CRM platform or looking to switch to one that might benefit you more, here’s how the right CRM platform can help you scale with ease.

What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

CRM platforms are all-in-one customer relationship management software systems used to manage customer relationships throughout the lifecycle stages of a customer, from prospect to profitability. Most businesses choose to use CRMs to enhance client communication and make their contact management system more powerful.

Let’s explore how a CRM platform can benefit your business.

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Connect Customer Information with Customer Communications

CRM software links customer data to communication streams between you, your leads, and your established clients. Using a CRM to streamline a range of customer-related tasks, can make many of your business processes more efficient at the same time.

Lead Management and Lead Scoring

A CRM allows you to quickly identify which leads are hot or cold. By knowing where you are in the sales pipeline, you can increase the likelihood of sales teams closing deals within a shorter sales cycle.

Contact Management

Without a central place to store your contact data, information can go missing or easily overlooked. Minimize any chance of missing information with a CRM built to store and also organize all of your contact data in one location. This includes contact information for existing clients, potential customers, vendors, and partners.

Customer Support Analysis

A CRM makes it easier to determine if you’re providing the appropriate level of customer support. When you know the frequency and urgency of communication and client requests, you can streamline the customer journey, enhance the customer experience, and deliver the high quality of service that your customers want, need, and most importantly, deserve.

Streamline Internal Processes

CRMs do more than manage customer data — they also help you streamline internal processes to make you more efficient. In addition to customer data management, many businesses rely on CRMs for:

• Project management
• Pipeline management
• Sales management
• Scalability
• Visibility

Read About: CRM for QuickBooks: The Benefits of Integration

What Are the Benefits of Using a CRM?

Leveraging a CRM can help your business identify who your clients are, pinpoint where prospects are in the sales pipeline, and understand any opportunities or roadblocks that may stand in the way of working with a client or account.

Here’s a look at the five benefits of CRM software.

Automate Client Interactions

Let’s face it, when you spend less time focusing on administrative details, you can spend more time reaching your financial goals. A CRM system simplifies administrative tasks by automating much of the work that goes into client interactions. Administrative tasks that once took up hours of your work week are now automated in a workflow that will help your team stay productive and profitable.

Facilitate Team Communications

With easier and more effective team communications, you can improve the overall workflow. Tasks like reassigning leads, reminding a colleague to follow up to close a deal, and tracking progress in real time are all easier to do with a CRM in place.

Provide Personalized Management

Because CRMs collect and organize all client data, it’s easier to personalize your interactions with both existing clients and potential leads.  You can use your CRM to review client history or concerns in a short amount of time so that you’re prepared to follow up on each customer’s unique needs before your next interaction.

Accurately Forecast Sales

Sales CRMs quickly compile and analyze lots of data, allowing you to make accurate sales predictions and forecast business trends.  With better sales forecasting, your sales reps can prioritize which products or services to market to specific clients, which can speed up the sales process overall and increase the success of your sales team.

Help You Scale

More data and information means more responsibility, and the more clients and leads you have, the more important a CRM is. Rather than trying to keep track of every client’s unique needs, you can use the data gathered in your CRM to improve upon marketing and sales to scale your business faster.

How Does a CRM Fit into Your Growth Plan?

A CRM platform is worth the investment whether you own a small, medium, or large business.

Of course, small businesses may invest in a CRM for different reasons than a large business would. However, some CRM trends are the same no matter the size of your business or the industry in which it operates. Consider how implementing CRM software will fit into your company’s short-term and long-term growth plans.

Here’s how a CRM platform can scale your growth:

• Generate reports that help you identify objectives and track performance
• Integrate data across multiple channels, including social media and email marketing campaigns
• Allow everyone on your team to access all of the most important data in one place
• Analyze metrics, identify challenges, and determine how to tackle current obstacles
• Establish better management processes for leads
• Develop a better understanding of lead generation
• Identify ways to make customer interactions faster and better
• Connect and automate multiple processes, including marketing, sales, and invoicing
• Streamline your sales process with pipeline management and forecasting

The more you use an all-in-one CRM platform to automate, the more money and time you’ll save — promoting significant growth for your business.

For example, marketing automation makes it easier to track emails. Email tracking, in turn, can show you which email campaigns are generating new leads. It also helps your marketing team better promote your products and services, as well as show your salespeople what steps they need to take to close a deal.  

You Might Like: 3 Tips for Sales Customer Relationship Management

Do All Businesses Need a CRM Platform?

A CRM platform will benefit almost any business, but certain features will benefit some businesses more than others. The best CRM solutions for an e-commerce business might not be the right features for a service-based firm.

That’s because CRM features vary across platforms. Fortunately, many CRM platforms include add-on features and customization so that you can adapt it to meet your needs.

Let’s explore some of the features the best CRM software solutions include.

An end-to-end cloud-based CRM platform that goes beyond customer relationship management is the gold standard of CRMs. From sales and quoting to project management to billing solutions, there are key features that predict success for all team members and all stages of work.

Key features include:

• A centralized client database
• Project management tools
• Project templates
• Reporting, analytics and profitability reports

Fact: Accelo offers excellent options for customization. It’s also a top integrated CRM for service firms, including but not limited to accounting and CPA firms, business consultants, architects and digital agencies.

Other Tips to Help You Choose the Right CRM

When choosing the right CRM platform for you, be sure to consider:

• Pricing
• Functionality
• Ease of use
• Scalability

It’s important to select a CRM that fits into your budget and offers all the functionality you need. But it’s just as important to choose one that will be easy for your team to use. You’ll need your marketing and sales teams not just to “get it,” but to be comfortable and confident using the platform and exploring all that it has to offer.

How you implement your CRM system can impact whether your team embraces the new technology. If your new CRM platform has a learning curve, be sure to offer ample training and support to your employees.

How to Successfully Implement a CRM Platform

How you implement your CRM will determine its success. Start by analyzing how you want your CRM to support your goals and processes. Your goals might include automating tasks, improving customer support, or nurturing sales leads.

Set customization options that not only meet your needs but also integrate your CRM with other tools and apps. Set up your system’s custom fields, filters, and built-in integrations the way you need them to function and appear.

Partnering with an implementation team will ensure a smooth and successful rollout. No matter how strong your internal resources may be, it’s best to involve experts in the software to help you get up and running.

Next, prioritize employee onboarding and training. Some platforms will be more intuitive to use than others. It’s also wise to show your team what to enter in the CRM during discovery. If your sales team, marketing team and other employees don’t understand how to use the new system, you’re less likely to get the results you want.

Before you roll out the platform company-wide, it’s best to choose a team to run a pilot. Confirm that all your third-party integrations work with the new system. Resolve any bugs or issues before the system goes live so that they’re less likely to escalate after the rollout.

Regularly review and streamline your processes to keep your CRM platform running well. As you become more familiar and comfortable with the platform, collect feedback from employees and identify opportunities for improvement. As time goes on and your team gets acquainted with the CRM, you’ll discover new ways to use the platform that can enhance the profitability and efficiency of your business.

Implementing a CRM within your business will save your team hours normally spent on repetitive tasks. A CRM platform can also improve the customer experience, strengthen marketing efforts, and accelerate sales processes. As a result, you’ll be in a better position to scale your business efficiently and increase your bottom line.

To learn more about what Accelo has to offer, sign up for a live demo of Accelo today.

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