Seventy-nine per cent of marketing leads aren’t converted to sales, according to a study by MarketingSherpa.  An efficient Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system could change that and convert more leads into sales. 

What is a CRM?

A CRM system manages customer interaction and consolidates customer data in one location. This data typically includes customer contact information (email, phone, addresses, social media accounts, website) and a log of interactions with customers or prospects, including phone calls, emails and online chat. You can also record details of customer relationships, such as how they discovered your business and their buying history.

CRM For Small Businesses – How Effective is it?

Salesforce’s CRM software can be a lifesaver for small businesses. It helps entrepreneurs track important data, such as how customers are interacting with your product or service, and where they are in their buying journey.

Salesforce’s tools help small businesses sort through customer data, doing everything from developing partnerships to predicting customer needs to process sales.

A Nucleus Research report found that for small businesses using a CRM, 65 per cent are achieving their sales quotas.

The benefits of Salesforce CRM

• Helps you understand your customers better
• Provides a clear view of the funnel
• A central resource for employees
• Guides businesses towards informed decisions
• Gives insights to boost customer retention
• Reduces missed opportunities
• Reduces delays in communication

Understand Your Customer Better to Maximise Sales Potential

Selling a product or service to a known audience is 50 per cent easier, and more cost effective, than selling to a new prospect.

Salesforce’s CRM tools help you streamline customer relationships allowing you to identify significant information. You can then use this information to:

• Communicate on relevant topics over a period of time
• Craft well-times offers and plans
• Determine strong opportunities to cross-sell or up-sell
• Anticipate customer’s needs
• Build rapport with each customer
• Personalise the buying journey
• Boost customer engagement

Avoid Wasting Time on Bad Leads

Salesforce’s CRM can give you a 360-degree view of all leads and customers, through its email marketing campaign, social media interaction, and other marketing automation tools. This 360-degree view enables you to differentiate between strong and weak leads, so you can focus on the strong ones and ignore the bad. This eliminates time wasted and encourages growth productivity.

Personalise Customer Service

Customers are more likely to pay attention to your marketing if you’ve made the effort to personalise it. Salesforce’s CRM enables you to access customers’ touchpoints, key demographics, behaviour and browsing history, so that you can tailor your marketing for each customer. For example, you could send email offers that are related to their previous purchases.

Salesforce allows you to:

1. Keep track of important dates relevant to your customer
2. Follow up on a consumer’s experience to guarantee a positive experience
3. Make specific offers to individuals based on their interest in a particular product

Train Your Team Members

Your employees and team members are key to your CRM’s success. Make sure that they know how Salesforce works and have the skills and knowledge to use it to properly.

Training your staff to use the software efficiently will enhance their performance and boost their productivity.

Salesforce’s CRM tools allow customer information to be accessed by everyone within your company. Training the entire team will enable them to work collaboratively, improving internal communications and eliminating silos and, as a result, strengthening your company.

Incorporate CRM Into Marketing

Salesforce’s potential isn’t limited to tracking and monitoring customer interaction. It can be incorporated into multiple business departments to improve customer relations.

For example, it allows you to develop and track marketing campaigns. ­Using CRM to get feedback on your campaigns enables you to assess what customers are interested in and how they’re responding to the campaign.

Knowing which elements of your campaign customers are clicking on is a huge benefit when putting together future marketing campaigns.

Integrate Other Tools

Sales, marketing and customer success information can all be incorporated into Salesforce –  giving you a 360-view of your customers and prospects and cutting down on manual data entry. This saves time and streamlines processes, making your business far more efficient.

How Cognition24 Can Help You

Salesforce can help increase your business’s performance and ensure you don’t miss out on valuable opportunities.

No matter where you are on your Salesforce journey, our expert team of Salesforce consultants can help. Whether you are evaluating Salesforce or are an experienced team in need of additional support, we can either augment your existing team or fully manage the project.

We have the resources, skills, knowledge and understanding to maximise your Salesforce implementation and investment. Find out more.