How to Turn Your Company’s Prospects Into Customers with CRM Tech

For businesses that are trying to drive leads with online marketing, one of the biggest challenges is connecting all of the dots between your marketing campaigns, leads and actual sales. Fortunately, you don’t have to do it on your own. There are a variety of customer relationship management (CRM) tools out there that can help you do that and so much more.

But what exactly is CRM tech? How does it work?

Just as the name suggests, this tech is designed to help businesses facilitate and manage their relationships and interactions with customers. And, if you’re trying to figure out how to start an LLC or any other business model, one of the key areas you cannot afford to overlook is having a clear line of communication with customers.

Using CRM tech, you not only get to learn which marketing channels produce the best leads and the specific needs and preferences of your customers, but you also discover effective ways to fulfill them for increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

In this guest post from Hugo Morris over at ProfitEngine, we share five simple ways CRM tech can help your new company convert more prospects into buying customers.

Create a Great First Impression

When starting out with a new company, the one thing you want to do is to impress prospects right from the first interaction you have with them. In most cases, the quality of this first interaction is what determines whether they will buy from you or not.

So, how does CRM tech come into play here?

Most reliable CRM tools have the capacity to monitor and analyze the online presence and web patterns of your prospects. Through this, you can tell what impresses a particular client and what turns them off. In addition, these tools allow you to interact with the leads long before they convert to build a friendly rapport. This way, you can connect at an emotional level long before you invite them to do business with your company.

Lead Qualification

When running a business, not everyone who buys from you will love your products or respond positively to your brand. And for those that do, not all will commit to becoming your long-term customers. To avoid wasting time and resources on people that do not really value or need your products, it’s important to classify your prospects and buyers.

The majority of good CRM tech tools are able to generate set qualification criteria to help you identify promising prospects based on factors like the actions they take while visiting your online business, their social media activities, location, purchasing power, and even gender. Based on these guidelines, you can easily know where to invest your resources for a greater ROI and improved sales.

Data Centralization

Having a central point where data can be accessed by anyone is something you’ll want—especially if you have a team or several staff members that collaborate on different tasks or processes in your company. Having a handy CRM tool enables you to gather prospect data from various locations such as affiliate websites, surveys, and social media.

As if that’s not enough, most CRMs will classify and organize the information collected into relevant units for the company. But the biggest win is centralizing the data into a common database where authorized parties and even complimentary tools can access it.

In addition to centralizing data, most CRMs update any new prospect data instantly to ensure your company is dealing with fresh information at all times. This way, you can identify any change in the activity of the prospect such as purchase patterns, location, and interest. As a result, you’re able to make timely adjustments in the approach, language of communication, and types of offers you present to your potential customer.

Data Entry Automation

Data entry is one of the most time-consuming yet crucial activities in prospect management. The information you feed into your system not only needs to be accurate but also put into relevant places for quicker access in the future. Consistent handling of customer data can be tricky especially if you’re doing everything on your own and manually. But it doesn’t have to always be this way. A good CRM tool can help you automate the process and save time while still enforcing data integrity.

By integrating a CRM technology into your company systems, you allow it to handle every stage of data management from entry to classification, backups, and retrieval by other tools. In addition, these tools help in analyzing customer data while also collaborating on key sales and marketing functions like customer support, ad monitoring, and performance reporting.

Facilitating Rational Decision-Making

Regardless of the size of your startup, rational decision-making has to be part of every action you take. For example, when it comes to customer acquisition, you need to decide which leads to follow and those to drop (probably based on the lead qualification strategy we described earlier in this post).

A good CRM tech provides a reference point for lead behavior analysis and allows you to decide how to handle each prospect or customer based on the information you have of them. Additionally, these tools facilitate easy sharing of customer data with other parties you’re in business with. These could be your business partners, consultants, and employees. With seamless data sharing, decision making becomes quicker, more efficient, and rational which is exactly what you want to avoid the common mistakes new entrepreneurs make.

Conclusion

So, do you need CRM tech? Well, let me ask you this question: do you need leads? If the answer is yes, then you definitely should consider investing in CRM tech. Otherwise, you’ll have a hard time managing, tracking and figuring out the best way to acquire those oh-so-important leads.

By the way, if you’d like help improving your lead acquisition strategy or making the most of your CRM data, feel free to reach out to the good folks at Disruptive Advertising here or in the comments. They’re experts at this sort of thing, so they can definitely help you out!

How do you use CRM tech to grow your business? Have a favorite tool? Let me know in the comments!