10 Steps to Building a Successful CRM Strategy

CRM is more than just software. It is an essential tool which helps your business in establishing loyal and trusted relationships with your clients. It was found that CRM increases the revenue by 41% per salesperson on average. Despite being such an important tool, a report from Gartner revealed that more than 50% of CRM programs fail to achieve the desired results. Put simply, a CRM cannot streamline your business operations alone without a proper CRM strategy.

Here is an obvious question – how can one create a winning CRM strategy? Let’s have a look at ten simple steps that can help your business make the most out of your CRM.

Guide to creating a successful CRM strategy

1. Have a proper vision in place

In order to integrate a CRM seamlessly with your business operations, it is imperative to understand the main goal of this implementation. Therefore, it is highly recommended to collect feedback from your employees. Since they are the ones who stay in touch with your customers, they know them and their needs the best.

Once you’ve collected enough feedback, choosing the right CRM solution for your business will become easier.

2. Make way for a CRM team

Your CRM team is the group of people who are going to use the CRM most. An ideal team contains a mix of employees from each department, such as customer support, sales, and marketing.

It is important to keep the recommendations of each of these teams well in mind when creating your CRM strategy. This way, you will be able to choose a system which meets the requirements of all departments pretty well.

3. Understand your team’s challenges

In order to make the most out of your CRM software, it is important to understand your current challenges. Talk with various departments and teams within your organization who are in direct contact with your customers and discuss the various challenges they face. Some of these challenges could be a lack of data needed to respond to the customer queries in time, spending time on repetitive manual tasks, or difficulty in following up with open client requests.

Having a look at each of these challenges can help you figure out the internal challenges that your team would like to solve, and this would help you choose a proper CRM.

4. Prioritize your customers

While treating all your customers equally is great in an ideal work, this isn’t always the recipe for success. As a business, you need to be practical and prioritize customers based on how much value they bring to your company. Put simply, prioritize the customers based on how profitable they are, or alternatively, how likely they are to become profitable in the near future. On average, returning customers bring more value since they tend to spend double when compared to new customers.

However, the definition of a valuable customer might vary from company to company. The bottom line here is to segment your customers into various groups based on their value, and focus on each of them accordingly.

5. Have an available customer support team

Aside from creating and implementing a CRM strategy, it is essential for businesses to have assistance available to customers 24/7. This is because customers are online throughout the day and they expect the same from you.

The best practice here is to provide an easy-to-reach customer support. It is best to have support available on a range of channels like social media, phone, online chat, and by email so that they can talk with you whenever the need arises.

6. Know your customers

CRM today has made it possible to gather information about your customers even before they contact you first. This is due to the advanced functionalities most CRMs are equipped with. Even before your customer interacts with you, it is always a best practice to use the power of your CRM to know more about your target customers by collecting information about them from various social media channels.

This will help you in understanding your customers better, which enables you to serve them flawlessly and established a strong customer relationship. However, if this seems overwhelming to you, you might also choose to hire a CRM strategist.

7. Market your product or service correctly

Read it twice. Market your products and services correctly. However, do not spam your clients!

There is a fine line between marketing and spamming. Care should be taken so that you make the best use of targeted direct marketing to up-sell and cross-sell your products and services without looking too sales-obsessed.

8. Customer retention should be your topmost priority

As we pointed out before, existing and returning customers prove to be more beneficial as they spend double when compared to the new ones.

Therefore, it is highly recommended to keep your existing customers engaged with the help of various initiatives, such as customer loyalty programs. These types of programs make your customers feel valued and give them a reason to stick to your brand for years to come.

You can also encourage referrals and generate more leads on the go.

9. Sync everything to your CRM

A lot of CRMs come with various built-in programs that enhance their functionality. This helps you in organizing tasks on the go, and efficiently track notes and appointments. If your CRM doesn’t support all the functionalities, you can always integrate third-party tools with your CRM to keep it in sync. Your team will never miss an appointment, and the CRM will update the cancellations and set the reminders whenever appropriate.

10. Evaluate, experiment, and improve

Each business has its own challenges. No matter how well-planned a CRM strategy is, it will surely become outdated with time. It is important that you re-evaluate your approach periodically and look for roadblocks to eliminate before they develop into larger issues.

Conclusion

Some people see CRM software as just a highly advanced tool. Of course, it can help you run your day-to-day tasks and accomplishing goals. However, in order to make the most out of it, it’s critical to create a winning CRM strategy. Your strategy should prioritize your customers and use the CRM accordingly. The software itself undoubtedly helps, but a proper CRM strategy makes the tasks easier and provides visible results.

Do you have a CRM strategy in place? Share your thoughts and questions with us in the comments below!