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Why You Need a CRM Strategy

The biggest benefits of having a CRM strategy for your business include:

• Making your organization more collaborative as a whole
• Keeping better track of your sales leads
• Creating more targeted and personalized marketing campaigns
• Being able to easily identify promising opportunities for your business to grow or bring in more revenue
• Providing better service to both prospective and current customers
• Drawing insights and data to make more accurate forecasts on future performance

CRM Strategy Definition

CRM stands for “customer relationship management.” A CRM strategy is your game plan for how to improve the relationship between your customers and your sales, marketing and customer service teams.

CRM strategies often go hand in hand with CRM software systems. You don’t necessarily need to have a CRM system in place to create a strategy, however.

What Is a CRM System?

A CRM system, or CRM software, is a tool that can aid your customer relationship management. CRM systems are, at their core, databases that house and organize customer data so that your team has a pulse on what’s going on at all times. CRMs also come with features to help your business automate sales and marketing outreach, field inbound customer care requests and generate reports on overall performance.

5 Steps To Create a Successful CRM Strategy

Before you dive into creating a CRM strategy, there are a number of steps you should take to ensure your intentions and goals are aligned.

1. Audit your business.

The first step to creating a CRM strategy is to closely examine your current workflows and any existing strategies. The purpose of the audit is to identify your company’s current weaknesses and strengths as well as the biggest opportunities and threats. This is what’s known as a SWOT analysis.

2. Define your goals.

At a high level, figure out what exactly you are looking to achieve when it comes to customer relationship management. Are you looking to increase your NPS scores? Reduce churn? Shorten your sales cycle? Make sure you have a clear purpose as to why you’re implementing a strategy.

Once you’ve defined your goals, take the time to determine whether or not you can realistically meet those goals with the resources you currently have. Do you have enough team members to make your strategy and goals a reality? Do you need stronger tools, like a CRM system, in order to help you? Set yourself up for success by ensuring you have what you need.

3. Identify your target customer(s).

This may sound a bit basic, but it’s important to have an understanding of who your customers and prospects are so you can create buyer personas. Having a clear picture of who you need to be talking to is only going to help you come up with the right tactics and messaging to reach them.

If you don’t have a clear buyer or customer in mind, consult your sales and customer service teams. You can also send customer surveys or interview customers directly to find the answers you’re looking for.

4. Pinpoint your customer journey.

Similarly, you should know the ins and outs of your entire customer journey from beginning to end. Familiarize yourself with all of the possible first touchpoints and the rest of your funnel. Relate this cycle back to your buyer personas. The most important question here is: Does your sales and marketing funnel align with who your buyer is?

5. Understand your competitors and your positioning.

While having an understanding of your customers and internal processes is great, it’s important to know how you stand in relation to your competition. What kinds of materials or resources are your competitors putting out? How can you stand out?

Examples of Effective CRM Strategies

Once you’ve finished all of the work that comes before implementing a CRM strategy, you’re ready to create one for your business. Below are some examples of popular and effective strategies that you can use as a starting point. You can always customize or tweak a strategy to better fit your business.

1. Using automation to your advantage.

If you find that your teams are doing the same tedious and repetitive tasks, it’s likely that there’s a way you can automate them. A CRM system can likely take over some of the administrative work that comes with managing a sales pipeline and customers. Freeing up time for your sales, marketing and customer service teams will enable them to focus on other more important duties.

2. Auditing your customer database regularly.

Cleansing and auditing your customer list can be the difference between sending an unintentionally insensitive email versus not. To avoid a potential PR disaster, aim to scrub your list on a regular basis of customers with low engagement, as well as those who have recently canceled or gone dormant. Doing so will keep both your database and communications more accurate—a win-win.

3. Publishing content that adds value and drives conversion.

Very few companies have the luxury of being a household name. How do you get customers to come to you? Meet them where they’re at by creating relevant content.

Popular examples include blog articles that pose your product or service as the answer to a common question, downloadable trend reports or e-books or insightful social media posts. Content can help strengthen the relationship between you and your customers by positioning yourself as an approachable, go-to expert in your industry.

4. Creating more personalized communications.

The difference between reaching out with “Hi there” instead of “Hi [First name]” is monumental—72% of consumers reported only engaging with personalized communications. Delivering tailored messaging to each customer is a great way to make your relationship stronger. Use the data and resources you’ve collected on each customer to inform which kinds of communications need to go out to which audiences.

5. Building a custom analytics and reporting dashboard.

Data is most powerful when it’s easy to generate, digest and present. Instead of spending hours compiling reports, a CRM dashboard will do all the heavy lifting for you. Using your CRM system (if you have one) to create a custom reporting dashboard will not only make it faster and easier to generate data, it will also make data more accessible and transparent to all relevant parties. The less time your team has to spend compiling data, the more time they can spend on other aspects of their roles.

Keywords: customer , relation , manager , management , crm , software , strategy