SALES GROWTH SERVICES:
HOW TO USE A CRM TO MANAGE CONTACTS

Use a CRM software to organize, track and manage information easier and more efficiently.

Your sales team are pros. Why do they need to use a CRM, or customer relationship management software? Isn’t customer relationship management what sales is all about?

Yes, but a CRM can make their daily work easier and reduce some of the time spent on mundane admin tasks. Here’s what you need to know about CRM software. 

Table of Contents:

• What Are CRMs and Why Do Manufacturers Need Them?
• Challenges Solved by a CRM
• How to Use a CRM to Manage …

Key Takeaways:

• CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software helps you organize and store information about leads, customers, suppliers, and other business contacts.
• In the sales process, CRMs track and manage contacts with prospects, leads and customers.
• Using a CRM to manage your sales contacts means fewer communication oversights, fewer missed opportunities, and better customer relationships.

What Are CRMs and Why Do Manufacturers Need Them?

How many contact methods do you have – work phone, mobile phone, work email, personal email, social media, etc.? Do you sometimes forget to return a text or answer an email? We all do. Now times this connectivity by the number of business contacts you have, and you can see why a CRM is vital.

CRMs do a lot more than just keep everyone’s contact information straight. They can also keep track of your interactions with each customer, lead, or prospect. They can help you ensure you never overlook a contact and that your reps always personalize their message. Essentially, CRMs store all of the details of your company’s external relationships in one place. You can manage your entire sales pipeline and organize and respond to all your customers with the same tool. 

Information management is critical to customer-centric selling. It allows you to time your interactions and craft your messaging to make them relevant to your customer – without spending a long time filing, retrieving, and updating information.

How to Use a CRM to Manage …

Let’s look at some specific things you can use a CRM to manage:

• Sales pipeline. Reps can see where each client or prospect is in the sales pipeline, adding relevant information with a few clicks or even automatically. Teams can use the CRM to assign and monitor tasks, track deals’ progress, schedule meetings, send reminders, and more.
• Prospect tracking. Prospects are visitors to your site who have not yet converted into leads (usually by filling out a form). CRMs can identify prospects’ companies (using the visitor’s IP address) and automatically search publicly available information about that company. This lets you understand who is viewing your site – and thus may be interested in your product.
• Contact activity. CRMs let you see detailed interactions between a contact and your website in a single place. You can see which pages they viewed, which forms they submitted, any sales activity, and more.
• Communication and follow-up management. CRMs also offer email tracking (which lets you know when a contact opens an email or performs a similar action and alerts you to follow up), It can also remind reps to contact clients or prospects based on other information.
• Data updates. Some CRMs can integrate with phone, note-taking, and email systems to automatically capture and update sales information. This frees up the rep and the sales support team from having to manually enter lots of information. 

CRMs aren’t just for sales teams, either; they can also help any customer-facing department manage their interactions. Each team – or each team member – can have a customized dashboard that keeps all of their job-relevant information in one place. And because all the customer data is stored in the same system, sales reps and customer service reps alike can see a complete customer history; this helps them provide better customer support.

Up Next: Lead Scoring Made Simple

So, technology lets you use a CRM to better manage data as well as customer interactions. What else can it do? In the next post, we’ll talk about how you can use lead scoring models to determine which leads are ready to move to the next step.