Often I am asked how CRM software can help various departments with their CRM business strategy. Here is a short list of the benefits CRM software can provide your departments:
Sales:
- Provide greater visibility into the sales pipeline
- More efficiently and accurately report on sales pipeline
- Better track probability of close, products, lead source, status and competitors
- Eliminate the need to browse for exceptions by automating alerting users as to the exceptions (for example, quotes requiring follow-up and customers that have not ordered in xxx days)
- Reduce attrition through fading customer alerts
- Qualify prospects with a standard qualification process
- Manage customer and prospect relationships from virtually anywhere via the web and wireless devices including BlackBerry and Pocket PCs
- Increase average customer value by increasing the number of orders per year and the size of orders
Marketing:
- Streamline marketing and sales campaigns
- Create customized marketing campaigns
- Better analyze ROI of marketing campaigns
- View campaign results in real time to better analyze performance of campaigns in progress
- Evaluate forecasted vs. actual return for each lead source, region or media type
- Automate distribution of leads
- Automate lead follow-up
- Coordinate between marketing and sales
Service:
- Quickly resolve customer questions, issues and requests
- Reduce cost of each customer transaction
- Provide everybody in your company with access to the same customer data
- Develop a knowledge base for future problem solving
In addition to the department specific benefits, you can also improve process and efficiency throughout your organization:
Process:
- Automate the sales cycle
- Standardizes and automates processes (such as sales processes based on product line, deal size, territory or lead type)
- Ensures that procedures and processes are being followed
- Standardization of quoting practices
- Increased quote conversion through automated follow-up and best practices
- Reduce the amount of time spent to generate a quote
Efficiency:
- Shorten new employee ramp-up time with data visibility in one place
- Save time by eliminating multiple sources of data and auto populating all systems at the same time
- Provide a single view of the customer that allows everyone to view all interactions with the customer and the customers purchasing behaviors