The CRM process is a business strategy that helps companies better identify and understand their customers. 

The goal of the CRM process is to improve the company’s marketing efforts, product development, customer service, and sales. 

In order for organizations to stay competitive in today’s global market, they need to be able to effectively use data analysis and segmentation tools. 

The acronym CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, which should not be confused with Customer Satisfaction or Customer Loyalty; it is about ensuring an organization has strong relationships with its customers at every point in the buying cycle. 

It includes identifying prospects (customers who have never purchased from your company) as well as those who are likely to purchase from you again (and may even buy more).

Why CRM Software for My Business?

CRM is business software that entitles teams and individuals to intensify customer relationships through effective communications and sales efforts. It helps to effectively build relationships to deliver a future-proof customer experience in meeting their demands instantly. 

CRMs can be customized to meet requirements that vary from organization to organization. It helps to manage multiple processes in a business simultaneously with a tailor-made layout with unique modules, fields, and navigation buttons to match the business requirements.

In addition, it assists in tracking the marketing and conversion opportunities, helps you examine and understand the possibilities, and takes your business with you everywhere.

What is the CRM process?

CRM in business encompasses the comprehensive management of customer relationships, including the CRM process. It involves capturing and maintaining customers, managing their data, analyzing information, and generating insightful reports. CRM plays a vital role in sales, marketing, business development, and customer service, covering all aspects of the business operation related to customers.

Therefore, CRM tools are integral in storing information and executing these processes. They also help facilitate other procedures such as integration with different business workflows.

These solutions centralize many operations that allow you and your team to manage marketing campaigns, create sales strategies, identify opportunities, minimize risks, and more. 

Why is CRM Important?

As anyone who is into business knows, the customer is king. You would want them to get the best experience when buying your products or availing of your services. But you can only do that if you have enough relevant information about them – their tastes, needs, wants, purchasing bias, and partiality. 

Giving an optimal customer experience is not without cost. This is why you must put an efficient system or process in place that will provide a positive experience to customers and result in business growth and profitability. 

Later on, you will find that the benefits and returns will far outweigh the investments you poured into building customer relations.

If you think a CRM system is only for large businesses, now is the time to shatter that myth. A CRM is an essential tool for a freelancer, sole entrepreneur, startup, or global corporation. The reasons why a CRM system matters much for a business are far too many if we list down specifics and details. So for this section, we go for the big picture. Here are some of them:

• Discover – by uncovering valuable insights and information about your customers, you are in the position to understand them better – who they are, how and why they buy your products. Identifying and unravelling customer trends and interactions is crucial because you can readily anticipate their needs and address their issues and keep you ahead of competitors who may not be as attuned as you are to customers’ pulse.
• Organize – you have the ways and means to keep everything in order – from the whole customer life cycle to customer channel engagement, from sales process automation to marketing campaigns, and from business analytics to storing and accessing customer data, among others. An otherwise string of complex situations and convoluted processes are all streamlined and automated to give you a clearer perspective and solid grasp of things.
• Optimize – you can improve, build, and manage customer-related operations through a host of CRM tools. These are designed to give you the flexibility and convenience you need to be responsive to your customers and, at the same time, make it easy for customers to do business with you.

What are the 5 steps in the CRM process?

The five steps of the CRM process are a collaborative effort between marketing, sales, and support departments. 

To help you understand how each team works together, we’ll walk through how each step works in practice. In addition, we’ll cover how each part of the process can be completed with a CRM tool and who is responsible for each step.

Generate Brand Awareness

The first step to acquiring new customers is to introduce them to your business. The marketing team typically takes on this task through several measures:

• Learning about your target audience. Marketers will research to identify their audience’s target demographics, interests, preferred channels of communication, what messaging they respond most to, and what they care about.
• Segmenting your target audience. Audience personas are created to segment a brand’s target audience into similar groups based on similar interests or demographics. This helps marketers identify which types of people are most likely to become customers and who their campaigns should target.
• Creating marketing campaigns that speak to those target demographics. A/B tests and marketing automation can identify what works and what doesn’t, create unique campaigns for unique customer segments such as on social media or email, and create strategies for lead acquisition.

When it comes to completing these steps, a CRM solution is a wealth of information. The tool can show past leads and customers patterns to give marketing teams a clear picture of their target audience.

Beyond understanding similarities in demographics, marketers can also analyze sales notes in their CRM technology to understand what led to conversions in the past. By understanding what resonated with leads, marketers are better equipped to create effective campaigns.

Acquire Leads

Introducing your brand to a potential customer is just the beginning of the CRM process. From there, you have to encourage them to learn more about your business and engage with it.

Depending on how your company is structured, this lead acquisition step could be a marketing or sales team responsibility — or both. Your marketing team, for example, might encourage website visitors to share their email with a newsletter signup CTA or a social media giveaway.

On the other hand, Sales could use their CRM system to set up live chat on your site. With this feature, your team can proactively reach out to potential customers who land on your website.

If your CRM technology comes equipped with a lead enrichment tool, like Reach, the lead acquisition is unbelievably simple. All the tool needs is a lead’s email address to reveal detailed information about the person instantly. 

You can personalize your outreach with the lead to start the relationship off on the right note with customer data. Not to mention, you can save tons of time by not needing to research leads yourself.

Convert Leads into Customers

You’ve successfully engaged with your leads, and they’re interested. Now it’s time to turn those leads into customers.

To do so, sales reps must first be skilled at identifying how interested leads are and, specifically, whether they’re interested enough to make a purchase. 

Again, a CRM system is beneficial here. The historical data from past successful sales can be used to identify lead-qualification criteria. 

These criteria can be added as “attributes” to your CRM’s lead-scoring tool to help reps identify opportunities with the highest probability of a sale.

If leads seem likely to make a purchase, reps must then nurture them further and build their trust enough to convert. One way to do this is to send leads to case studies, white papers, and other resources that may sway their decision.* *

Reps should also use their CRM platform to set reminders and tasks to follow up with interested leads. 

After all, studies have shown that “63% of consumers need to hear a company’s claim 3-5 times before they believe it.” 

Use your So use’s dashboard to help you remember to follow up to ensure that no opportunities are missed.

Provide Superior Customer Service

You’ve successfully converted your lead into a customer. Great! But the CRM process doesn’t end when a customer converts. To grow as a company, you need to retain customers. So how do you keep that customer coming back? Excellent service from support.

According to Zendesk‘s 2021 Customer Experience Trends Report, customer service is the most significant factor determining a consumer’s loyalty to a brand. Conversely, poor customer service can cost you customers and negatively impact your reputation. Therefore, support teams must deliver superior support whenever, wherever, and however their customers expect it.

Forty-nine percent of customers say being able to resolve their issues quickly is the most crucial aspect of a good customer service experience. With CRM software, support agents can easily access the historical customer information they need to resolve a ticket quickly.

Fifty-seven percent of customers expect to have a choice of channels when reaching out to customer support. CRM features allow support agents to provide omnichannel support and manage those conversations in a single, unified view.

With the right CRM, your agents have the customer information and resources they need to resolve a customer’s issues quickly and effortlessly. This allows for a stress-free and efficient experience for both the customer and the support agent.

Drive Upsells

When we think of a returning customer, we imagine a shopper continually coming back to the same business to buy the products they know and love. 

But there is another important way existing customers provide value — by upgrading to more expensive products.

How do you convince customers to switch products? Personalized recommendations via email are a great place to start. You can use your CRM to organize customers into intelligent lists based on similar purchase histories. 

You can then create custom email templates that send relevant product releases to entire lists of customers at once. This way, you can be sure the promotional deals or releases you send are reaching the people most likely to buy them.

If your business is service-based, you may find upsell opportunities through check-in calls. Set reminders in your CRM to regularly reach out to repeat customers to ask how they’re doing and whether there is any way you could improve your service. Their needs may very well have changed since the last time you spoke, and they may be ready for an upsell.

With a CRM process, the customer lifecycle no longer feels abstract. Instead, the right CRM enables you to create a deliberate, personalized experience that naturally drives leads through your sales pipeline.

Benefits of CRM for Business

• Improves Informational Organization – CRM identifies, documents, and records all customers’ interactions with the organization. This helps businesses to understand their customers better and provide instant solutions.
• Ensures Enhanced Communication – CRM is cloud-based and never disappoints customers as it makes information accessible from any device. All the customer needs is an internet connection.
• CRM enhances Your Customer Service – With CRM, customer support becomes a cakewalk. When the customer reaches out to the company, the executive would be all equipped to retrieve information on the activities like the recent purchases made, priorities and any other assistance that the customer requires.
• Automates our day to day tasks – A CRM is developed to automate the performance of multiple tasks of the employees. This would help employees focus more on converting leads and addressing customer issues while the CRM is at their disposal to take care of the details.
• Greater efficiency for multiple teams – The stored information entitles the users of different teams to access emails, phone calls, and calendar details from a secure and easily accessible console. The best part of CRM is that users can same data with multiple teams simultaneously by tagging the required team to access the information. This new find simplifies the work for the teams and gives the possibility to work together to enhance the bottom line seamlessly.
• Delivers accurate analytical data and reports – CRM systems archive data in one place that prompts enhanced data analysis. The tool is developed to easily integrate with plugins and other tools that can generate the possibility to create automatic reports to maximize your time. This helps the users to make effective decisions to reap the rewards in customer trust and get good revenue in the long run.
• Choosing the right CRM for your business?
• Choosing the right CRM is a key to any successful business.

Following are the questions to consider to find if it’s the right for your business

• Is it for small business
• Are any limitations to the number of users
• Is it easy to use?
• Is the API accessible?
• What are the default security features available
• Is it easy to integrate with other solutions that I already use?
• Is the software affordable and fits your budget?

Following are the factors to consider knowing which CRM is the right for business.

Implementation: Implementation plays a vital role. If you are changing or installing new software to the existing process, a phase of implementation has to be gone through. Understand if implementation factors like training and testing and the associated cost incurred would fit your requirements.

User Adoption – The new change should be easy to adopt by the users of the team. Involving the teams in selecting the CRM process helps associates accept the change and the new system. In addition, the more ownership the employee gets in choosing the new tool, the easier it is to adapt to the change.

Mobility – Employees in the teams are more adoptive to the newest technology. So it is critical to choose a CRM tool that can be updated regularly and remain current with the latest technology.

Customization – Each business process is unique and different, and the demands are other too. The CRM you choose must be flexible and versatile to handle your business processes. It should also be adaptive and scalable to the changes in business processes without any replacement.

Compatibility – It is essential to choose a CRM compatible with other existing applications involved in the process.

Product Demo – As a part of the user adoption, it is crucial to access a product demonstration. This would help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of the tool and understand if it would be the right tool for your business needs.

Reporting – While you sit back and enjoy the product’s functionalities, it is essential to check on the reporting capabilities that can assist you to thrive amidst your competitors successfully.

Customer relationship management is the lifeblood of solid businesses. Develop a CRM process to ensure you’re investing your time and energy efficiently. Although CRM seems like an internal process, it will result in customers having the best possible experience doing business with you. The goal of any solid CRM process is business growth and profitability. CRM boosts productivity by allowing you to focus on the highest quality leads and deals so you can reinvest the time back into them.

Martin Gessner

Martin Gessner is the Founder of Focus on Force.

He has spent over 10 years working in various Salesforce roles including business analyst, project manager, consultant and solutions architect. Along the way he has earned twelve certifications, published "The Salesforce Career Playbook", and helps Salesforce professionals learn more about Salesforce, develop their career and prepare for certifications.