Any company, whatever its sector and size, knows that Good customer service and the correct follow-up of your sales process goes far beyond knowing the name or contact information and having them in an agenda.. A helps the whole process of organizing and managing the relationship with your prospects as well as remembering important details that you might otherwise overlook and miss out on a great opportunity.
What is a CRM
the acronym CRM comes from the English term Customer Feedback Management: a rough translation would be customer relationship management. Although many have the misconception that CRM is just a software that allows you to manage sales, CRM goes much further, since it also includes strategy tools that it allows put the customer at the center of management.
And it is that if before you had to fill out an agenda to schedule meetings, calls and know the client portfolio, and in some cases, carry out a more adequate follow-up through spreadsheets, now the CRM can collect all the information of commercial operations as well as the interactions with each one of the clients, maintaining a detailed history, with which knowledge of specific clients can be shared and maximized with the work team, at the time it is needed and anticipating their needs, enhancing sales opportunities.
Who should use a CRM
If you have ever been lost in the organization of your company, surely you need a CRM. Beyond targeting large corporations, a CRM should be used even by startups since the first commercial contacts that they have managed to obtain thanks to friends, clients or other startups must have adequate follow-up to continue their development.
Also, if you feel that you are losing sales because you have not been able to take advantage of certain opportunities, if you have a work, sales and marketing team or if you want to improve the interaction with your clients, having all their information in one place, and If you basically want to improve your sales, you definitely need a CRM.
How will a CRM help you?
More than an advanced form of contact management book, the CRM implies that companies can get to know them in depth, differentiate them and segment them according to their preferences and thus be able to offer the experience they expect, thereby achieving loyalty. If you have never used a CRM, this video, in which we use the example of , may be very useful:
Understanding this software as a tool that helps to obtain analytics and data, you should use a CRM to:
Have more collaborative workflows
In other words, a CRM allows you to have effective communication between the different employees and departments of your company, it creates a methodology of working with clientssince all interactions with the same client are managed in one place, in addition to the fact that all this flow of communication with sales representatives will belong to the company.
Automation
Some CRM tools can perform repetitive tasks automaticallyfor example, sending promotional emails, segmenting customers according to their stage in the .
Customer interactions or certain sales cycle functions can also be performed automatically to track leads. In fact, many CRMs have integrated Artificial Intelligence functions, a function that will be enhanced in the future, with which you will be able to foresee the next ideal sales, marketing or attention interaction that a specific client requires, creating predictive routes to prioritize actions in a much more successful way.
Usually, a good CRM should allow the process to be more efficient as well as improve teamwork to:
- Manage subscriptions
- Track and organize relevant information to find new projects
- Manage sales opportunities
- Manage the team and measure the results of the collaborators
- Generate leads through forms or chatbots
- Nurture the relationship with potential customers
- Identify the actions to take within the sales funnel automatically
- Measure business results
CRM history
The history of CRMs when began to be evaluated through annual surveys. Back then, companies relied on mainframe systems to sort customers into spreadsheets and listings.
In 1982 Kate and Robert D. Kestnbaum introduced the database marketing concept, that is, the application of statistical methods to analyze and collect customer data. Four years later, in 1986, the ACT!, a client evaluation system who offered a contact management service for the first time in history, a trend followed by numerous companies and independent developers, trying to maximize their potential to reach potential customers.
In 1992 Tom Siebel designed the first CRM Siebel Systemswhile large enterprise resource planning software companies such as Oracle, SAP and Navision began to extend their services with integrated CRM modules, which they included sales force automation or expanded customer service.
In 1997, customer relationship management became popular thanks to Siebel, Gartner and IBM who enriched their systems with marketing capabilities.. The first open source CRM system was developed by SugarCRM in 2004, while in this period CRMs were already migrating to the cloud, making them accessible not only to large corporations but also to small and medium-sized companies.
Around 2009 developers began to consider options to harness the momentum of designing tools to help companies use users’ favorite networks, even many startups dedicated themselves to offering exclusively social CRM solutions such as Base and Nutshell.
Between 2013 and 2014, most of the popular CRMs were linked to business intelligence systems and communication software to improve both corporate communication and the end user experience. Now the trend is to create CRM solutions that are customizable enough to meet the needs of each business, in addition to integrating artificial intelligence systems.
What are the most outstanding CRM in the world
Among the most recognized CRM tools that can offer most of the advantages that we have mentioned, we have created , and here we share with you the most outstanding:
pipe drive
The CRM tool is intuitive and easy to use, offering a large amount of data of interest and future forecasts for your customers and interactions with them. It is a tool very focused on the sales area and has a paid subscription. Currently, some of its clients are Amazon, Skyscanner or Vimeo.
We have tested it to make a didactic video on YouTube and they have raised a special offer for Marketing4eCommerce readers of 1 month free trial (normally 14 days) and a 20% discount in the first year from the following link:
Salesforce
Another tool to highlight is , quite similar in terms of employment to Pipedrive, it is one of the best-known CRM programs, despite having a paid subscription, recommended for large companies but not so much for entrepreneurs or SMEs. It is a program that adapts perfectly to the dimensions of your companywith great usability adaptable to any device and with the possibility of being used anywhere where you have a network.
Sugar CRM
Also as outstanding we find , with clients such as IBM, Audi or Zurich, it has a simple user interface and an intuitive customization platform, and it has two types of CRM adapted to each user: a CRM for SMEs and a business CRM for large companies or multinationals.
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