Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Yes, you need a CRM if you want all your customer data stored in one location and all interactions with your customers logged automatically, ultimately enhancing your marketing strategy and driving business growth. There’s an even longer answer, but you’ll need to read through the sections in this blog to get all of it, because it’s difficult to put all that information in one sentence.

What Is a CRM?

A CRM (short for Customer Relationship Management) is software that helps you develop and manage relationships with your customers and prospects. When you’re starting a business, you probably know all you need to know about your first few customers. However, this quickly changes as the business expands and you acquire more customers. You can try to keep tabs on your customers manually, but you’ll never be as effective as dedicated tools for customer relations. A CRM will work as your right-hand man, storing important customer data. That’s not all. A CRM can analyse the data it stores to give you insights into customer behaviour that you can act on to improve your marketing strategy.

Are CRM and ERP Software Similar?

Yes, an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is similar to a CRM because both software automate a business’s core processes and ultimately help a business grow; however, they differ in functionality. While CRM focuses on customer relations, ERP automates finances (including the general ledger, accounts, payroll, and reports) and operations (such as inventories, orders, supply, production, and distribution), among others. Some ERPs may have tools for customer relations, but a business often has to acquire a CRM and ERP software separately and integrate them on a platform that supports both.

Another way to think of both software is that CRM is the frontend, managing customer interaction and gathering their inputs, while ERP software acts as the backend of a business, automating day-to-day operations to fulfil customer needs. Any good web developer knows that the frontend and backend must work in tandem for a website to function optimally. Likewise, the best CRM and ERP systems work best together, complementing each other.

The Importance of a CRM

Improves Customer Relations

A CRM helps you store all data about each customer in one place, making it easy to access that data at any time. That way, when you interact with any customer, you do so with knowledge of their preferences and behaviour, which helps you offer advice tailored to their specific circumstances. Hence, you can resolve issues with your customers more quickly and provide the necessary support. CRMs not only make interactions with your customers seamless, but they also make it easy to initiate conversations by integrating all options to engage leads and customers, including calls, live chat, email, video calls, and social media. They also log and record these interactions. The result of these efforts is a happy, returning customer.

Streamlines Processes and Improves Efficiency

CRMs automate day-to-day processes and offer custom workflows to save you time. Tasks such as follow-ups, lead management, and email marketing are time-consuming but necessary, and a CRM can automate these tasks, freeing up customer service agents to focus on more complex customer needs. CRMs now leverage AI as digital assistants, chatbots, and other automated messaging systems to handle simple customer inquiries, such as order status and payment due dates.

Workflows make your life easier by allowing you to organise service processes and save time. Take, for instance, CRMs can automate the customer onboarding process such that it sends a welcome packet, assigns a support agent and sets the first call for every new customer. You can also create a workflow to reengage inactive leads with emails and assign them to a rep.

A key benefit of these CRM functions is that they enable you to follow up on leads more effectively and close deals faster.

Better Decision Making

CRMs don’t just store customer behaviour and preferences; they also analyse them to report on metrics that apply to your business and help you improve customer service. A CRM can help you create reports with the data presented in the way you prefer, and share them easily with your team members. You can also automate the reporting emails so they’re sent regularly. That way, your team can make smarter and faster decisions across the board.

CRMs can forecast a business’s future sales after analysing historical data and trends. You can also practice targeted marketing campaigns with this information by classifying customers based on certain metrics (such as buying habits, engagement levels, location, and feedback) and sending personalised marketing messages.

After the marketing team runs a campaign, a CRM can help to analyse results and inform future campaign decisions. It’s also a valuable tool for tracking team performance and identifying areas that need improvement.

Improves Teamwork

It’s cliche, but teamwork really makes the dream work, and CRMs will align your sales, marketing, service and other departments. When all team members have access to the same customer data, anyone can create a personalised experience when interacting with a customer. In other words, everyone works from the same playbook, which is already tested and trusted to yield the right results. According to HubSpot, 45% of salespeople said that sales and marketing alignment became more important for them from 2021 to 2022, and 79% of sales professionals say that their CRM is moderately to extremely effective at improving that alignment.

Increased Sales and Revenue

When you build stronger bonds with your customers, they’ll stay loyal to you and recommend you to others. CRMs also help you nurture leads effectively, enabling them to turn into paying customers more quickly. These efforts will significantly increase your sales and revenue in no time. Leading companies that fully utilise CRM report:

• 52% more delivered proposals, quotes, or RFP responses, with 11% more quotes resulting in orders
• 32% higher overall team attainment of sales quota and 24% more individual quota attainment
• 23% higher lead conversion rate

—Source: Aberdeen, CRM+ Sales Workflow: Removing the Friction from Your Pipeline

Keeping Track of Leads With a CRM

Tracking leads is one of the most important things a business can do—and the great thing is, a CRM makes it all so easy. How can a CRM help you track leads and convert them to customers? Read on to find out.

Capture All Leads in One Place

A great CRM is a one-stop shop for all your leads in one location. It doesn’t matter where your leads come from; a CRM can track them all, including:

• Website & contact forms
• Email or newsletter campaigns
• Social media ads
• Incoming calls
• In-person meetings or conferences

Where you may have been relying on spreadsheets and separate email threads, or digging through stacks of business cards, your team now has a singular hub. Any time an inquiry comes in, it’s instantly logged with a timestamp and auto-assignment.

Create Custom Lead Profiles

Every lead in your CRM has a profile, meaning you can store everything related to that person in one place. This often includes:

• Their name with phone number, and email
• Company name and industry
• Source (LinkedIn, landing page)
• Previous inquiries (emails/calls/notes)
• Interests & activity on your site.

Remember the bit about targeted marketing campaigns with personalised messages? The CRM’s ability to classify leads based on behaviour, geolocation, and demographics means you can send correspondence tailored to what people care about.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring enables you to identify which leads are worthwhile based on their similarities to your existing clients or target audience, as well as their level of engagement (such as clicks through a newsletter or form submissions).

Leads that score highly can be assigned to sales representatives and contacted sooner, while those who initially show less interest can be nurtured over time.

Task Management

Leads go cold when you forget to reach out, and that’s where automation comes in. A CRM ensures your leads never go cold by sending automatic reminders to them. Members of the sales team also get assigned activities and follow-up tasks to stay on top of every lead.

Sales Pipelines

Many CRMs allow you to bring leads through the typical sales pipeline:

New Lead- Contacted- Qualified- Proposal sent- Won / Lost

This provides everyone on the team with a better understanding of where specific prospects are in the buying journey.

Reports & Analytics

Many CRMs have advanced analytics that show how your lead process is performing over time. You can see metrics like:

• How many new leads per week are generated
• Conversion rates per source
• Average response rates
• Performance analytics per salesperson

This is important because you can see what’s working (and replicate it), what’s broken (and amend it), and what’s not yielding results (and stop doing it).

The Power of Automation

Automation is perhaps the best part of having a CRM because it enhances productivity, reduces response time, and keeps leads warm that would otherwise go cold on a busy day. Although we already mentioned a few points about automation earlier, let’s expand on them in this section.

Automated Workflows to Save Time

One major feature of most CRMs is rule-based workflows that automatically trigger things based on certain conditions. For example, when a lead fills out a contact form, your CRM can send a thank you email, assign the lead to a sales rep, create a follow-up task, and tag the lead by the source. This frees up time for more important tasks.

Email Sequences to Nurture Leads

Instead of constantly going back and forth manually composing and sending follow-up emails, CRMs enable businesses to create email sequences that are sent automatically so leads can experience the buyer journey at their own pace. For example:

• Day 1: Welcome Email
• Day 3: Send a case study
• Day 6: Offer demo/free trial
• Day 10: Ask if they’re ready to chat.

Instant Notifications and Alerts

Automation keeps your team one step ahead. For example, you get an alert when:

• A VIP client opens your pricing page
• Someone submits a ticket
• A deal goes a week without updates

With this, you can respond quicker, address things faster, and close more deals as they won’t fall through the cracks.

Grow Your Business With a CRM

For all of its several advantages (such as improved customer relationships, streamlined operations, automation, lead tracking, better marketing campaigns, and enhanced sales), a CRM’s ultimate role is to grow your business. Get in touch with our team today to discuss which CRM would be best suited for your business