Top 5 Goals Your Business Can Achieve with CRM

From the strategy to the software, here are five ways your business can succeed with CRM

You already know that your small business needs a CRM (customer relationship management) system – that’s a given. But be warned; the art of managing customer relationships is a fragile, delicate one. 

To get it right, you’ll require more than the software – you’ll also need to develop a set of fully-fledged CRM goals to guide and propel your sales, marketing, and customer service efforts.

So what might those goals look like at your business, and how can the right CRM system help you knock them out of the park? We’ve put together our five top strategic goals of CRM to get you thinking, and inspire some fresh, creative ways to put CRM software to use in your team.

Let’s take a look!

The top 5 goals of CRM: explained

First of all, let’s quickly break down the different meanings of CRM.

There’s a CRM system, or CRM software – this is a web-based application that allows your team to prioritise the customer experience, and use data to optimise sales and service.

CRM also refers, at large, to a strategy (or more commonly, a whole set of them) that businesses use to achieve better relationships with their clientele. Whereas these strategies refer to how your business can go about attaining CRM perfection, we’re interested here in the final product… the goal.

1. Customer satisfaction, of course!

The number one goal of CRM? Keeping your customers happy.

That’s not to say your customer service team isn’t already doing a cracking job with this. It’s just that, if you want to streamline how your agents resolve disputes, manage ongoing issues, and deliver world-class customer service, you will need CRM software.

Drag-and-drop ticketing systems for prioritising the most urgent enquiries. Customer loyalty and engagement tracking to identify your best customers. Elaborate customer histories that enable your team to understand a customer’s needs and preferences with greater speed and ease than ever before.

With a CRM system to help you do all this (and more), your business can – and should – make customer satisfaction your top goal this year. 

Up next: The Best CRM Software for Customer Service

2. Marketing campaigns that actually convert

Marketing is a frustrating task at the best of times. We’ve all been there – sending emails out into the ether, and getting nothing back for our efforts but an empty inbox and protruding lower lip. It’s tough. 

But, with CRM software, it’s not so tough. In fact, the right system can automate most of the work. You’ll still get to do the fun stuff, like creating the emails and coming up with the message. And, of course, you’ll be responsible for monitoring clicks, opens, and reads.

But the CRM software does the rest – segmenting customers by demographic, preferences, or location to ensure maximum return on investment. 

Here’s an example:

Better still, CRM software allows you to take some of the load off your marketing team – saving time and resource by taking a more reactive, rather than proactive approach to winning clients.

With the right CRM system, you’ll be able to embed web forms into your site – allowing you to generate fresh leads from scratch, and deliver them straight into the grateful laps of your hungriest salespeople.

More profitable, effective marketing campaigns aren’t out of your reach. Make them your primary CRM goal for 2021, and watch your business take flight.

Up next: 7 Best CRM Software Solutions for Marketing Teams

3. Shattered sales quotas

Motivating your sales team to surpass their sales quotas isn’t about adopting a ‘Gordon Gekko’ (pictured) mentality, or upping the office’s caffeine consumption. If supercharging sales is your business’s top strategic goal, CRM software can help – ensuring your team works smarter, not harder, to hit its targets.

With a CRM system, your sales team will be able to build up not only a strong pipeline of prospects, leads, and contacts, but an understanding of those potential customers, too – who they are, what they like, and how best to convert them into a deal.

And, once your sales team has built up a relationship with those new clients, they’ll have everything they need to sell to them again, and again, and again. That’s because CRM software also acts as a central contact database, storing info from every phone, email, and social media interaction your sales team has had with your clients. 

This keeps everyone in your team on the same page, and eliminates the harmful effects that siloing data away in spreadsheets (or any other form of Jurassic data storage techniques you rely on) can have on business growth.

Some excellent CRM options for this are:

var appWikiRequestUrl = “https://appwiki.nl”;

Up next: The Best CRM for Sales Teams

4. A better understanding of what works

The key to growing a successful business isn’t always about acquiring and retaining customers. It’s also about knowing what works, and – perhaps even more crucially – what’s not working.

In other words, it’s about evaluation, about reflection – about analysis.

Enter one of CRM software’s core benefits – that it allows you to drill down into the data and extract key nuggets of insight you might otherwise have missed. This CRM goal is about sifting through the coarse dirt of your business’s figures, and panning for the gold dust within.

We’re talking about sales forecasting and revenue cycle modelling; about granular reporting features and business intelligence. Taking into account everything from past performance and current trends to individual team member performance, analytical CRM can offer uncannily accurate predictions for the future.

Don’t let your blind spots define you. Make developing a better understanding of your business’s past, present, and future one of your central CRM goals this year.

Up next: The Best Analytical CRM Solutions for Small Businesses

5. Ultimate business mobility – and better collaboration

Even before COVID-19 made digital nomads of us all, most companies were growing wiser to the benefits of flexible working. Research tells us that 85% of businesses have introduced some form of flexible working policy over the last decade. And let’s face it – if you want to keep your employees happy and attract the best talent, your business needs to get flexible, too.

That’s why offering remote working should be one of your top goals. So how can CRM software help?

Well, most CRM systems are cloud-based. Instead of storing data on your own servers (which takes time, money, storage space, and a lot of patience), everything you need is kept in ‘the cloud’. Cloud-based CRM is also accessible from a web browser, so there’s no hefty files to download, install, or maintain. 

All you need, in fact, is an internet connection.

Plus, whenever one of your team updates information in a cloud-based CRM system, the change happens in real-time. Apart from simplifying remote work, this also improves collaboration – no more salespeople treading on each other’s toes, or follow-up calls forgotten because “somebody else probably did it”. 

Nope, just smooth, seamless cooperation – and another example of a key goal that CRM can help your business achieve.

Our top pick CRM for the ultimate in business collaboration has to be Monday.com.

Up next: The Best Cloud-Based CRM for Small Businesses

Next steps

“Alright”, we hear you say. “I get it. If I’m going to achieve my business’s lofty CRM goals, I’m going to need the software to do it. But how do I know which CRM system provider is going to be the best fit for my team? Where would I possibly begin?”

Well, you can start by letting us help. Simply provide us with a few details about your business’s requirements and current setup. The questions take about 30 seconds to complete – we’ll only ask which CRM features you require, how many users the system will be for, and what (if any!) contact management software you’re using right now.

When we have a better feel for your specific needs, we’ll match you with one or more leading CRM providers – though only if they’re a good fit for you. 

The next part’s easy. You just sit back, and wait for the phone to ring. When it does, there’ll be CRM quotes and offers tailored to your team on the other end. The whole process comes at no charge to you, either – and it could be your business’ shortcut to scalability.