Imagine, your business a couple of years down the line after you have established your startup. You probably had a few customers or clients back then, but now the numbers are snowballing. Apart from grappling with your core business, funding and workforce, you must be finding yourself entangled in an indefinite thread of numbers. You can abide by the adage “many hands make light work” and can pitch in several people to get your data in the right shape or you may consider the smart way of doing it – Customer Relationship Management.
As a growing business, chances are slim that you haven’t heard of a CRM but chances are high that you aren’t familiar with one. CRM, as you might think, isn’t that complex to understand.
A handful of customers isn’t difficult to manage and interact with. At an early stage, you might probably be keeping track of your existing customers manually. Things for the management team take a turn when the business starts flourishing and customers begin to proliferate. Concerns mushroom on how to manage and analyze customer data and interactions in a robust and efficient way. An evolved lead management software over the existing, obsolete ones was the need.
So, what is CRM?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a combination of strategy, software, and practices to help businesses improve relationships and interactions with existing and potential customers. A CRM will keep you plugged into everything – customer management, sales management, vendor and supplier management, and more.
The CRM software
CRM software is conventionally used as lead management software and as a sales and marketing tool to better manage customer data and hence increase profitability. It brings the entire previous history of a customer, current interaction and outstanding issues all into one cohesive unit.
Data flows from across departments – sales, customer service, and marketing. Translate these data into useful business information with CRM software.
To summarize, a CRM software is designed primarily for interaction between an organization’s marketing team, sales force, and customers. It allows you to:-
- consolidate data from across the departments and that of customers
- manage and analyze the data
- foster personalized and meaningful interactions with your customers
This eventually helps you achieve the goal of retaining and enhancing the relationship with existing customers and acquire new ones. Hence CRM not only increases sales but also helps improve customer retention.
