Five Easy Steps For Creating A Easy To Use CRM Strategy For Business Growth

If you are still not aware what is CRM , then for them this is a software which is an extremely powerful tool that helps in acquiring new leads, boost customer relationships, and thereby drive customer loyalty, resulting in rapid business growth.

But for all this, you must know how to use it.

Alarmingly according to studies done on CRM it has been seen that only 14 percent of sales reps actually use the full capability and all the functionalities found in their CRM, while more than 30-60 percent of CRM projects fail to kick-off due to low adoption rates that ultimately results in dismal returns on investment.

Now there is nothing worse for any business than to invest money, labor and time into a CRM solution and thereafter fail to use it properly for business growth.

Hence, here are five steps below that you can use as a roadmap to build your own brand’s cross-departmental and scalable easy to use CRM strategy that can help you to elevate relationships with your customers at every stage in their journey with your businesses.

1. Identify your easy to use CRM solution’s strategic goals

The primary and foremost step for creating an effective CRM strategy is to identify its goals, which in other words means what exactly you will be using your easy to use CRM for.

It must always be remembered that CRM software is a platform that must be used collaboratively across all the departments in your organization.
Therefore irrespective of whether you are using Salesforce, or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM, which are mostly used by startups and small businesses high-level CRM goals will remain constant for the company as a whole; however the approach to achieving them will depend on departmental roles and responsibilities.

Hence, for this reason, it is extremely necessary that all departments in your organization must work together on the goal-setting process.

Therefore encourage your marketing, sales and support teams to sit together and thereafter break down large goals into actionable CRM tasks that align specifically with their job roles and responsibilities.

2. Identify core challenges and weaknesses

To ensure that your easy to use CRM strategy is proactive, instead of being reactive, identify your team’s main weaknesses and challenges early for proper adoption of the software.

For example, if you discover that cross-departmental communication is one of your team’s key weaknesses, or your support tickets are not getting resolved in time, you can be proactive about ensuring that your CRM strategy utilizes highly collaborative processes and transparency which it comes to sharing resources and knowledge management and for that create required knowledge base and resources that are readily discoverable and available within your CRM database.

3. Create CRM processes to streamline workflow

Most CRM systems will include integrations and features for streamlining workflow across the entire company.
Therefore, depending on the capability of your CRM tool use the system to improve the efficiency and internal communications of your teams.

For example, create definite responsibilities and roles when it comes to CRM tasks, segment and organize your leads and customers into manageable groups, integrate external business applications to eliminate multi-platform tasks, set up notifications in the software so that your teams can utilize their opportunities promptly, customize the dashboard in your CRM to display the key insights at a glance, and more.

4. Decide on the right KPIs

You just cannot measure the effectiveness of your CRM strategy without defining the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) relevant for your business.

For this, you are required to revisit your business goals and identify how best you can measure them.

For example, some of the KPIs you can consider is Customer Retention Rate, Number of new prospects over a span of time, Renewal rate, New revenue generated, Closing Rate, Time to Resolution, and more.

5. Develop a thorough onboarding process

Take your time to develop a methodical onboarding process to make sure that your teams have the right CRM training they require for their success.

For this, you can create detailed and thorough documentation of the training materials and make it easily discoverable and organized within your CRM database .

Now, as written information is sometimes not simple enough, you can also record how-to videos as a guide, apart from creating knowledge base articles, customer support forums or real-time chatbox for supporting simple inquiries.

Improve the customer experience with a CRM strategy

The following five steps above, not allows you to create a CRM strategy that you help your teams to work more efficiently, but it also provides you teams an opportunity to identify their key customer touch-points, to find out what is working and what is not, pinpoint new opportunities and discover areas of improvements for business growth.