What is CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is also used to describe contact management for sales.

CRM is a sales and marketing strategy. The aim is to grow long-term relationships with customers and prospects over time. Everyone has a different bend on CRM Strategy - from the importance of personalized communications to retargeting email ads. At the end of the day, it's all about how you can optimize Customer Relationships.

We'd like to keep it simple. Here are a few ways that a customer relationship management strategy can help business - without doubling your work.

#1 Understand Your Target Audience. No faking it! If you cannot close your eyes right now and imagine your customer - including the things he or she says or does, then you probably do not actually understand your target audience. One of the most powerful things in having a CRM Strategy is that it also is a market research tool so that you can better understand your target audience. With enough customer data, you will easily see the patterns among people. Perhaps you are attracting more people from a specific niche marketing than you realized. That has a major impact on your sales, marketing, and even operations.

#2 Build Better Customer Relationships. Let's face it, people are demanding personalization more than ever. Your customers and potential customers may already be interested in your brand. The moment they feel treated like another number or generic customer, you have lost them. Use the customer data you have collected to serve them better, ask smarter questions, and drive them to buy something new. You may be surprised how far that birthday email goes.

#3 Share Across Your Organization. This is a big issue for those companies that are quickly growing and scaling. Suddenly, you have 3 new sales people to train and they have no idea about the details of your top customers. In comes your CRM system. If you have created a strategy and implemented a CRM system in your business, then it will be a breeze to direct that sales person to the contact record and easily explain how you use different fields to track customer information. Wasted hours and major mistakes are avoided.

#4 Optimize Customer Communications. Both over-messaging and under-messaging customers are problems for any business. If you have too many emails, SMS, social messages, and phone calls to customers, they feel overwhelmed and may shut down - it creates content fatigue. On the other hand, you don't want to disappear on customers either. There is a delicate balance of how often customer communications are happening and where (what medium). If you are tracking your customer communications using a CRM, this is no problem. Even if you current CRM is a spreadsheet, you're ahead of many others.

#5 Analyze Your Revenue Generators. Yes, we treat all customers equally with high-quality service and products. It's important to know which ones are the most valuable to the company. That means tracking your sales or deals with all the specific details and matching them up to the right customers. You may be able to do this with your bookkeeping software to an extent. Using a CRM will also allow you a few other things - attribution to any marketing campaigns that led to the sale, referral contacts, and a level of detail that is usually not on an invoice (such as a breakdown of the project deliverables).

If you want to get started on this right now, then scroll down to get a free customer tracking tool.