Unit Details
Customer relationship management (CRM) is the combination of practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. The goal is to improve customer service relationships and assist in customer retention and drive sales growth.
CRM systems compile customer data across different channels, or points of contact, between the customer and the company, which could include the company’s website, telephone, live chat, direct mail, marketing materials and social networks. CRM systems can also give customer-facing staff members detailed information on customers’ personal information, purchase history, buying preferences and concerns.
These days, the science of selling has become ever more sophisticated. There’s still room for artistry, but the truth is, investing in an integrated digital tool – i.e. a sales CRM, is pretty much now indispensable. Learn how to use today’s top CRM software for sales, marketing, and customer success teams. It is important to understand your business needs in order to choose best CRM Software for your company to gather customer insights, easily pull reports, create workflows, and more.
Skills covered:
- CRM Introduction
- CRM Software
- Types of CRM
- Adoption & Deployment
- Benefits and Drawbacks
Introduction
You have gathered so much valuable information about the type of business, the competitive landscape, and the marketing activities that can truly impact sell-through of your consumer product. The three critical questions now are, what are you doing with all this rich data and account information? Where are you storing it? And who has access to it?
Firstly, the acronym CRM stands for customer relationship management, and typically refers to any software application, or tool, that helps you to manage your customer relationships. So, what exactly does that mean, managing customer relationships?
From a sales perspective it can mean many things like inputting and tracking leads, then checking up on those leads, converting them, hopefully, to contacts, and making deals with them. If you do you want to track revenue, both potential and secured revenue, following up with customers and gathering insights into your customers and sale cycles.
Now the goal of any CRM is to improve business relationships, all while staying productive as you streamline processes, and in the end hopefully improve profitability. The old days of complicated, messy, and time-consuming spreadsheets for keeping track of all these things, is over when you decide to invest in a CRM system.
