How Can a CRM Strategy Enhance Your Business?

In the B2B domain, relationship management plays a key role in business growth. As compared to B2C, B2B relationship management is complex. B2B sales cycles are longer, business is catered to key accounts, which are retained through regular contact, and there are multiple decision-makers who make purchase decisions.

Seamless co-operation can happen only when a powerful tool like cloud-based CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software collects crucial data and assists the management strategy.

74% of respondents say that CRM solutions give them better access to customer data, which is crucial to offering personalized services to accounts. (Source: Resco)

What is a B2B CRM Strategy?

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy helps improve the conversion rate, retain customers better, and capture more leads. A B2B CRM strategy is used to sell services or products to accounts and has complex sales processes, fewer leads, and a longer sales cycle as opposed to B2C’s simple sales processes, more leads, and shorter sales cycle.

A customer relationship strategy includes listing methods to oversee an influx in profits and an increase in sales. It helps in detecting shortcomings in your B2B CRM process and comes up with advanced solutions using critical data to enhance your management. 

To execute this strategy, you should choose an efficient cloud-based CRM software that is securely hosted on the servers of your CRM provider. You can access it over the internet from anywhere. With the help of good CRM software, you can manage your contacts, gain insights into your customers, understand and fulfill their needs at every stage of the sales cycle.

Types of CRM Strategies for Business

There are three types of CRM strategies for businesses. You can choose an appropriate strategy based on your business goals and objectives.

• Collaborative CRM

This type of strategy focuses on breaking the silos between the sales, marketing, and customer service teams. These teams may not be in the same geographical location, use different channels to connect with the customer, and have different skills and specialities. Such differences make it hard for these teams to come together and work towards the same goal - an outstanding customer experience. Sharing information between these teams throughout the customer journey is vital for an optimum customer experience.

• Operational CRM

Businesses use operational CRM for streamlining customer relationships using tools to understand and handle complete customer journeys, even those with multiple touch points. It also supports marketing automation, service and sales automation so that employees don’t have to manually carry out all the campaigns. Instead, they can allot more time to carry out activities that need human interaction.

• Analytical CRM

New B2B marketing strategies include digital tools and platforms. A big chunk of customer data that is gathered through these tools and other channels may not be used accurately without a feature-rich platform that analyzes customer behavior. Through analytical CRM, you can get a detailed analysis of the data. It helps with customer retention and solving customers’ problems swiftly.

Role of CRM in Business Strategy

The main role of CRM is to enable teams that handle customers with relevant customer data so that they can offer an optimum customer experience (CX). So, a CRM strategy example would be a business strategy that focuses on customer satisfaction.

“The C-suite plays a fundamental role in giving appropriate weight to CRM across the business, thereby ensuring that it is executed appropriately across all layers of the business and all the way down to the customer.”

- Anders Lindholm, Managing Partner of Boyden Italy.

CRM helps C-level executives to:

• Understand their customers better
• Retain their customers with impressive CX
• Bring in new customers
• Increase their revenue
• Manage customers economically

Using CRM in business is also  necessary if you want to achieve business growth through consumer-centric ideas.

Let us take a look at the role of CRM in business strategy in detail:

• Provides Reliable Reports

Businesses procure actionable customer data from social media, Google Analytics, apps, and business software. However, it becomes useless if it is unorganized. CRM organizes this data and collates it for better understanding. It can also categorize the customers into leads, sales, or opportunities. AI-based marketing automation is also possible using CRM.

• Allows Drip Campaigning

Implementing drip campaigns to target a specific audience cluster with an interest in a niche product is easy because of the dynamic content that CRM provides. These drip campaigns are triggered by specific actions and send out emails to get in touch with the audience. They can be used to convert leads throughout the sales funnel.

• Enhances CX

Through the data it collects, CRM provides insight into the issues and needs of the customers. This makes it easier for a customer service team to tackle issues that customers face. They don’t have to spend time or energy digging for information because they have all the data they need on their CRM dashboards. A quicker resolution time and higher customer satisfaction translate to an improved bottom line. 

• Cross-department Data Accessibility

CRM data can be accessed across departments that may not necessarily be in the same location. This kind of accessibility makes it easier for all departments to optimize their processes.

• Provides Business Insights

Companies easily track business intelligence metrics that help them understand which campaigns are generating leads and how much time it takes to follow up with leads. They can also gauge salesperson performance, business KPIs (closed cases, average call time, average user rating), customer sales, and product sales, up-selling and cross-selling data.

• Aligns Core Teams

All the teams that come into contact with customers are used to working in silos. That doesn't mean that CRM data won't help them. It can show them how to focus their goals and efforts on getting, nurturing, and converting leads, as well as giving customers a great experience.

Creating an Effective CRM Strategy

To create an effective CRM strategy, follow these steps:

• Identify your position in the market
• Know your product or service
• Define goals and vision
• Determine the ICP and target audience
• Map the customer’s journey
• Create a 360° CX experience
• Choose a good CRM software
• Sync everything with your CRM software
• Measure the performance of your strategy using KPIs

British Airways’ Volume Requests Increased after Using CRM

British Airways set a great example of a CRM strategy using Teradata CRM. Their volume requests increased by 150%. They automated campaigns and customer communications for their integrated warehouse through Teradata and saw amazing results.

Conclusion

The role of CRM is crucial in your business strategy. Adopting the best CRM strategy can bring you outstanding results and help you focus on your customers closely.

FAQ

Which companies offer CRM software solutions?

Companies like Salesforce, Oracle, Zendesk, Microsoft, Hubspot, and Agile offer CRM software solutions.

How can a CRM strategy help you scale your business?

CRM can help you offer an enhanced customer experience, analyze customer behavior, bring your core performance teams together, and automate your marketing campaigns.

How can you measure the success of your CRM strategy?

Upsell rate, close rate, average value of deals, duration of sales cycle, and length of pipeline stages are some of the important KPIs to measure the success of your CRM strategy.