Customer relationship management (CRM) typically refers to software used to help businesses manage data to improve sales and relationships. But with so many tools and features, software can quickly become overwhelming. That’s why we put together our CRM best practices for managing and growing your business.
In this article, we outline the six pillars you should build your CRM strategy on.
6 CRM Best Practices
From finding the right CRM to using all the features it has to offer, these CRM best practices will help you make the most of your system so you can scale your business.
1. Use CRM software
Customers expect consistent communication across channels and departments. At the same time, customers engage with brands through many channels (think email, live chat, social media, etc), making it difficult for companies to meet those expectations.
With only 22% of companies having unified customer experience (CX) data across departments, implementing a centralized CRM system is pressing.
CRM software unites customer-facing teams. You can only create a smooth, consistent customer experience by aligning these teams.
As a first step toward connecting your teams, you need to find a system that supports the functions of each team and gives them a unified customer view.
A CRM suite like Brevo is the key to uniting your teams and the first CRM best practice on the list. CRM software gives sales and marketing teams access to shared dashboards, eliminating the need to switch between systems and find customer data. It also comes equipped with marketing and sales features so each team can do their job better.
First off, Brevo’s Marketing Platform norway telephone number data supports your marketing team’s tasks. From landing page building to targeted email and paid ad campaigns, marketers have all the tools for lead generation and nurturing in one place.
An email template gallery in Brevo CRM.
Using marketing tools is a CRM best practice.
Source
As new leads turn into sales disadvantages of artificial intelligence and how to avoid them in marketing prospects, Brevo passes the CRM baton to the sales team so they can seamlessly take over the customer journey. Thanks to data centralization, they gain immediate access to detailed customer profiles, including their interactions with marketing campaigns.
From here, a salesperson can create sales pipelines, make forecasts, and interact with prospects — all through the same platform.
A sales pipeline in Brevo CRM.
Sales pipeline in Brevo
To learn more about CRM, check out these resources:
How to Choose CRM Software for Your Business
CRM vs CDP: Differences and Use Cases
2. Follow a CRM implementation plan
CRM implementation is just the beginning of your CRM journey. Over 80% of companies already use CRM software.
The problem is businesses are underutilizing CRM solutions. Over 35% of sales representatives report they don’t feel they can use their CRM system effectively.
No matter how many employees you have, you need a structured approach to adopting a CRM system within your company. Below are some CRM best practices for getting started with software.
Dedicate a team to setting up your CRM.
This team will do everything from conduit china comparing CRMs on the market to migrating contacts into your CRM database.
Check if your CRM system offers onboarding support or educational resources like Brevo Academy. Having a dedicated account manager also helps make the most of the system.
Create onboarding flows to train your team. Users should be able to access on-demand resources whenever they have questions. Make video tutorials or documents for FAQs.
Collect feedback and document best practices to drive further adoption of the CRM system. Ask more experienced users to share their knowledge.
Continuously evaluate CRM usage. You may discover some workflows aren’t intuitive or take too much time — use this data to revisit and update your CRM processes.
3. Automate workflows
98% of marketers say automation is important to success and hands-down one of the most useful CRM best practices you can follow. Without automation, you’d still have to do sales forecasting in Excel and wouldn’t have a way to send password resets, welcome emails, and other triggered messages.
Automate your workflows to create seamless customer experiences and help your team be more efficient. Key uses of automation in CRM include:
Minimize manual administrative tasks
Only 10% of marketers report fully automating their customer journeys. Even though almost every CRM system offers robust automation capabilities, a lot of processes in marketers’ and sales reps’ daily routines remain manual.
Data entry and use are the most basic tasks you can automate with a CRM system. You can make email signup forms and set up tools that automatically capture and input data into the CRM system. Tech-savvy users will enjoy using APIs to seamlessly integrate data from various sources.
Automation also helps your team avoid human error from manual data entry and campaign launches.
Personalize customer experiences
62% of business leaders report increased customer retention when using personalization.
Personalization is more than automatically customizing recipients’ names in email marketing campaigns. It’s tailoring every interaction to align with this customer’s past experiences with your brand. Only automation can make it possible.
Here are a few marketing automation ideas that will help you create personalized customer experiences:
Customer segmentation. Group your contacts based on demographics or email engagement and create more relevant content. Brevo dynamically adds new or existing contacts that match your criteria into specific customer segments.
Behavior-based triggers. Brevo allows you to automate actions based on user behavior. For instance, you can create a rule that will trigger an automated re-engagement email to your inactive customer segment.
Dynamic content customization. Any CRM automation tool should be able to create dynamic content blocks within your emails — these blocks automatically fill in details based on contact attributes. The most common example of simple email personalization is inserting the recipient’s name in the copy. Advanced personalization may involve mentioning the product they’ve recently purchased.
Behavioral automation workflow as part of CRM best practices.
Behavior-based automation set-up in Brevo
Do sales workflow automation
CRM isn’t limited to marketing efforts and sales reps play a significant role in creating a positive CX.
Sales automation allows sales representatives to focus on high-value tasks, such as engaging with qualified leads and building relationships, rather than getting bogged down in repetitive tasks.
Here are a few examples of how to automate the sales processes that will save your sales reps’ time and create a smooth experience for your prospects:
Contact management. Automation ensures that every interaction, be it a phone call or an email, is recorded and added to the relevant customer profile immediately. For instance, if you manage your sales calls with Brevo, your call recordings will be automatically tied to your CRM data.
Lead scoring. Use your CRM system to automatically assign scores to your leads based on their interactions with your brand. Based on lead scoring models, you can add contacts to specific lists and reach them with the most relevant communication.
Meeting scheduling. You don’t have to juggle your meeting calendar on your own. Implement meeting scheduling automation to automatically update your availability and enable prospects and customers to book meetings in real time.
Follow-ups. You’ll never forget to send a follow-up message on your sales pitch if you set up an email autoresponder. You just need to define how soon the CRM system should send a message if the recipient doesn’t respond.
A lead-scoring automation workflow in a CRM. Using automation is a CRM best practice.
Lead scoring in Brevo
4. Connect your CRM system to apps
Your CRM system collects customer data from marketing and sales interactions, but there are more touchpoints between you and your customers. Aside from reading your emails, your customers also click your ads, make purchases on your website, and leave support requests.
Don’t leave all that data scattered across different platforms. Bring it together to reinforce your personalization strategy and create even more consistent customer experiences.