How Sales and Customer Success Teams Can Utilize a CRM

As more and more businesses have moved online and started to acquire customers through online channels, they have begun to employ digital solutions to help with this acquisition. With the internet becoming a bigger and bigger part of people’s lives, it makes a lot of sense that businesses want to meet customers where they are spending their time. As such, businesses need to not just know where their customers are, but also have strategies to help them discover their business online, as well as allay any concerns once they are able to convert them to customers. This can best be accomplished through a digital tool called a CRM.

But what is a CRM? A CRM, which stands for customer relationship management software, is a digital tool that can help companies better manage and optimize their relationships with customers. These can be any kind of customer, including those that are acquired online, those that are acquired through sales calls, or even those who are connected with at trade shows and other such events. The most important part of using a CRM is utilizing its customer data analysis capabilities, and these can both be used by sales teams and customer success teams to acquire new customers and retain existing ones.

How sales team can use a CRM
A CRM is not often thought of a sales tool. However, CRM companies such as Salesforce have changed the conversation around CRM, and allowed sales manager to solve the two main problems they face: how to qualify and quantity leads, and how to prioritize which sales leads to go after. A CRM helps to give clarify to these issues by housing a database of all existing and potential customers.

Using this data, sales managers can then create buyer personas to better focus the sales teams’ efforts.Using this data, sales manager can then make determinations on the quality of a specific sales lead and whether or not they fit into the buyer personas that they have created. By using this data, sales teams can figure out which sales tactics will work the best and which sales tactics will not be a good use of their efforts. Sales teams can also use a CRM to better streamline their sales pipeline, which can help them better focus on driving sales and spend less time on more mundane administrative tasks

How customer success teams can use a CRM

As its name suggests, the main purpose of a CRM is to better manage your customer relationships. This can also help to improve a customer success team’s customer service ability. Using a CRM, a customer success team can actually determine which stage of the customer journey a customer is, and actually map out this process to better represent where a customer might get bottlenecked. This can allow them to more proactively reach out in certain stages of the customer lifecycle and reduce customer churn by helping their customers better succeed. 

Overall, a CRM is an excellent tool for many different departments to collaborate. Both sales teams and customer success teams can benefit a lot from the use of a CRM, and both departments can collaborate to improve their processes by focusing on a more customer-centric approach. By doing so, companies can better show appreciation for their customers and conduct their sales activities in a way that is more in line with the goals of their potential customers.