CRM is a software that allows you to guide your customer from point A to point B, automate sales and improve the efficiency of customer relationship management. Today, it is one of the most popular sales tools. Moreover, a CRM system allows you to personalize interactions with your target audience, increase their loyalty, minimize customer churn and improve customer retention.
Unfortunately, despite the huge benefits of CRM, many online entrepreneurs miss the opportunity to use the tool, fearing the complexity of customizing it. Some even suggest that such software is too expensive for a small business because it requires a large investment to use. In this article, you will learn what a CRM system is, why it is not only suitable for large businesses and how it can be used to automate many business tasks.
Why you need CRM
First of all, a CRM system allows you to collect the necessary information on each client in one place. Unlike documents in Excel or Google Tables, data can be added automatically, which significantly reduces work and minimizes errors due to human factor. Each lead and customer has its own card, which stores the entire history of interactions with him. At any moment you can find out when the client came, which manager communicated with him, when the subscriber opened an email newsletter with a promotional offer, how much he bought and so on. CRM allows you to quickly find out how many leads came for a certain period of time, how long it took to warm them up, how many of them converted into customers and how many dropped out.
The CRM system also helps you to plan interactions with potential customers and track them. Depending on the functionality of the service, you can connect and use such tools as telephony, SMS and email newsletters, chatbots in messengers.
If you have a team of managers, then with the help of CRM you can monitor their work and if necessary redistribute the load to avoid failures in communication. Using special software allows you to identify weaknesses in customer interactions and eliminate them. Customers can drop out due to many factors and at different stages. Even an untimely mailing can be a reason for leaving.
Automation of business processes with the help of CRM-system helps to avoid such gaps, to establish quality communication with each user and in time to notice if someone needs an additional incentive to conclude a deal. This is possible due to the fact that the tool allows you to track all stages of the sales funnel, which you will learn more about in the next section.
Sales funnel in CRM
The classic sales funnel is based on the AIDA model and represents a step-by-step path to attract the attention of the target audience, fuel customer interest and motivate them to perform a targeted action, such as a purchase or registration. The acronym AIDA stands for:
- Attention
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
It is visualized as shown in the screenshot below.
Let's say we want to sell a course on designing web site layouts. To achieve the desired goal and develop a sales funnel based on the AIDA model, we need to perform three main steps.
Analyze the market and make a detailed portrait of the target audience. This will help us find out who our buyer is, how old he is, what social networks he prefers, what he does, why he needs a course on landings design.
Study competitors and their offerings. This step will help you find and define your competitive advantages and identify your strengths and weaknesses. Studying competitors also allows you to learn how other companies attract users and convert into customers.
Develop your sales funnel. In it, it is not so much the number of stages that is important, but their effectiveness in moving the lead through to closing the deal and converting into a customer. A sales funnel is a path you build that starts from the moment you introduce a potential customer to a product and ends with a purchase.
Let's see what our funnel built on the AIDA model for selling a real-life lendings design course might look like.
- Attention. To attract the attention of the target audience, we prepare a free checklist for users with recommendations on how to create landings. We set up targeted advertising on Facebook with a transition to messenger, where we use a chatbot to send prepared tips and offer to leave an email to receive two free video lessons.
- Interest. After the potential client leaves his email, he will receive a welcome email with the first lesson, which will also tell him when he will receive the second newsletter from you and what is waiting for him.
- Desire. The next day we send the second lesson and tell in the email about our course and other paid products. At this stage, the client is already familiar with us and is interested in further training, as he has watched the first lesson and opened the second one. Therefore, we fuel his desire to continue studying the topic by offering paid materials.
- Action. On the third day we send a mailing in which we congratulate the user on the successful completion of our two lessons and motivate him to continue learning on our course. You can use a discount, a gift, or a personal consultation to stimulate a decision.
Depending on the complexity of the product and its cost, it may be necessary to prepare a series of mailings of five or more letters or offer the customer a telephone consultation. In order to maximize the reach of the target audience, advertising on a social network may not be enough, so it is important to think carefully about other touchpoints. This could be a landing page, video ads on TikTok and YouTube, an offer in newsletters, on the websites and social media of partners or influencers.
Also in the sales funnel it is important to consider other moments when the customer registered but did not open the email or read the first newsletter but ignored the second one. In order not to miss a customer, think of ways to bring them back into the sales funnel.
CRM-system allows you to automate all these processes and in time to identify leads that are stuck at any of the stages or dropped out altogether. Sales funnel in CRM is often displayed as a kanban board, where all stages are represented as vertical columns. A customer card is generated by a specified condition or manually. A trigger for the system to place a lead in the sales funnel can be a subscription to a chatbot, registration on a website, creating a request, and so on.
How to choose a CRM
CRM-systems are presented in the form of SaaS-services, applications, extensions for Google Chrome or software with the need for installation. The latter require the use of special equipment, the involvement of a specialist for customization, as well as time for training. SaaS services are very popular for small and medium-sized businesses today. These include SendPulse, Bitrix24, Megaplan, AmoCRM, Pipedrive and others. Such CRMs are characterized by accessibility and ease of operation. For their use is important only good access to the Internet.
In order not to make a mistake with the choice of CRM-system for your business, use the recommendations below.
- Familiarize yourself with CRM capabilities. Services provide different tools for managing relationships with clients. This can be the connection of telephony and chatbots in messengers, the ability to automatically generate contracts, sending email newsletters, SMS and so on. Make sure that the chosen CRM has all the necessary features and integrations.
- Study the tariff plans. The cost of CRM depends on the selected functionality, time of tariff validity (month, six months, year), the number of managers in the team. Carefully study the proposals, so that after the start of work did not turn out that the selected package does not provide the necessary functions or cost too much. Pay special attention to this issue in the case of choosing a free CRM system.
- Try out the functionality. Do not rush to immediately purchase a tariff plan of the first favorite CRM-system. Test it in practice. Study the interface, try to create a funnel, see how easy and clear it is for you to work. Perhaps the tools provided on the free plan will be enough for you to get started.
- Check the availability of instructions and support service. Questions and difficulties may arise in the process, so it's good if the service provides materials to help you work. Even better, if the CRM has a support team that can advise and help with tasks. Be careful, some services provide the ability to communicate only if you buy a certain tariff.
CRM-system - this is the tool that will help you simplify your work and automate many business processes. Therefore, start searching for the right CRM right now to improve the quality of customer relationship management and increase sales. The time spent today on searching for a CRM system and creating a funnel will bring the first results tomorrow and help you increase your competitiveness in the market.