Source: pexel

The Role of CRM Software in Increasing Sales

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Businesses often struggle to keep track of all their leads. As they acquire new leads, marketers need an efficient way to sort, label, and qualify those leads in a singular program.

To make things more complicated, each lead is at a different stage of the buying process. Some might be just learning about the product. Others might be reviewing the different features that the product offers and sharing them with their team.

Marketers need to engage qualified leads with the right content at the right time in order to effectively convert them. This requires using customer relationship management (CRM) software to aid in the storing, labeling, and management of those leads.

What is a CRM Software?

A CRM software is a program that manages the customer relationship from the moment they fill out a form on your site all the way until after they purchase. The software functions as a dashboard that enables you to acquire, manage and segment leads so you can initiate targeted campaigns or review where they are in their purchasing journey.

The CRM can function as a centralized location for the business to understand what is in the pipeline for future deals. It can offer assistance in the storage and management of current prospects as well as reporting for deals that are open, closed, or in motion. Sales, marketing, and business intelligence departments will all have reasons to use your CRM software.

Often, companies will build their entire tech stack around their CRM software, using other software that specifically integrates with it. Freshworks CRM offers dozens of integrations with popular software solutions used by entrepreneurs around the world.

But how exactly will CRM software increase sales? Let’s take a look at three ways you can deploy your CRM software to ensure it is increasing your bottom line.

Leveraging CRM Software For Sales

For many businesses, purchasing a new software must justify an increase in sales. Well, you’ll likely be able to recoup your investment with your CRM software, since it is such an important component of your sales channels.

Your CRM software will help with inbound and outbound marketing campaigns and ensure your sales and marketing team have closely collaborated on goals and initiatives. Specifically, your CRM software will help increase your organization’s sales through the lead capture, event tracking, and sales automation functionality.

Lead Capture

Do you still have a bunch of web forms on your website that simply collect prospect's information and store them in your CMS, only to be retrieved when someone does a manual export? Now is the time when you can streamline this and use your CRM to add a web form that will send the prospect information right into the CRM.

An effective B2B content strategy only works if you include forms embedded natively into the content to ensure that you are capturing your prospect’s information while they browse. It is a missed opportunity if you forget to include a form. You wouldn’t have any way to capture the information of an engaged prospect who is reading a relevant piece of content related to their business use case.

With forms that are linked to your CRM, you can go beyond the simple action of acquiring emails to grow your email list and instead, let your CRM do the work by automatically setting up a profile for your prospect in your CRM when they sign up. By doing so, you’ll capture the important information needed to begin nurturing prospects down the purchasing path.

Event Tracking

Has your marketing team been running 10,000 miles per minute and throwing the kitchen sink at all your campaigns in hopes of attracting more leads? With event tracking in your CRM, you’ll be able to distinguish what is paying off.

By adding scripts to certain campaigns and pages on your website, you’ll be able to track which pieces of content or ad campaigns were viewed by the prospect in your CRM. If the prospect converts, you’ll have more visibility on the ROI for specific marketing initiatives and understand more holistically where it makes sense to invest your time and resources.

For example, if you’re using a bunch of link building tools to ensure that a specific blog post ranks higher on search engines, you’ll be able to track the people that have viewed that blog post and eventually purchased it. In Freshworks CRM, you’ll be able to see which actions your prospect took along their customer journey:

By adding event tracking to key marketing initiatives, you’ll be able to evolve your marketing strategy to ensure it consistently reaches your target audience.

Sales Automation

Now that you have your customer profile set up in your CRM, it’s time to nurture them with strategic sales messages. Your CRM can send your prospect information directly, or you can integrate your CRM with your email service provider.

Sales email cadences are essential for nudging prospects closer to conversion. You’ll be able to see if your prospect opened or clicked on the email in your CRM which can help you evolve your messaging to ensure you’re resonating with your prospect.

In the Freshworks CRM you can build these sales sequences with basic steps:

Your CRM will keep track of your prospects’ journey. With the right sales sequences, you can ensure that your prospects are continuously engaged and learning about your product’s features as well as everything you have to offer.

Conclusion

Without a CRM, you’re not reaching your full sales potential. Businesses need a centralized hub for all their interactions with their prospects. Their CRM can act like this and function as so much more. A CRM will acquire, track and nurture your prospects with the right cadences set up.

In addition, you’ll be able to easily find and segment prospects to ensure you’re reaching them with the right marketing campaigns and messaging.

By using a CRM, you’ll be able to drive sales and increase revenue while consistently engaging your prospects and leading them to purchase.

About the Author

Brad Smith is the CEO at Wordable.io and the Founder of Codeless (a content production agency). His content has been highlighted by The New York Times, Business Insider, The Next Web, and thousands more.

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