THERE WON’T BE much time this month to work on your business or even get through your pile of mail. But at the dawn of 2023, I’d like you to consider a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to propel your growth and profitability.
CRM has come a long way since being that part of your POS that records customer contact information, birthdays and anniversaries and allows you to print postcards. CRM in 2023 is about creating connected customer experiences.
CRM eliminates all the post-it notes, individual note pads, static POS customer notes that nobody remembers to look at and private email and text communications that you can’t see (but you worry about). With CRM, you replace all those individual, disconnected methods with the ability to track every customer interaction from outbound calls to inbound, every email communication, social media clicks, shares and comments, clienteling outreach and staff reminders, repair communications, custom orders, and yes, even those all-important birthday and anniversary communications.
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Businesses that adopt CRM easily outpace the average growth rate of their competitors. There are many CRM systems to choose from, and the best of them consistently deliver these seven benefits:
1. Better customer service. Centralized, accessible customer information helps everyone who touches the customer understand them better and meet their needs.
2. Increased sales. CRM helps you prospect for more qualified customers, nurture prospects and turn them into customers. How? By streamlining your prospecting and sales processes, providing meaningful sales data, and supporting your sales team with reminders, clienteling workflows and productivity tools.
3. Increased customer lifetime value. Companies that use CRM are better at encouraging repeat business, and their team members are far less likely to drop the ball or represent the company in a way that doesn’t suit your brand.
4. Automated sales reports. A CRM connected to your POS and website collects and organizes data about your customers on dashboards tailored to each employee. Performance evaluation, tracking quotas and goals, and checking progress become part of everyone’s work without requiring a full-time reporting person to produce the information.
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5. Higher productivity and efficiency. Modern CRM software uses marketing automation technology, which handles most of the menial sales and marketing tasks and frees you and your staff to do the value-add work that only well-trained humans can do.
6. Better insights. CRM systems provide detailed analytics to contextualize your customer data, develop the right products and promotions, monitor important metrics and motivate your teams.
7. More strategic focus. Most business owners feel like sheepdogs, chasing all the wandering elements of their business and trying to keep everything in alignment. A CRM dramatically simplifies that work, giving you time to do the work that only you can do.
While you’re busily occupied producing those holiday sales, just tuck these ideas and benefits in the back of your mind. I have a feeling that by the first week in January, you’ll be ready to consider CRM as the most important thing you can do for your business in 2023.
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