Our CRM Business Advisory team can help you with all of your CRM needs. CRM which stands for Customer Relationship Management is a type of software that is used by marketing and sales teams to manage business relationships with customers, prospective customers and cold leads.

Switching the acronym CRM we can explain it as managing relationships with customers which is exactly what you would do as part of a sales or business development team.

CRM software has evolved greatly over the last decade and can now integrate with many other business software using API (Application Programmable Interface) Think of an API as a dual plug socket that allows two devices to run at the same time.

A strong CRM system and process can streamline your sales process greatly.

Now, with paid advertising being the first touchpoint for many companies, the initial peaking of interest of a prospect can be done online through advertising.

Let’s look at a simple sales process and how this type of software can be used.

Let’s say a company is running ads on a platform like Facebook and they are trying to sell cars. Their initial ads might be a video ad showing the car in action. This video shows up in the newsfeed of the potential customer and at the end of the video there is an offer to test drive the car and the viewer is asked to fill in a form with some basic details.

As an example, this could be name, telephone number and town or city.

That information is automatically added to the CRM software using the API we mentioned earlier. The car company now has a warm lead inside their database, but that is not all.

CRM software allows a series of automatic actions to be taken when this warm lead is added to the database.

1. It sends out a thankyou email to the lead
2. It sends out an automatic message to the salesperson for that region to make an introductory call and offer a test drive of the car.
3. The salesperson follows up and either registers the test drive or not.
4. If not the prospect is tagged as a prospect and a future follow up booked for, let’s say a month down the line.
5. Now the CRM software see’s this is a prospect and each week sends an email out to that prospect with information about cool features on the car he/she has already shown interest in and each email has a call to action to take a test drive.
6. If no test drive has been taken during the first month, the salesperson can call again and offer a discount on the car if the prospect takes a test drive within a week and then notes down the response.
7. This time the prospect accepts and a test drive is booked for a week later.
8. The CRM system will then send out a reminder a couple of days before to give a nudge to the prospect.

The above is a very simple example sales process. CRM software can accommodate very complex sales and marketing processes and build out very strong data reporting.

Was this advertising campaign successful is the question?

How many people filled in the form?
How many people filled in the form and took the test drive?
How many people took the test drive and purchased the car?

Customer Relationship Management software allows companies to drill down into the data to make an informed decision on whether their marketing spend is producing results or not.

Business advisory and consulting companies can help you choose and implement the right CRM for your business.

If the campaign is producing results then it is scaled. If not it is pulled and unnecessary advertising budget spend is eliminated.

Contact us today for a complimentary business advisory session explaining how adding a CRM software tool can decrease marketing costs and improve your bottom line.