As a business, the competition increases daily leaving your customers with multiple options to choose from. This is why to convert leads and not lose out to the competition, you need to prioritize your customer relationship management (CRM strategy).
In this post, we’ll share how you can create a successful CRM strategy with real-life examples from other businesses to inspire you.
What is a CRM Strategy?
A CRM strategy is a roadmap that outlines the specific actions, and tools you’ll use to manage the relationship with your leads and customers throughout their journey with your product/service. It prioritizes the customer and their experience by seeking out ways to build a lasting relationship with them.
For example, you send a series of email campaigns after someone signs up for your webinar. The outline of how and what you’ll use to send that campaign is your CRM strategy. Now this can vary depending on your specific business, however, really planning it is what will make it unique.
Your CRM strategy is specifically important because it creates a way for your business to improve customer relationships, boost sales and in turn revenue.
With an excellent CRM strategy you can;
- Understand your client’s needs and preferences better to increase customer satisfaction
- Convert leads faster by sending targeted marketing campaigns using customer data
- Provide exceptional service to increase customer retention
- Gain valuable customer insights that can inform strategic decisions across your business like optimizing campaigns, improving products and more
7 Ways to Create a Successful CRM Strategy
Building a CRM strategy takes planning and careful consideration. After reviewing several business models, here are the winning strategies that have worked with examples of how you can implement them in your own business.
1. Start with a Goal
Like every other project, you need to map out goals and north star metrics you hope to achieve. These will guide you while implementing and optimizing the actual workflows. With clear goals, you’ll know what to work towards and how to get there.
For example, if you set a goal to increase the sales bahamas telemarketing list conversion rate by 15% within the next quarter, you can build up steps to get there. Some could be revisiting the sales funnel, optimizing for higher quality leads to increase the potential to convert and so on. The most important thing with setting CRM goals is that you should always ensure they are SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
2. Revisit and Rebuild Your Ideal Customer
Once you have a goal in mind, it’s time to evaluate whether you’ve been targeting the right people all along. Remember, converting leads is easier for your sales team when you get high-quality leads from the start. So finding these people complaint management: the 3 r’s for resolving a complaint and having a good understanding of who they are can help you craft a winning CRM strategy.
Here’s an example – if you’re an e-learning platform offering professional courses with certifications, your target audience might be professionals seeking a promotion or self-development within a large firm.
It’s not enough to have an idea of who they are, you need the details to make a good sale. To understand the demographics, their needs, current challenges, and even preferred communication channels so you know where exactly to meet them. We recommend using a customer profile or a buyer persona similar to the one below.
You can develop your very own ideal customer using this free persona generator .
3. Review Your Customer Journey and Sales Pipeline
Taking your persona’s needs and motivations into account, build a pathway they would likely want to go through to stick with your business. Start from how they find your product/service up until the point where they convert. At each stage or ireland lists touchpoint, analyze if you’re reaching them at all.
So for example, as a real estate agency, your persona spends a lot of time on YouTube. Showing an ad in the newspapers might not be effective especially if your person doesn’t even read the paper. So you may want to look at how your best clients found your business.
The next step in the user journey might be to visit your website looking for an apartment, then book a viewing, making an offer before signing the contract. This entire flow could be your sales funnel but they are also touch points in your CRM strategy because you can optimize it to better nurture the relationship.
