How CRM Helps Business Grow?

A powerful customer relationship management system is a key ingredient in business growth. Whether you run a small brokerage with a dozen contacts or a large multinational company, a CRM may improve your business performance by:

• providing a 360-degree view of a customer and improving forecast accuracy by 42% (Salesforce)
• bumping up sales by as much as 34% (Salesforce)
• improving customer satisfaction by 27% (Salesforce)
• increasing lead conversion rates by 300% (a Forrester study).

What is a CRM System

CRM, or Custom Relations Management, refers to software and tools that help centralize all interactions with your customers, their details, and other data in one platform. Examples of CRM systems include Salesforce products, HubSpot, Dynamics, Zoho, and others.

What does a CRM system do? Apart from centralizing all your records, it can:

• Manage and nurture potential customers
• Provide marketing insights into customers’ demographics and behaviors
• Automate back-office processes
• Manage sales pipeline, etc.

Well, there are countless advantages of CRM systems and ways how a CRM helps businesses to grow, so here is a breakdown of the most beneficial scenarios for your CRM-powered business success, curated by CRM experts with 26 years of experience across the world’s best CRM platforms.

1. CRM Helps Deliver Personalized Experience to the Customer

The value of a CRM system is that you can personalize your customers’ experience with thoughtful touchpoints such as offering targeted promotions, sending a how-to video, or asking consumers to write a review, on time and with minimum effort.

Today’s customers are much pickier and more demanding than they used to be a decade ago. In fact, 71% of customers do expect services to always be personalized, whereas as many as 76% of consumers get frustrated when they don’t see it, McKinsey reports.

Here is how customers define personalized experience:

Importance of CRM for Increasing Customer Satisfaction by Personalization

Let’s face it: once your potential customer stops “feeling special”, it’s easier than ever for them to choose something different.

CRM is a real game-changer here. Here are the benefits of CRM software that are bound to help you grow your business from the service personalization standpoint:

• Centralized collection and AI-driven analytics of first-party data – data you directly collect via surveys, forms, and other engagement channels is then fed into your CRM, where it is processed, analyzed, and structured in a meaningful way to deliver more insights into your customer’s uncharted and evolving circumstances.
• Buying journey tracking – a CRM can help catch and analyze what a potential customer is looking for on a website and what stage of the buying process they are in. For example, if they are looking at pricing, a CRM would suggest / automatically send them an invitation to book a call with a salesperson to discuss your service or product in detail.
• These two CRM advantages help adjust marketing strategy and identify where to focus and where to start when searching for new opportunities.

2. CRM Helps Improve Employees’ Productivity and Get 240 Extra Hours of Work Annually

Another reason to use a CRM to help your business grow is to use a CRM system that offers both desktop and mobile / tablet solutions. A mobile CRM allows your salespeople, managers, and customer representatives to gain an additional 240 hours of work and always stay armed with the same context and information across multiple devices.

More than that, among the companies using a mobile CRM, 65% are achieving their sales quotas, while only 22% of salespeople using non-mobile CRM have reached the same targets (Nucleus Research).

Let’s AscendixRE CRM to illustrate the utmost importance of CRM mobile applications and how they can help you improve business performance.

AscendixRE is an advanced CRM tool designed for real estate professionals and powered by Salesforce. Being a cloud-based solution, it can easily work as a desktop or mobile solution, letting salespeople have wireless access to the same data from multiple devices.

Right from a mobile screen, brokers can view:

• communication history with a potential buyer / renter / landlord
• last purchase
• notes
• recent marketing mailings to the prospect, etc.

How Mobile CRM Helps Business | AscendixRE CRM

Having this intelligence on their mobile screen while they are on the go right before the meeting can provide the extra insight needed to close a deal.

3. CRM Helps Increase Customer Satisfaction by 27%

Another CRM advantage is that this technology helps your business deliver a connected engagement between your customer and their various digital touchpoints, such as salespeople, customer service agents, marketing campaigns, etc. Such department collaboration then results in a 27% boost in customer satisfaction, according to a Forrester study.

However, there is much room for improvement in this regard, as the Salesforce statistics show:

The Importance of CRM | Departments Collaboration

These are just a fraction of the whole spectrum of the advantages of CRM systems that can help your business grow and improve performance. To avoid getting lost, check our guide on how to choose a CRM system.

4. CRM Helps Improve Forecast Accuracy by 42% by Visualizing Core KPIs

One of the biggest CRM advantages in terms of business growth is the capability to visualize your organization’s activities by pulling granular information into well-thought-out dashboards.

Having all your data at your fingertips will then help you analyze certain customer behaviors and predict outcomes like subscription cancellation or purchase at a 42% higher accuracy rate, says Salesforce – one of the CRM industry leaders with more than 150,000 customers worldwide.

These bars and charts tell a story about the data in the system, such as the number of current leads, their demographics, marketing KPIs, ROI reports, etc., which otherwise would look like plain numbers. But remember, your records should be well organized, clean, and deduplicated. So, make sure your data sets have been properly migrated to the new system beforehand.

How a CRM helps business to grow | Dashboards within AscendixRE CRM

5. CRM Helps Automate = Reduce Manual Work = Cut Your Bills

Process automatization is another benefit of CRM software that can help your business grow without redundant manual work and at a cheaper cost.

Let’s take salespeople as an example. According to a recent study by CSO Insights, they spend only 25-30% of their time selling. The rest is spent on administrative work like qualifying leads, forecasting, routing leads, and researching.

The importance of CRM software in this regard is that it lets salespeople focus on what they do best. Here are a few thoughts on why you need CRM automation for your business:

• Rather than having to manually trigger certain emails (for instance, lease expiration notifications), AI-powered analytics suggests the ideal time for certain actions, and then you can automate them. You won’t have to worry about over or under ordering for peak season again.
• A CRM system can automate administrative tasks and eliminate the need for micromanagement as all the tasks are routed to the right people across departments.

With powerful analytics and your tasks automated you can grow your business and improve its performance with more productivity from invested time and money.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, a CRM system can help skyrocket employees’ productivity, connectiveness between departments, and forecast accuracy, thus giving you extra room to make your business grow.

Now that you know why use a CRM, the main question is what CRM system you need. You have several options here:

• If your business operates in a narrow-niche industry, like commercial real estate, you might need a highly specialized system like AscendixRE CRM, which has been tailored to real estate brokers’ needs. Check our featured case study with Cresa to see how you can benefit from our solution.
• You may also opt for generic CRM systems like Salesforce, which is great for any industry, from e-commerce to fintech. If you are new to the CRM world, it’s worth checking out Salesforce Quick Start Packages. The idea is to provide an economical packaged set of services that provides the fundamentals for a proper implementation such as data migration, light configuration, and training.
• To get the most value out of any CRM system, you may want to engage in large-scale implementation partner engagement, meaning that you will get your new system customized to your most demanding needs, your team trained, and your data migrated and properly groomed.