How to Make the Most of Your CRM for Business

Finally got a CRM, but don’t know what to do with it? Learn how to make the most of your CRM with these tips.

How to Make the Most of Your CRM

Your customer relationship management tool is one of the most powerful sales and marketing assets you have, if you know how to make the most of it.

A robust CRM system is the foundation of effective lead generation and nurturing, but it’s also a powerful source of customer data that you can use to achieve numerous other business goals. In essence, having a CRM tool at your disposal is one of the most important elements of success, especially when it comes to sales, marketing, and customer service.

Your CRM system allows you to boost your marketing and sales strategies with invaluable customer data, enable seamless collaboration between teams, and deliver a better customer experience overall. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Modern CRMs are equipped with a whole host of valuable features that make the lives of your employees much easier, and their efforts much more effective. Let’s explore some of these features and give you the best tips on how you can make the most out of your CRM.

Here’s how you can make the most of your CRM and ensure long-term success. 

Make onboarding seamless and effective

Firstly, you can’t hope to maximize the potential of your CRM in your company if your employees are unsure how to use all of its features. While it is true that comprehensive CRMs can be difficult to master due to the sheer number of functionalities they have, you can overcome this challenge relatively easily with a concrete training and onboarding process. 

This process needs to ensure that your employees are able to use your CRM consistently, in order to deliver consistent results and continue to guide leads down the sales funnel. You can automate this process with concise yet effective training videos, listing the best practices and concrete rules for using the CRM within your company’s unique sales and marketing processes.

Once you have a concrete training program in place, you can start using advanced features, extensions, and best practices to make the most of your CRM.

Use tagging and segmentation to your advantage

Your CRM has many great features that makes lead management and nurturing more efficient for your team members, some of which include customer tagging and segmentation. These features allow you to further personalize your marketing, sales, and support processes, by putting different customers into different tiers. You can use features like tagging, grouping, segmentation to differentiate between different types of leads and customers, giving every employee the data that they need to guide those customers towards a positive outcome.

Your CRM should allow you to categorize your leads and existing customers by age and gender, occupation and income, their unique interests, the way they consume online content, and more. Be as specific as possible when assigning tags and grouping your customers in order to empower your sales and marketing teams as much as possible to deliver personalized experiences.

Make it easy to manage contacts

The full power and potential of your CRM comes from its extensions and integrations, as you need to sync up your CRM with all the other data pools you’re using – such as your website, your analytics software, and even Gmail. In fact, it’s important to have a feature-rich Gmail CRM so that you can easily share your google contacts with your team members, and manage them more efficiently and effectively.

You can achieve this with innovative tools like Shared Contacts for Gmail, which you can integrate with your CRM to make contact management, sharing, and editing a breeze. Your employees can then work together based on these shared contacts to make smarter decisions, and turn leads into paying customers.

However, this is also important for risk management. If every employee has the same contact data, then they will know exactly how to proceed in communicating with that contact. This means that a sales rep won’t make the mistake of pushing sales-oriented messaging towards a potential customer who is not ready to buy – they will instead let the marketing team warm them up a bit first.

Integrate your CRM into your website

Another powerful way to utilize your CRM to its full potential is to sync up the tool with your website and your landing pages. This will allow you to gather invaluable user data from your website visitors, and make better marketing and sales decisions based on their browsing history and other key information. This is called behavioral data, and it can help you capitalize on every lead and turn website visitors into paying customers.

For example, you can set up your CRM to send personalized follow-up messages to potential customers after they have visited a certain landing page. Rather than losing a lead for good, your CRM will automatically reach out to ask the person if they have any questions, or if there is any way you can help them in their search for a product or service. This is one of the most powerful ways to leverage your CRM and the browsing data on your website.

Utilize the full power of CRM automation

Last but not least, while there are many benefits to using a CRM system in your company, one of the biggest advantages is the level of automation in modern CRMs. These tools are always evolving and getting new features, and developers are particularly focusing nowadays on automating as many repetitive tasks as possible. 

For example, you can automate the follow up emails we talked about before, or you can set up automatic reminders for different team members, automate parts of your workflow, and use automated features to simplify internal communication. The possibilities are numerous, so make sure to explore your CRMs automation capabilities thoroughly.

Over to you

Having a CRM system is no longer a luxury or an option, it is a necessity, one that will help you take your company to new heights of success. With these tips in mind, go ahead and make the most out of your CRM and empower your employees to achieve better results in 2022 and beyond.