B2B firms deal with larger sales cycles, lead nurturing, and remain in the hope that customers will invest in their product/service. Being strategic is very important to take your business to the next level.
Having strong B2B CRM software can help you deliver exceptional customer service at the same time make life smoother for your staff.
What Is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software?
A customer relationship management system (CRM) is software that can help you with storing customer information, track sales leads, analyze your profits and KPIs, and many more.
CRM software is particularly designed to make business processes more optimized and efficient in areas particularly sales, marketing, and service.
CRMs can store information about every customer interaction with a contact. To give an example, you can know how many times a customer has contacted or purchased from you. Hence, knowing customers’ tastes and preferences can help you market your products better.
What Types of Businesses Can Benefit From CRM?
Regardless of the type of business, a B2B service CRM can help you keep track of your customer information and business deals. The use of spreadsheets to maintain contacts is very time-consuming and is subjected to chances of manual data-entry errors.
What Are the Signs You Need a CRM Platform?
A B2B service CRM is a must-have to run your business successfully. Here’s why.
- Your contact database is jumbled up
When the contact information is stored in one central database, you have access to all the customer information such as customers’ past orders, previous interactions, purchase histories, and logged support tickets. CRMs also provide the functionality to clean up the database using search, filter, and merge-duplicate capabilities. This way you can remove unresponsive contacts from the database thus leaving more space for fresh contacts.
- There Aren’t Enough Sales Qualified Leads Coming In.
Your customers are not at the same point in the customer journey. Therefore each customer has different needs and concerns. A CRM can help you learn the needs of customers at various points in the customer life cycle and cater to their needs accordingly. The people who express interest in your product/service can be called a lead. A B2B customer service CRM software can give you insights on how to track a lead and convert it to a potential customer.
- Your marketing and sales teams aren’t working together.
You need to bring in a lot of collaboration among your teams because it is important that everybody understands where the rest of them are. Also sharing files, reports, hassle-free communication, and visibility to day-to-day tasks are all very important for the efficient running of your business.
A B2B service CRM can help your teams plan marketing campaigns, and target the right customers through end-to-end team collaboration.
- Internal and external communications are ineffective.
A CRM lets you understand your customers better as it maintains a 360-degree view of customer information. This eliminates the need of putting customers on hold while talking to them. They do not have to go on explaining, for example, about their recently placed order. You get all this information with a few clicks and can interact with the customer proactively.
- Prospects quickly lose interest.
Send lead nurturing emails to prospects to keep engaging them with your business. You can, for instance, send emails asking customers to sign up for a newsletter or register for a webinar, and so on.
Advantages of CRM Software for B2B Businesses
Read about the advantages of a robust CRM platform for a B2B organization.
- Simplifies B2B sales cycle
Customers consider numerous options before making a purchase such as reading reviews, making a physical store visit, or browsing through the website. They may also have to gain buy-in from the decision-makers of their organization. At the same time, B2B goods and services are investment-heavy. All this calls for effective marketing to prospects through the sales funnel.
- Allows for better contact management.
When a customer reaches out to you with a concern, CRM provides you with all the information you need to know about the customer such as their previous interactions, preferences, job title, place of business, and much such valuable information.
- Improves the customer experience.
Your customers can quickly access information and can do this at a personalized level as intelligent CRM solutions can customize the information to customers’ needs.
CRMs can make auto-suggestions or recommendations to customers based on their previous purchases, send ‘thank you’ emails or coupons or discounts at milestones, or on the occasion of special days.
- Customer retention is improved as a result of CRM.
Customers would love your business and become your advocates when you are able to understand their needs and serve them at a personalized level. By gaining insights from the customer data, CRM tells you what they want and how to serve them beyond their expectations.
- Prepares the Groundwork for More Effective Marketing.
CRM helps you prepare tailored marketing content that can be sent to customers at different stages of the customer lifecycle. A first-time visitor to your website would like to know more about your products or would like to try out a trial of your product whereas an existing customer may be seeking some add-ons or plug-ins. You can send appropriate emails to customers that actually cater to their needs.
How to Choose the Best CRM for B2B sales?
Here’s what you can consider while looking out for CRM platforms for a B2-B company.
- The Size of Your Company
The type of CRM you require may be determined by the size of your company; the service providers usually provide variable pricing, ranging from free to enterprise.
- Number of users
Find out how many of your staff will need access to the CRM to scale up their efficiency. Check this across various teams and departments.
- Apps from Third Parties
Consider all the third-party applications you’re currently using to run your company. Be it your ERP, Google Calendar, or e-commerce store make sure that the CRM you pick has the ability to integrate with external systems.
- Your Sales Methodology
CRM platforms are capable of serving different types of functions. It is your business strategy that will help you decide what will work best for your business. Some of the features that all B2B organizations must consider are lead and pipeline management, contact management, reporting, and analytics, invoice generator, and sales forecasting.
- Solutions that are all-in-one
Kapture CRM offers a user-friendly and simple interface, and contains a variety of functions to make your life easier at work, such as the following:
- Following up on leads
- Organizing meetings
- Chat in real-time
- Templates for emails and tracking
- Personalization of email campaigns
- Marketing automation across all channels
- Invoice generation
- Knowledge management
A CRM is important for your B2B Company from planning targeted email campaigns to delivering speedy responses. Analyze the features of leading CRMs in the market, pick the right one, set up and deploy, and observe how your business thrives as you keep turning your customers into loyal ones.
