Customer Relationship Management
Challenges
CRM is all about understanding what you know, and accessing the right information
when you need it.
By focusing on the right people and relationships, you’ll be able to help your
customers but also improve your own sales funnel.
Understanding your relationship with your customer is an ongoing process. It’s not
just about getting new leads and converting them into customers: the aim is also to
retain and develop customers for the long term.
If you’re going to take customer service seriously as something to be measured and
improved, you need to keep track of all your customer interactions.
This is the key to giving customers a satisfying experience, reducing their frustration
and making sure their needs are not only met but anticipated in advance where
possible.
Why CRM matters
- Business need to know whtheyre working with identical, accurate and up-to-date
information across teams
- Customer service teams cant satisfy customers and perform their best if they dont
have full knowledge and records about them. This can result in less personalized
customer interactions
- Without accurate information about sales and service team performance,
businesses can lose money by investing resources in the wrong things.
Why using a CRM
To track
- Potential customers
- Customers that are in the process of making a purchase
- Customers that have previously purchased from the company
- How well employees, projects or efforts are performing
The Sales Process
Prospecting
To sell anything, you first need customers to whom you’d like to sell. A lead is an
individual or organization with an expressed interest in what you are selling. It is
simply another way of referring to an interested or potentially interested customer.
Prospecting, sometimes referred to as lead generation, is the process of identifying
potential customers.
Inbound leads are leads that come directly to a business and express their
interest.
Outbound leads are leads that businesses seek out and reach out to in order to
sell to them.
Qualifying
Once the marketing team generates leads, the next step is to evaluate whether
those potential customers have a need for the product or service and can afford it.
This process is called qualifying. The marketing team does the first round of
qualifying, which is used to weed out leads that would be a waste of time to continue
to pursue. Once a marketing team has done a simple round of qualifying leads,
these leads are considered to be marketing qualified leads (MQLs). These
leads are now ready to move into the next phase of the sales process.
When an SDR determines that a lead is qualified, it becomes a prospect.
A prospect is a potential customer that is qualified as fitting certain criteria. Think
of the qualification process as a filter between leads and prospects.
Presenting
Here the AE presents what the company has to offer to the prospect. This is one of
the most crucial stages of the sales process: AE need to present the product or
service in a way that solves an issue that the customer is facing.
In this stage, AEs will schedule presentations and demos, conduct additional
research on stakeholders to prepare, and will develop specific recommendations for
how the product or service can be used.
In this stage, AEs will also handle objections or hesitations that prospects have
about the deal. Prospects might be hesitant to commit for a number of reasons, even
if they’re interested in a product or service — for example, price, timing, and general
fear of change.
It’s the AE’s job to address all of the prospect’s concerns by demonstrating the value
of the product or service, as well as what the risk or cost might be if the prospect
chooses not to buy.
Closing
This stage captures everything that needs to be done in the end stages of a sale to
get a prospect to sign a contract and become a customer. In this stage, the AE will
get the decisions from the client on whether they will be moving forward with the sale
or not.
Customer success
The relationship between a business and a customer doesn’t end when the customer
signs a contract. In fact, what comes after they sign — the actual business
relationship — is what ideally lasts the longest! In the customer success stage of the
sales process, businesses must provide post-sale support so that customers
continue to want to buy from the business and so that they are encouraged to refer
the business to other potential customers.
