Customer relationship management (CRM) is fast becoming the determining factor for business growth in the e-commerce industry. With so many competitors out there offering the same product line, prospective customers have no incentive to remember your brand, let alone purchase from you. To differentiate your company from a pool of competitors, you need to offer more than just an extensive product range and value for money.
A recent paradigm shift has prompted the concept of Customer 2.0. These customers have entirely different needs compared to traditional consumers. While Customer 1.0 was loyal, traditional and valued face-to-face interaction, Customer 2.0 is quite the opposite - it demands instant gratification, hyper-presence from companies and minimal face-to-face interaction.
To accommodate these needs, many companies are turning to CRM platforms for better customer visibility, seamless third-party integrations and deeper insight to beat the competition, and Salesforce is just the right candidate for the job.
Understanding department needs
The objective of implementing a CRM system is to improve your understanding of customer needs, but you need to understand the requirements of your internal departments before doing so. To start with, you should assess the requirements of your sales, marketing and customer service departments as they will experience the greatest benefit with your new CRM system.
Customer service – The primary role of customer service is to remediate problems for users. This could be as simple as changing personal details for customers, to escalating more severe issues and managing communications on a user's behalf.
This department will want to offer better customer support experiences with a faster mean time to remediation (MTTR), and automated feedback collection to maintain a proactive approach to customer service. Your CRM system will need to facilitate all of these.
Marketing – With marketing, the objective is to attract customers through advertising, social media and website content generation. Specifically, marketing teams are ideally looking to find loyal prospects that offer a recurring revenue stream for the business.
This department will want the ability to identify high-value prospects and target them with personalized advertising to maximize the chance of a sale. They will need email campaign automation, real-time customer insight and historical reporting to create a marketing formula that works for your business.
Sales – The role of a sales team is to carry prospective hot leads through the sales pipeline and close the deal. In simple terms, they contact customers who are on the fence but ready to make a purchase. Besides highlighting the benefits of your product, the sales teams also allay any concerns to finalize the sale.
Your sales team will want more time at hand to do the core job of selling and less time performing manual tasks. This can be accomplished by automatically cleansing the sales pipeline, thus narrowing the scope of your sales teams' efforts. With Salesforce, you can take advantage of drip campaigns, which automatically contact relevant leads and assess their interest in your product or service. If a prospect is interested, they will be moved up the sales pipeline with a lack of interest moving them down or out of the pipeline. This allows your sales team to prioritize their efforts better and maximize prospect conversion.
Case Study: Salesforce Application Support & Maintenance
Visualizing the sales pipeline
Once you understand the requirements of your internal departments, you should then look to visualize the entire sales pipeline. The increased visibility offered by a CRM platform will allow you to categorize prospective customers and assign them to relevant departments.
Geolocation – For global enterprises, prospects in the U.S. should be assigned to your North American operations team, and vice versa. This ensures that your staff speak your customer's language and will be in the office during times of peak demand to answer queries.
Lead temperature – Your CRM system can automate the categorization of customers, and one crucial aspect of this is measuring the potential ROI for leads based on the key data points. A cold lead won’t appreciate a direct phone call from a sales operative, as much as a generic marketing email will be of no value to a warm lead. By categorizing these prospects, you can tailor your marketing and sales approach, increasing the chance of converting prospects into sales through drip marketing.
Understanding your data requirements
In a world of big data analytics, it may seem like more data is always better. In reality, a CRM platform will operate more efficiently and offer more targeted insights, if you perform regular data cleansing.
Removing duplicate entries and categorizing customers will improve querying times, but more importantly, it will simplify data compliance management. Keeping your CRM datasets up-to-date will allow for quick and easy data deletion to adhere to the GDPR and CCPA. By regularly cleansing your CRM data, you can also maintain an up-to-date list of fresh, warm prospects, maximizing the potential of marketing and sales initiatives across the business.
Create a CRM implementation framework with Salesforce and Trianz
We are a leading customer relationship management consulting firm, which has partnered with Salesforce to deliver industry-leading customer relationship management functionality for our clients. Our expert team of consultants can step in at any stage in your digital transformation journey, assessing and implementing leading software and hardware solutions to drive business growth.
Get in touch with our customer relationship management consultants and convert more leads into sales with Trianz and Salesforce today.
