Marketing follow-up shines with improved CRM

Marketing conversations can go one of two ways: Either the salesperson starts on the back foot, trying to figure out what the client wants and offer up options that fit, or the seller is proactive, taking what he or she already knows and turning that into an irresistible pitch. While you can gain the occasional sale with the first approach, it’s far better to achieve the second. This is where CRM implementation comes in, taking information from throughout company architecture and delivering it to sales and marketing professionals in forms they can use immediately.

Using what you know
Corporate data can be locked away in places marketing and sales professionals cannot access. This division is due to the fact that these workers don’t have direct access to the software tools used by back office personnel while they work to fill customer orders. What they need is an interface that will make facts and figures available, preferably in formats that can be easily incorporated into sales strategies.

Upselling a product or service or gaining additional buy-in is a vital part of sales, and there is data that can help stored within the solutions that employees access every day. A good CRM solution will gather these resources and present them to front office personnel, helping them construct profiles of existing clients, determine how much profit those accounts are responsible for and figure out strong new strategies going forward. The difference between a data-driven sales effort and one carried out without good insights can be highly noticeable.

Some businesses end up storing client information in databases that differ wildly, with each salesperson who makes an initial contact creating a record, then failing to connect that data to the content created once the contract actually begins. Having information that is inaccessible is in many ways just as bad as not possessing that data at all. Only once it is freed up and presented to the appropriate employees does it live up to its considerable potential.

Choosing to implement a CRM solution
Many companies still lack CRM functionality. Finally adopting this tool may boost a business directly, as improved decision-making throughout the sales and marketing functions can help improve existing contracts and secure new ones. The problem isn’t collecting data. Chances are, the processes already in place are handling that capably. The real challenge is getting that information into a place and format where it can be seen and understood. That is where CRM comes in, acting as an intermediary.