What is a CRM and its benefits

CRM is short for Customer Relationship Management. It is a software for managing all your relationships with your potential customers.

CRM is a tool which helps with contact management, sales management, pipeline, productivity, and more. In a CRM you can save the history of your transactions with your clients, make phone calls and emails to them, create a weekly or monthly report, add notes for each and every customer, manage the pipeline, and more.

For most businesses, their most valuable and important asset is their customers. In the early days at a lot of companies, the details about those customers -- who they are, how they’ve interacted with your organization -- are spread out in many different places like spreadsheets, The CEO’s brain, a sales rep's inbox, the accountant’s stack of invoices, and a lot of other similar places.

When your business has just started, it is ok to maintain your customer records like this, but once your customer base increases or when your business starts to grow, it quickly becomes necessary to have one central place where all of this information can live. This is where CRM plays a role.

With a CRM tool, you can just have all your customer information in one place. The dashboard can tell you a customer's previous history with you, the status of their orders, any pending customer service issues, and a whole lot more. This kind of information helps you keep your customer happy. A happy customer is one who will come back again to buy your product -- they might even recommend your products to other people!

Without a CRM, your sales team will still be generating leads, talking to customers, and scheduling meetings. However, all this information will be stored mostly in excels or notes or in heads of the salespeople. Details can get lost easily and more often, meetings won’t be followed up. A single client might communicate with you through different modes like a phone call, mail, or via social media pages and most of the time the communication with your clients go missing and your salespeople won’t have an idea when that deal will get closed or what is the customer’s communication history. A CRM tool is proven to increase sales by 37%.

Benefits of using CRM software:

1. Web-based application
Most, if not all, CRM systems are web-based applications. So you can work from anywhere. The updated information is available to anyone who needs it.

2. Supports integrations
You can integrate your CRM with a variety of applications like marketing automation tools, live chat software, and helpdesk software.

3. Increases referrals from existing customers
With all the customer data in the CRM tool, your sales reps can serve the customers better which, in turn, increases your chances of getting a referral from them.

4. Improve products and services
With the help of a CRM, you can consolidate a lot of information from a huge number of sources. This information can give you an overview of how your customers feel about your products and services, as well as the opportunity to improve.

5. Better communication
A proper CRM can help you keep all the records of your communications with your customers, helping avoid any information gap.

6. Healthier pipelines
CRMs help you see your pipeline very clearly. This helps you keep track of the number of leads that come in every day, your conversion rate, and more. A clear view of your pipeline makes it easier to prioritize the potential customers and close deals easily.
Do you want to see a CRM in action? Request a demo now for MaxCustomer here. (https://maxcustomer.com/)