Here’s the hard truth about even the best software; it cannot fix broken processes. This is especially true in the area of sales and customer service, where the best practices your team adopts can have a real impact on the corporate bottom line.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software, when used most effectively, engages existing clients while improving the time-to-close ratio for new customers. It can help sales teams by telling them when to follow up with a prospect and aid in communication between operations and front-end processes.
These are all great reasons to take the time to create a customer relationship management strategy. A CRM strategy means you’ll improve CRM efficiency and get your money’s worth from tools like Dynamics 365. Here are some best practices that will benefit your company.
CRM Strategy and Best Practices
The surveys show us that maximizing CRM efficiency can increase a salesperson’s productivity by 41%. But without an effective CRM strategy, you’ll likely join the ranks of 43% of all businesses that are failing to optimize these tools. How can your company take advantage of the big investment a CRM requires?
Here are some suggestions for developing a successful customer relationship management strategy for Dynamics 365:
- Benchmark your goals
Engage your sales and customer service teams in CRM efficiency by reviewing the features and benefits of Dynamics 365. Then look at how those features could influence your customer relationship and prospecting goals. Set clear, actionable benchmarks for each quarter after the rollout. Take the time to see how you’ve improved. - Prioritize your target audiences
One fact of life that you should never tell a customer is that they not all created equal. Use the CRM tool to help segment the most profitable from the least profitable customers. We know that retaining customers is just as important for finding new ones, so develop a CRM strategy that seeks to capitalize on both. Are there ways to upsell the low-profit customers to improve their spend? What kind of perks can you provide the high-dollar customers so they’ll stick around? - Use your CRM to track prospects, not just sales
Maximizing CRM efficiency means using it as a tool to build new relationships. Ideally, marketing will be inputting data into Dynamics 365, along with sales, operations, and fulfillment. The benefit of this customer relationship marketing strategy is that it will create a full 360-picture of the customer lifecycle journey. You’ll be able then to use the CRM to pull data analytics to help you improve CRM efficiency and customer engagement, - Sync all functions to the CRM
When using Dynamics 365 as part of the Microsoft suite of tools, it’s easy to sync back-end order fulfillment processes with front-end sales. The benefit is in CRM efficiency; sales appointments and customer service notes should automatically track throughout the CRM.
The benefit of creating a customer relationship management strategy is that it will help optimize the CRM to it’s fullest potential. You’ll have actionable metrics, a more efficient team, and hopefully, higher profits.
IES can help your team develop a CRM strategy for Dynamics 365. Contact us today to find out how we can improve your CRM efficiency.
