Effectively managing the customer lifecycle – from marketing to sales to service – is critical to your company’s profitability and growth. That’s why many mid-market organizations have found value in choosing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for their businesses. But, what many people don’t know is that a CRM system can be so much more than your basic sales force automation tool that captures account and contact data. So I wanted to tell you a little more about how a CRM system can really impact your business by exploring the three main components of today's solutions.

Drive Marketing Effectiveness and Maximize Marketing Spend

With a CRM solution, you can improve marketing effectiveness by providing marketing professionals with flexible segmentation tools, simplified campaign management capabilities, intuitive response tracking, and insightful analytics. This can lead to an increased pipeline full of qualified leads that can then be prioritized and routed to the right sales representatives. Having a single system for managing and tracking multi-channel marketing campaigns from lead to close allows you to easily create dashboards and reports to see which of your marketing efforts result in the most sales. A CRM solution gives you the power to demonstrate marketing’s impact on your organization’s bottom line and lets you begin reinvesting in the tactics and strategies that work best for your business.

Help Salespeople Win More Deals

All CRM systems provide the ability to build a complete customer history, resulting in increased sales productivity. This enables sales representatives to focus on turning opportunities into closed business with a single place for updating deal information, recording customer interactions, tracking competitors, and creating quotes. Your CRM system should enable your team to not only find the information and history they need, but also allow them to perform forecasting and customer planning activities, such as contract renewals and selling upgrades, etc. By reinforcing your sales process in CRM, sales representatives will gain a proven methodology for managing and closing deals.

Furthermore, a CRM system will allow representatives and managers to gain visibility across deals and prioritize their selling time, giving them the ability to close the right deals faster and increase their deal size. The system also eliminates painful administration tasks by automating work flows and approvals. Finally, a CRM system will give your sales manager the ability to create ownership and accountability, as well as oversight by tracking all sales representative activity.

Create Lifetime Customers with Attentive Service

Your CRM system does not stop when a deal is closed. Continue building your 360-degree customer view with your CRM's service module for your customer service and technical support teams. Empower your people with tools that simplify case management, streamline escalations, improve knowledge sharing, and enable more effective account management. The result of these tools and processes will help your organization contain service costs without sacrificing service quality. In fact, your customers will be delighted with service representatives who are armed with all of their customer history and the knowledge base necessary to efficiently and effectively resolve their issues.