CRM: Managing Every Customer Interaction
How can you enable your team to deliver, capture, and manage every customer interaction across all channels?
Customer data is crucial to an organization in order to better understand their current clients and attract new ones. However, capturing quality data and managing it to get a 360 view is no cakewalk. That is why Marketing and Sales teams rely on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to store and manage this data in a centralized location. In fact, a study from Salesforce indicates that CRM software can increase sales by 29%, improve sales forecasting accuracy up to 32% and improve sales productivity by almost 40%.
What is a CRM?
CRM is a technology that gathers and manages all of your customer interactions across channels. By managing this data, a CRM system can overall improve the customer experience, streamline processes, and drive business.
While Salesforce reports that “81% of sales reps believe it is important to have a connected view of data across the entire customer journey,” a big challenge lies in the way = lack on integrated systems. This can overall hurt a business as “high performing sales teams are 2.1 times more likely than underperformers to have these systems in place,” Salesforce shares.
Are You Leveraging All of Your Customer Data?
The pandemic pushed more companies to embrace digital tools for the management of customer conversations. Statista reporting that in 2020, the global sales performance management software market was valued at 1.58 billion dollars, it’s set to increase to 1.79 billion in 2025.
Many organizations are leveraging these tools to get the insights they need from their data to enhance the customer journey. Around 92% of teams say they use a database to store customer information. However, a lot of businesses don’t have an easy way to manage all of this information and identify quality data. A recent GDS Group poll asked senior sales executives at the 2022 RevGen Digital Summit, “what is your biggest challenge around data?” Almost half, (41%) of people voted that it’s getting the right data, to the right people, at the right time. 38% voted data quality as their biggest challenge.
Be Customer-Centric
On top of that, with company data growing at a rapid rate – an IDC survey reveals that 68% of data available to businesses goes unleveraged. So, understanding your customer data and putting them at the center of our strategy is crucial in 2022. Deloitte claiming that customer-centric companies were “60% more profitable” than those organizations that are not focused on the customer.
Challenges For Sales Leaders
CRM data alone can’t guarantee sales performance and results. It comes down to the people. “It’s extremely fundamental to the success of any of these complicated strategies to start with the people” shares Joshua Tillman, CEO at Conquer. During a recent RevGen Digital summit, Joshua moderated a roundtable discussion group titled, ‘Capture & Deliver your Data:
Manage every customer interaction all from a single pane.’
“We like to start the conversations around the user experience. Those are the users on the frontline, managing and engaging the customer interactions across the omnichannel…and not only make it seamless and easy to meet the buyer where they are – but that those interactions are all logging intelligently within our CRM and utilizing those datasets to help other related systems. So, we are taking labour intensive activities away from the sellers and helping them concentrate on the customer experience and the engagement.”
During that roundtable discussion, senior leaders focused on what systems are utilized within their CRM, where sellers spend their time and where they meet the buyers across the journey. Overall trying to see how they manage and identify the importance of the data. They spoke about what technologies are chosen, implemented, and executed – but also how to have sales teams lean in effectively and adopt these technologies to execute goals.
“Resources follow results.”
-Joshua Tillman, Conquer
Start With the People
But it’s not all about the technology! Joshua shares, “when we start with any of these big enterprise deployments, we have to do the discovery of what is the role responsibility, tools, technology and expected deliverable results from the people – and then we can look at the tools and technology. I often find that these large enterprise deployments that we specialize in, focus on technology and then you wind up with a very complicated stack. You wind up hearing challenges around adoption of the sellers and huge expenses of deep technology that is being heavily under-utilized. So, I think its fundamental to start with the people.” He says after that, they often start with the technology and then the process.
So, how can you enable your team to deliver, capture, and manage every customer interaction across all channels? While there is no one size fits all, come join one of our GDS Group Summits to share more with your industry peers!
GDS Summits are tailored 3-day virtual event conferences that bring together business leaders and solution providers to accelerate sales cycles, industry conversations and outcomes. Regarding the RevGen Digital Summits 100% of Delegates said the overall experience of Digital Summit they attended was Above Average or Excellent and 100% of Delegates said the Digital Summit provided them with actionable outcomes to support their current initiatives.
For more, click here to hear from attendees on how GDS has helped them to achieve their business outcomes.
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