CRM Best Practices: Using Your CRM Analytics
Posted by Holly Rountree on Mon, Aug 22, 2011
CRM software is a great tool for tracking customer contacts, but if you don’t make use of the analytic capabilities of your software you aren’t reaping the full benefits of your investment. CRM best practices demands that your software allows executives and managers to make decisions with confidence. Here’s how:
Who are your customers?
CRM software allows you to sort your customers into categories. This segmentation might tell you about the geographical distribution of your customers, their size by revenue or number of employees, the business or industry they are involved in, or any other factor which may prove important to successful target marketing.
You might find key market segments you have been missing. You might also find information about what type of customer is most likely to provide repeat business or buy from you in the first place. Using your CRM software to analyze who your customers are (or aren’t) helps you realize a quicker return on your CRM investment
What do they want?
By tracking responses to marketing campaigns, conducting polls of existing and potential customers and other data gathering techniques, you can get a picture of the type of products your customers want. You can do what-if scenarios to see how likely a customer who bought one product is to buy a similar one.
Using your CRM software to analyze what your customers want will help you focus your product line as well as your marketing campaigns. Increased efficiency results in a higher ROI for your CRM investment.
What are they doing?
Event monitoring is another area available for analysis by CRM software. When does a customer reach a certain buying level? How long does it take? How long from lead generation to close? How quickly do you make a follow-up sale?
This kind of analysis can help you focus your sales cycle and marketing, again leading to increased efficiency and higher sales success.
Contact Harvest Solutions, a Customer Relationship Management, Sales Force Automation and Business Analytics consulting firm serving small to medium size businesses, for more CRM best practices or to share your own.
Harvest Solutions
We understand the importance of quality customer relationship management. We can perform a needs assessment for your business, followed by planning, customization, implementation and data integration services of your next CRM system. Our continued training and support ensures your business successfully implements the plan we create together. Request a consultation from Harvest Solutions today. Then, stay up-to-date by finding us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Learn more industry insights by subscribing to our YouTube channel and following our blog. Also, please give us a call now to schedule your free consultation! (877) 683-3313