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CRM
How To Create A Successful CRM Strategy
lemlist team
June 7, 2024
|
7 min. read
lemlist team
LAST UPDATED
June 7, 2024
READING TIME
7 min.
As a business, the competition increases daily leaving your customers with multiple options to choose from. This is why to convert leads and not lose out to the competition, you need to prioritize your customer relationship management (CRM strategy).
In this post, we’ll share how you can create a successful CRM strategy with real-life examples from other businesses to inspire you.
What is a CRM Strategy?
A CRM strategy is a roadmap that outlines the specific actions, and tools you’ll use to manage the relationship with your leads and customers throughout their journey with your product/service. It prioritizes the customer and their experience by seeking out ways to build a lasting relationship with them.
For example, you send a series of email campaigns after someone signs up for your webinar. The outline of how and what you’ll use to send that campaign is your CRM strategy. Now this can vary depending on your specific business, however, really planning it is what will make it unique.
Your CRM strategy is specifically important because it creates a way for your business to improve customer relationships, boost sales and in turn revenue.
With an excellent CRM strategy you can;
Understand your client's needs and preferences better to increase customer satisfaction
Convert leads faster by sending targeted marketing campaigns using customer data
Provide exceptional service to increase customer retention
Gain valuable customer insights that can inform strategic decisions across your business like optimizing campaigns, improving products and more
7 Ways to Create a Successful CRM Strategy
Building a CRM strategy takes planning and careful consideration. After reviewing several business models, here are the winning strategies that have worked with examples of how you can implement them in your own business.
1. Start with a Goal
Like every other project, you need to map out goals and north star metrics you hope to achieve. These will guide you while implementing and optimizing the actual workflows. With clear goals, you’ll know what to work towards and how to get there.
For example, if you set a goal to increase the sales conversion rate by 15% within the next quarter, you can build up steps to get there. Some could be revisiting the sales funnel, optimizing for higher quality leads to increase the potential to convert and so on. The most important thing with setting CRM goals is that you should always ensure they are SMART - specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
2. Revisit and Rebuild Your Ideal Customer
Once you have a goal in mind, it's time to evaluate whether you’ve been targeting the right people all along. Remember, converting leads is easier for your sales team when you get high-quality leads from the start. So finding these people and having a good understanding of who they are can help you craft a winning CRM strategy.
Here’s an example - if you’re an e-learning platform offering professional courses with certifications, your target audience might be professionals seeking a promotion or self-development within a large firm.
It’s not enough to have an idea of who they are, you need the details to make a good sale. To understand the demographics, their needs, current challenges, and even preferred communication channels so you know where exactly to meet them. We recommend using a customer profile or a buyer persona similar to the one below.
3. Review Your Customer Journey and Sales Pipeline
Taking your persona's needs and motivations into account, build a pathway they would likely want to go through to stick with your business. Start from how they find your product/service up until the point where they convert. At each stage or touchpoint, analyze if you’re reaching them at all.
So for example, as a real estate agency, your persona spends a lot of time on YouTube. Showing an ad in the newspapers might not be effective especially if your persona doesn’t even read the paper. So you may want to look at how your best clients found your business.
The next step in the user journey might be to visit your website looking for an apartment, then book a viewing, making an offer before signing the contract. This entire flow could be your sales funnel but they are also touch points in your CRM strategy because you can optimize it to better nurture the relationship.
So think about what you can improve in each step after outlining them. Ask questions like is the right team handling this stage? Am I communicating the value they should be seeing at this stage well enough? And so on.
4. Go multichannel
Once you’ve identified all the potential touchpoints and corresponding channels, create plans for how to meet them at each stage. By this, we mean messaging. This is where you really nurture the relationship you’ve built. Review your case studies if they actually resonate with your leads.
Is your communication consistent? Are you even at the top of their mind? Evaluate all your sales channels. Are you communicating using the channel they prefer? You need to tailor each approach on these touchpoints in such a way that it syncs with their interests and any previous communications.
In this example above, you can see although there are multiple touch points there’s a reference to a workshop the lead might be interested in and it references the previous touchpoint. It's consistent and simple.
We recommend using lemlist’s multi-channel feature. You can send emails, linkedin messages, cold calls and more all from one sequence.
5. Automate as Much as You Can
Your CRM strategy should include timely prospects follow-up and the right tool allows you to automate the most time-consuming tasks so your team can focus on other important tasks. The more things you can automate, the better.
For example, you can automate the lead qualification process, set up a welcome email series and even how contacts move through several workflows. The outreach tool you choose will determine how much you can automate.
While lemlist isn’t a CRM, it does this well for salespeople.
With lemlist, you can even automate the lead generation process from finding contacts to verifying them before adding them to your database.
It also integrates with several CRM tools to make automation even quicker. This way the sales team won’t have to worry about manually scheduling follow-up calls or even generating reports to track any metrics. The tool lets you automate repetitive tasks throughout the sales funnel.
6. Collaborate, Track and Optimize
Your CRM strategy shouldn’t be limited to just the sales team. Since your CRM software is a central data management tool, you should include other teams like marketing, customer service and more. This way, they can also share the data and insights they get within the tool for a unified customer experience.
Once this holistic approach is taken, keep optimizing your new CRM strategy. Your CRM strategy is a document that should evolve along with your business and customer behavior. We recommend monitoring your KPIs, analyzing customer feedback and more to find areas for improvement.
Usually, CRM tools like lemlist will offer advanced reporting across several areas from revenue to the direct workflows and campaigns. Based on the metrics and feedback, you can then optimize for better results.
Key takeaways
Building a successful CRM strategy requires being very customer-centric. So the key to building a successful CRM strategy is to put your client, lead or customer in the forefront. Think about how to reach them better and make the relationships stronger with each step you take.
lemlist team
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