Seven changes to a CRM for business that drive customer growth

Grow and attract customers with a CRM for business

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Customer relationship management (CRM) software is central to running and growing a successful small business. Puttingthe customer at the heart of everything you domeans that every client communication, product sale, or service provision is based on their needs.

When you’re looking for thebest CRM software, it’s important to think about your growth strategy. Customer-focused, relationship-driven growth is essential. In a self-service, always-online, extremely competitive marketplace, personal attention matters. We all want to connect with businesses that care, and a CRM lets you add a personal touch to every interaction.

How are you going to leverage your CRM insights into changes you can make to improve revenue and profitability? There are several strongreasons to invest in a small business CRM. Once you’ve made a commitment, how do you use this powerful tool to actually grow your business?

We’re glad you asked.

1. Create a CRM baseline for your current customers and sales processes

If you want to grow your small business through a CRM, you need to know where you’re growing from. Getting measures in place helps you build a baseline of what’s happening right now. That’s a great starting point—you can make changes to your CRM process, and track how those improvements affect your success factors.

You’ll need to decide how deep and detailed you want to get with your baseline CRM metrics. We recommend focusing on high-level measures to track how your business is doing as a whole, and then drilling down into detailed metrics to track successes based on specific changes you’re implementing. For example, you might baseline and track your visits to the website from email when you’re making changes to your customer email messaging.

2. Understand the CRM areas that lead directly to customer and business growth

CRMs cover an increasingly wide range of activities, and it can be difficult to know where to begin. We recommend focusing on the activities that meet one or more of the following business goals:

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If you have an interest in marketing, you’ll see all of these as part of the marketing and sales funnel. Optimizing this funnel is one of your most important goals as a business, and your CRM for business has a huge part to play. Getting marketing and sales right directly leads to more customers—and, critically, higher revenues.

3. Prioritize small business improvements to increase customer awareness, understanding, and revenue

Each of the above areas breaks down into multiple drivers of business growth. You’ll want to prioritize one or two of these areas at a time to grow your business. Any more than that, and you’re likely to spread your resources too thin, and you won’t be able to track the changes that create the biggest improvements. Examples of priority areas might be:

Your business’s CRM will let you measure how things are currently working, make the changes you need to, and track improvements with your data. That’s the power of a good CRM for business: every part of what you do can be defined, baselined, measured, improved, and tracked. You can see what works, lock in those changes, and refine them further.

These are the prerequisites to CRM improvement—understanding how things currently are, identifying changes, and prioritizing the changes you want to make. Now, it’s time to convert all of that good intent into CRM actions and improvements. You can focus on the activities that will maximize growth in customers, revenue, and profits.

4. Use CRM to build trusted communications with your customers

Customer relationship management is all about the interactions and communications you have with clients. Sometimes, these are indirect—a promotion that speaks to a type of reader, or what a visitor learns through browsing your website. Sometimes they’re direct—the tone of your emails, or how your salespeople follow up on specific leads.

You can build trusted communications through:

5. Focus on strong informational and educational content for customers

Customers are often resistant to a very direct sales approach. Instead, many will want to take the time to learn about the niche that your products and services are in, and how those types of offerings can solve their problems or meet their needs. Your CRM can bring together data on the type of questions your potential customers are asking, and help you create interactions and content that builds connections and wins sales.

You can boost your informational and educational content through:

6. Optimize and split-test your business CRM sales process

Your CRM is the central tool your sales team will be using to guide customers through the sales process. It’s important to optimize every step of that process—from initial contact through to onboarding, and all the interactions you have with clients.

One of the most effective ways to do this is through “split-testing.” For each part of the sales process, a sales team member can choose to interact with a customer in one of two ways:

The idea is that when you’ve run enough customers through both versions of the sales process, you can see which performs best, and make that the preferred type of interaction. When you’re split-testing like this, you’ll want to change only one part of the process at a time, and just test the current baseline and the alternative. Then, you measure how many customers continue to the next stage, and optimize appropriately.

There are plenty of areas you can split-test, such as:

7. Measure and optimize your CRM changes as part of continual improvement

Growing your customers and your business is an ongoing process. There will always be new initiatives, more efficient ways of doing things, and the chance to interact with customers through more powerful communications. One of the great advantages of a CRM-centered approach to improvement is that you can prioritize, measure, make changes, and optimize every part of the customer relationship.

You can take the baseline you developed at the beginning, propose some changes, prioritize what you want to do, make the improvement, and track the impact. You can use that data in conversations with your sales and marketing teams to understand any benefits and drawbacks. You integrate the stuff that works, reject the stuff that doesn’t, and rinse and repeat.

Over time, this approach of continual CRM improvement will tweak and refine all of your customer interactions. You’ll sharpen up your sales processes, perfect your interactions, and master your communication channels.

You’ll attract more customers than ever before, because your CRM for business will tell you what works. Building strong, deep, trusted relationships will become second nature. Your customers will become advocates, and you can combine your business growth with creating deep customer value.

Those are the successes that a CRM-centered approach will generate. Learn aboutthe best CRM for small business, and go do it.

Seven changes to a CRM for business that drive customer growth#

1. Create a CRM baseline for your current customers and sales processes#

2. Understand the CRM areas that lead directly to customer and business growth#

Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter#

3. Prioritize small business improvements to increase customer awareness, understanding, and revenue#

4. Use CRM to build trusted communications with your customers#

5. Focus on strong informational and educational content for customers#

6. Optimize and split-test your business CRM sales process#

7. Measure and optimize your CRM changes as part of continual improvement#

Further reading on CRM software#