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Creating a CRM Strategy For The New Year
 

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” -Sun Tzu

Great technology alone doesn’t make a business successful. How an organization uses the resources at its disposal determines its ability to compete at a high level. Without a comprehensive business strategy, you’ll always be fighting just to keep your head above water. Daily efforts need to align with long term goals to produce meaningful growth, and Customer Relationship Management is no exception. 

You’re not paying hundreds of dollars a month to not use your CRM. This powerful technology offers tools for managing sales, marketing, and operations, but many businesses only use it to send emails. To optimize ROI, you’ll need a comprehensive “CRM Strategy” 

To start, let’s define what is a CRM strategy?

Business strategy mixes equal parts art and science. Creative insights need to be backed by measurable results, and align with overarching business goals. The tenets of any successful CRM strategy are transparency, accountability, and optimization. When executed correctly, organizations can expect their CRM strategy to yield a significant increase in productivity, lead generation, and revenue.

What does a CRM strategy involve?

CRM improves access to data by storing all of your company’s information in a single digital location. A Complete CRM offers tools for sales, marketing, and operations. Since the different facets of your business often operate using the same data, it’s critical that pertinent information can be easily accessed by all departments, without making your people waste time jumping through unnecessary hoops, just to get the info they need. The current state of information sharing technology, has left no room to justify subpar data management, and accessibility no longer has to impede security, because a Complete CRM offers both.

A Complete CRM will show your progress in attaining your goals, by providing detailed reports and metrics in each category. Click here to learn more about how to generate these annual reports inside GreenRope.

Why does your business need a good CRM strategy?

Consumers now have more choices than ever before. With the click of a button they can access goods and services from all across the globe. Modern technology has rocketed the supply curve skyward. To account for this, forward thinking companies have adopted customer centric business models, which leverage technology and process to offer their clientele more than ever before. Customer Relationship Management plays a critical role in high level customer support.

A Complete CRM strategy will allow you to:

  • Easily identify high value opportunities in your sales pipeline
  • Delight your customers with relevant and timely content at all touchpoints of the customer journey
  • Enhance collaboration among your sales, marketing, and customer service teams
  • Segment contacts to easily create targeted marketing campaigns
  • Generate and export detailed reports with analytics to inform and guide your business strategies moving forward

 

Steps to create a CRM Strategy

STEP 1: Outline Your Company’s Goals and Vision

Before we dive into mapping out the buyer's journey, it’s important to have a clear understanding of your overall business goals. If you want to improve your business, strategy you need not look any farther than your CRM’s dashboard feature.

To get a bird's eye view on your current processes, here are a few reports you can generate right from GreenRope’s CRM Dashboard:

  • Opportunity funnel & value
  • Overview of sent emails
  • Website tracking and lead scoring points
  • Top landing pages & blog posts
  • Transactions and conversions
  • Signup forms, ticketing, and events 
  • Database growth

STEP 2: Identify Your High Value Customers

Once you have a clear idea of what your company is trying to achieve, you want to make sure you’re targeting the right type of customer. This requires a firm understanding of who your customers are, and what media they find most accessible and relatable. It’s a simple formula; the right channels combined with the right messaging results in increased lead flow. 

So how do you identify the best channels and craft quality messaging? You want to start with developing a customer persona.This helps deliver your message to the right audience, using personalization and segmentation

Use GreenRope’s reporting to access the data points needed to craft your customer persona! Useful reports include:

  • Marketing reports for tracking engagement
    • Website Tracking
    • Campaign Analytics
    • Email Campaign Analytics
  • Sales reports for tracking conversions
    • Opportunities
    • CRM Activities 
    • Transactions and Conversions

Step 3: Define Your Customer Journey

Once you’ve developed your buyer persona and crafted a clear, appealing message, you’ll want to begin mapping out your customer journey. A well-built customer journey will detail each possible step in your customers’ buying process and present the myriad of avenues they can take in getting from point A to point B.  

The tricky part is there’s no standard for any organization’s customer journey. Each customer journey is unique to a particular company’s approach to lead acquisition and sales. You’ll need to map out every possible touch point, from getting awareness to conversion and beyond. 

  • When mapping out each touchpoint in the customer journey, ask yourself: 
  • What are your customer’s preferred methods of communication? Is there a better way to deliver your message?
  • At this point in the customer journey, is the next step? What are the touchpoints?  
  • What is the customer looking to achieve? Is there helpful content you could provide?
  • What challenges is the customer facing? How can we minimize friction?
  • What content does this customer receive? Is it relevant to them?

Once you’ve built your journey, it’s still not complete. You’ll need to periodically reassess and revise to ensure the best possible result. Understanding the types of customers that converted, the content they received, and how they engaged with that content will help build your strategy moving forward. 

To continue learning how to implement this in your business, check our blog to realize the Importance of a CRM Implementation Strategy

 

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