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• How to create a CRM strategy that drive ...

How to create a CRM strategy that drives sales and loyalty

A CRM strategy is a company-wide plan to increase revenue and improve customer relationships using specific actions and technology. In this piece, we teach you how to build a CRM strategy with the use of CRM software. CRM software helps teams turn strategy into action by consolidating data. It also helps teams improve existing CRM strategies to better meet customer needs.

In business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, the buyer journey is paramount. Happy customers are loyal to brands they love. So whether you’re in charge of sales, marketing, or customer service, your business processes should focus on customer needs.

This cyclical process increases customer retention while keeping potential leads front of mind. Whether you’re starting a new business or you’re an established company wanting to develop a CRM strategy for a new initiative, this piece will teach you how to build a CRM strategy from the ground up so you can set and reach your business goals . 

What is customer relationship management (CRM)?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a term that refers to practices, strategies, and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. The goal of customer relationship management is to improve customer experiences, support customer retention, and ultimately drive business growth.

CRM systems compile customer data across different channels, which may include a company's website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials, and social media. By leveraging this information, businesses can make data-driven decisions about their target audiences and learn how to best cater to their needs.

However, it's important to note that CRM isn't just about using technology to collect and manage customer data. It's a holistic approach that requires a customer-centric philosophy and culture within an organization. This customer-centric focus is what drives the development and implementation of a CRM strategy, which we'll explore in the next section.

What is a CRM strategy?

A CRM strategy is a company-wide plan to increase revenue and improve customer relationships using specific actions and technology. CRM software helps your team turn strategy into action by consolidating data and giving you insight into your customer’s online behavior.

An effective CRM strategy has various touchpoints that each target customers in their own unique way. The touchpoints you create should lead your potential prospects down the sales pipeline . Touchpoints may include:

Online shopping

Email sign-up form

Social media platforms

Customer service chat portal

These predetermined touchpoints lead potential customers through your website and direct them toward a product to purchase. Combined with CRM software and data from your website, you can use this information to analyze customer behavior and create additional touchpoints that better serve buyer needs.

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How to create an effective CRM strategy

When you build a CRM strategy from the ground up, your CRM software won’t have data from past funnels to report. However, you can use market research and some old-fashioned critical thinking to help build your customer base.

1. Define your business goals and KPIs

When you have clear business goals , you’ll have an easier time building your CRM strategy. Without goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) in place, any CRM strategy you create will likely struggle to point your customers in the right direction. 

For example, if one of your business goals is to double sales next quarter, you can use your CRM strategy to answer the following questions:

What will doubling our sales require?

What must we do to increase our customer base?

What must we do to keep current customers coming back?

Can we get current customers to refer their friends?

Having defined your CRM strategy goals, you need to give your teams some concrete targets to work towards. Some metrics you may wish to measure include:

Sales cycle length

Sales close rate

Customer satisfaction

Customer retention

Customer churn

Profitability per customer/account

Tip: You may have sales goals that don’t involve customers. For example, you may be able to double your sales next quarter by improving your product or revamping the backend of your website. But remember that CRM strategy is a customer-centric methodology.

2. Outline the customer journey and define your target customer

The best way to ensure customer satisfaction is to understand who your target market is. This is called a buyer persona, and there are typically more than one of them. Each different type of customer should have their own persona. Then, you can use this information to further customize your sales funnel.

To identify your ideal persona(s), use market research to analyze who has bought your products—and your competitors’ products—in the past. Collect metrics like age, gender, race, location, level of technology use, preferred social media platform, and socioeconomic status to map specific touchpoints for every customer. All of this information, together, makes up the ideal customer(s) you’re selling to.

Once you identify who your ideal buyer is, you can use their demographic information to figure out where they spend their time online. For example, which social media apps do they use most frequently? How do they relate to brands online? Understanding their online habits can help you identify where and how to connect with them.

Tip: With buyer persona charts, you’ll create an in-depth profile of a potential customer. It’s important to get detailed with each customer profile so you can put yourself in their shoes and find ways to guide them through their sales journey. But keep in mind that each persona represents an entire group of people you intend to target. 

3. Map the sales pipeline and plan your customer experience

Once you know who your target market is, you can create your initial touchpoints—or the first moments of customer engagement. Align your sales pipeline with your CRM strategy so you can visualize where to take action when things go awry. 

Common sales pipeline stages include:

Lead generation

Lead qualification

Initial contact

Making an offer

Negotiation

Closing the deal

For example, if metrics from your CRM software show that you have both a high number of website visitors and a high bounce rate, this means prospects are coming to your website, but they’re leaving before making a purchase. By comparing that to your sales pipeline, you can see that you have a problem somewhere between initial contact and closing the deal. 

The next step in your CRM strategy is ensuring you have the resources and processes to provide a 360-degree customer experience. Check each team's roles and responsibilities.

Can your marketing team analyze customer feedback and gather information effectively?

Can your sales team automate any sales processes to increase speed and efficiency?

Can your customer service team onboard and support customers effectively?

Remember to infuse every customer interaction with a personalized experience by keeping your communications relevant and engaging throughout their lifecycle.

Tip: Your CRM strategy is a more refined version of a traditional sales funnel. Both the traditional sales funnel and your CRM strategy aim to attract and convert prospects, but your CRM strategy improves upon the traditional sales funnel by considering your customer’s specific interests and needs.

4. Organize your internal processes

To execute your CRM strategy, your team members must understand and know how to manage CRM technology. CRM software can help team members in customer service, sales, and marketing reach departmental goals such as:

Increasing lead generation

Reducing bounce rate

Improving customer retention

Revamping marketing efforts

CRM software can also streamline data across departments, which provides a comprehensive view of your customer base and promotes cross-functional collaboration. This integration enables your teams to make data-driven decisions, derive valuable insights for business growth, and improve forecasting accuracy.

A CRM platform lets you consolidate customer data from different departments, such as marketing, sales, and customer service, in a single dashboard. Teams can leverage this real-time data quickly and efficiently to improve their productivity.

Example: a unified dashboard can prevent sales reps from wasting time asking customers the same questions or handling data twice.

Outline processes in your CRM strategy that facilitate this, including employee education, keeping data error-free, and integrating disparate data.

Tip: Have your team members set SMART goals that align with your CRM strategy. By setting measurable and time-bound goals, you can track the real-time progress of each goal and KPI against the metrics in your CRM software. For example, if a sales team member’s goal is to generate 20 leads per month in the next quarter, the CRM tool will not only show how close they are to achieving this goal but also track the conversion rate and effectiveness of their lead management strategies. 

5. Define CRM components

Defining and organizing your CRM components means getting specific about who you plan to target and when. By using CRM software, you can organize potential customers into categories like contacts, leads, prospects, and opportunities.

Contact: Someone you’ve previously done business with.

Lead: Someone you haven’t worked with but could have business potential.

Prospect: Someone who fits your target market and has the power to initiate a purchase. 

Opportunity: A prospect who has shown interest in your product and is ready to make a purchase.

Once you’ve grown a list of contacts through social media, an email list, or an e-commerce platform, your CRM platform will automatically pull in this contact information and use marketing information to categorize each lead. 

Tip: Depending on the CRM tool you use, your team may also benefit from more specific contact categories. Nurtured leads are people that fit your target market but haven’t yet shown intent to purchase. Marketing qualified leads (MQL) are people who have shown some level of intent to purchase. Sales qualified leads (SQL) are people that the sales team is actively trying to convert into customers.  

6. Invest in a CRM system and deliver personalized experiences

CRM systems keep your sales pipeline flowing as current customers cycle through it and new customers flow in. Your CRM tool should integrate across various platforms so you can intake analytics information—from your website or email management tools—and export the next steps to create the best customer journey possible. 

In particular, the right CRM software should integrate with your project management software . That way, team members from all silos can use updated customer information in daily project decision-making.

A successful CRM strategy ensures that all your business processes and workflows, from marketing and sales to IT, work together systematically. This helps you better understand who your potential customer is and what they need.

Statistics show that customers prefer a personalized experience. For example:

80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience.

63% of consumers won't buy from brands that have poor personalization.

42% of customers are frustrated by impersonalized content.

Personalization improves the customer experience and, ultimately, drives revenue and customer loyalty.

Tip: The customer journey doesn’t stop with the sales team, and your technology shouldn’t either. That’s why Asana’s work management tool offers robust, cross-platform integrations with the best CRM software, like Salesforce , Zendesk , and Hubspot . When you combine Asana for work management with your favorite CRM tool, team members across all teams have a clear idea of what they need to do to close deals and keep customers satisfied beyond their purchase. 

7. Reduce costs with marketing automation

With a CRM solution, you can save time and money by automating repetitive administrative tasks, such as feeding lead data, purchase history, and customer segments into your sales pipeline.

CRM marketing automation examples:

Instead of manually typing in data, you can set up your lead capture forms to automatically sync with your pipeline.

Set up email templates that are correctly formatted with your tone of voice and personalized with the correct contact information to save time and boost sales.

Tip: Automating your sales processes will free up additional time for your sales reps. They can invest this time nurturing leads and closing more deals, shortening the sales cycle and reducing costs.

8. Track your CRM performance and engage stakeholders

Finally, you want to ensure that you track your team's performance to ensure they're achieving their individual targets and meeting your CRM strategy goals. This involves closely monitoring aspects like follow-up actions, the impact of email marketing campaigns, and how well different customer segments are being served. You can easily track performance with the help of reporting and analytics dashboards that come built-in with most CRM platforms.

Tip: Regularly review your CRM metrics and share valuable insights with key stakeholders to ensure your CRM strategy continues to align with your overall business strategy and small business needs. Their input can help refine your approach.

CRM strategy examples

CRM software provides you with insights on how to better serve your customers. Depending on your product offerings and target audience, you may notice that the people you want to reach get most of their information from blog posts. Or maybe they spend a lot of their time on social media. 

You can improve your marketing tactics for both new and existing customers by using these insights to your advantage. Consider these examples of different CRM strategies 

Example 1: Value-added content

People use Google as a first resort to answer questions and search for product offerings. If your site ranks at the top of Google for a specific keyword or question, then users are more likely to visit your website. 

The best way to rank on Google is to create valuable, SEO-optimized content that’s relevant to your product. Consider writing content for people in various stages of their sales journey to move them through the sales pipeline. 

Some people may not be ready to buy your product, but they’ll have relevant questions you can answer. 

Others may want to know more about the differences between products, which means they’re further along in their sales journey and are closer to making a purchase.

Example 2: Loyalty and rewards programs

Customer loyalty and rewards programs keep first-time buyers coming back. You can customize one of these programs for your product by offering:

Other bonuses

These incentives encourage customers to make purchases and refer their friends. 

Consider airline companies with complex loyalty programs that offer: 

Miles on credit card purchases

Discounted flights

Priority boarding. 

These perks keep passengers dedicated to one airline even if other airlines occasionally offer them better rates.

How to implement a CRM strategy

Now that you understand what a CRM strategy is and have seen some examples of successful CRM strategies, it's time to put your own strategy into action.

Here are some key steps to effectively implement your CRM strategy:

Get buy-in from leadership and key stakeholders. Before you can successfully implement a CRM strategy, you need to ensure that your company's leadership and key stakeholders are on board. Share your CRM strategy plan with them, highlighting the benefits it will bring to the business, such as increased customer loyalty, higher sales, and improved efficiency.

Choose the right CRM software. The CRM system you choose should align with your business goals and CRM strategy. Look for a solution that offers the features and integrations you need, such as contact management, sales automation, marketing automation, and analytics. Consider factors like ease of use, scalability, and pricing when making your decision.

Train your team. Once you have your CRM software in place, it's essential to train your team on how to use it effectively. Provide comprehensive training sessions that cover all aspects of the software, from basic navigation to advanced features. Ensure that everyone understands how the CRM strategy aligns with their individual roles and responsibilities.

Integrate your CRM with other systems. To maximize the effectiveness of your CRM strategy, integrate your CRM software with other systems for your business processes, such as marketing automation tools, customer service platforms, and accounting software. This will provide a more comprehensive view of your customers and streamline your workflows.

Monitor and analyze your results. Regularly monitor and analyze the results of your CRM strategy using the reporting and analytics tools provided by your CRM software. Track key metrics like customer acquisition, retention, satisfaction, and churn rates to gauge the success of your strategy. Use these insights to continually refine and optimize your approach.

Continuously update and improve. A successful CRM strategy is not a one-time effort; it requires ongoing maintenance and improvement. As your business grows and evolves, so should your CRM strategy. Regularly review your processes, gather feedback from your team, stakeholders, and customers, and make adjustments as needed to ensure that your CRM strategy continues to support your business objectives.

Level up your customer experience with CRM software

When you make customer satisfaction a top priority, you can increase your chances of profit growth and secure a long-term spot in the market. Customer relationships are more important than individual purchases because building trust leads to invaluable name recognition and lead generation.

CRM software levels up your customer experience by helping you keep track of different customers and their needs. It’s difficult to make customer support feel personal, but when you use sales management software, your team members gain perspective and can make every customer feel supported.

Related resources

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How Asana streamlines strategic planning with work management

What is management by objectives (MBO)?

Write better AI prompts: A 4-sentence framework

How to Write a Business Plan for CRM Software: Key Considerations

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Are you considering starting a CRM SaaS business? With the rapid growth of the CRM software market, now is the perfect time to dive into this lucrative industry. According to recent statistics, the global CRM software market is expected to reach a value of $80.45 billion by 2025 , growing at a CAGR of 14.2% from 2019 to 2025. This indicates a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs who are looking to offer customer-centric software solutions.

However, starting a CRM SaaS business requires careful planning and strategy. To ensure your success, it's important to follow a step-by-step process. In this blog post, we will guide you through the 9 essential steps to write a business plan for your CRM SaaS business. By following this checklist, you will be well-prepared to launch your business and attract customers in no time.

So, let's jump right in and explore the key steps you need to take to create a comprehensive business plan for your CRM SaaS business.

Conduct Market Research

Market research is a crucial step in creating a successful business plan for a CRM SaaS business. It allows you to gain a deep understanding of your target market, identify potential customers, and assess market trends and dynamics. Through market research, you can gather valuable insights that will help you make informed decisions and tailor your product to meet the needs and preferences of your target audience.

There are several key aspects to consider when conducting market research for your CRM SaaS business:

• Identify your target audience: Determine the specific industries, businesses, or individuals that would benefit from your CRM software. Consider their unique needs, pain points, and the potential benefits they would gain from using your product.
• Analyze market trends: Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and developments in the CRM industry. This includes understanding the shift towards cloud-based solutions, the increasing demand for analytics and reporting capabilities, and any emerging technologies or features that could impact the market.
• Evaluate customer preferences: Gain insights into what customers look for in a CRM software solution. This could include factors such as ease of use, customization options, integration capabilities with other software, and the level of customer support provided.
• Assess the competitive landscape: Research and analyze your competitors in the CRM SaaS market. Identify their strengths and weaknesses, pricing models, target customers, and any gaps or opportunities in the market that you can capitalize on.

Tips for conducting effective market research:

• Utilize a combination of primary and secondary research methods. Primary research involves directly gathering data from potential customers through surveys, interviews, or focus groups. Secondary research involves analyzing existing data and reports from industry publications, market research firms, and government sources.
• Engage with potential customers and industry experts through online forums, industry conferences, and networking events to gain firsthand insights and feedback.
• Consider partnering with a market research firm or hiring a researcher to help you collect and analyze data effectively.
• Regularly monitor and update your market research to stay informed about evolving customer needs and market trends.

Define Your Target Audience

Defining your target audience is a crucial step in creating a successful CRM SaaS business. Understanding who your ideal customers are will help you tailor your product and marketing strategies to meet their specific needs, leading to higher customer satisfaction and increased sales.

1. Research your market: Conduct thorough market research to identify potential customers for your CRM SaaS business. Analyze the industry trends, customer preferences, and pain points to gain insights into who would benefit the most from your software solutions.

2. Segment your audience: Divide your target market into distinct segments based on demographics, industry type, company size, or any other relevant factors. This will allow you to create targeted marketing campaigns and personalized messaging that resonates with each segment.

3. Identify customer personas: Develop fictional representations of your ideal customers, known as buyer personas. These personas should include details such as their job title, responsibilities, pain points, goals, and preferences. Understanding these personas will help you determine the features and functionalities your CRM software should offer.

4. Conduct market surveys: Engage with your target audience through surveys or interviews to gather their feedback. This feedback can help you understand their needs, preferences, and challenges in managing customer relationships, allowing you to refine your product offerings and tailor your marketing messages accordingly.

Tips for defining your target audience:

• Look for common characteristics among your existing customers to identify patterns that can guide your targeting efforts.
• Consider partnering with market research firms to gain access to valuable consumer data.
• Keep track of industry trends and changes in customer behavior to stay ahead of the curve.
• Regularly reassess and refine your target audience as your business evolves.

By defining and understanding your target audience, you can tailor your CRM SaaS business to meet their unique needs and position yourself as a valuable solution provider. This differentiation will help you attract more customers and drive the success of your business.

Analyze Your Competition

When starting a CRM SaaS business, it is crucial to thoroughly analyze your competition. Understanding what other companies are offering in terms of customer-centric software solutions will help you identify gaps in the market and differentiate yourself from the competition. Here are some key steps to follow when analyzing your competition:

• Research and Identify Competitors: Begin by making a list of all the companies that offer CRM SaaS solutions in the market. Look for both direct competitors who provide similar software and indirect competitors who might have overlapping functionalities.
• Study Their Offerings: Take the time to explore and evaluate the features and functionalities of your competitors' CRM software. Pay attention to their user interfaces, integration capabilities, reporting and analytics features, and any unique selling propositions they highlight.
• Assess Pricing Models: Analyze how your competitors are pricing their CRM SaaS solutions. Look for any pricing tiers or packages they offer and determine how their pricing aligns with the value they provide to customers.
• Evaluate Customer Feedback: Read customer reviews and testimonials about your competitors' software. Pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses customers mention, as this insight can help you identify areas where you can provide a better solution.
• Identify Market Share: Research the market share of your competitors and assess how dominant they are in the CRM SaaS market. This information will give you a clearer picture of the competitive landscape and help you understand the challenges you may face.
• Keep track of emerging competitors or new entrants in the market who may disrupt the industry with innovative solutions.
• Look for opportunities to differentiate your business by offering unique features or targeting specific industries that are underserved by your competition.
• Consider conducting surveys or interviews with potential customers to gather insights on their experiences with existing CRM SaaS solutions and their pain points.

Analyzing your competition will provide you with valuable information to refine your own CRM SaaS business strategy. By understanding what sets your competitors apart, you can position your product as the better choice and tailor your marketing and sales efforts accordingly.

Determine Your Unique Selling Proposition

Once you have conducted market research and analyzed your competition, it is crucial to determine your unique selling proposition (USP) . This is what sets your CRM SaaS business apart from competitors and convinces potential customers to choose your solution.

To identify your USP, consider the specific features and benefits of your CRM software that make it stand out in the market. What problem does it solve for customers? How does it improve their customer service and communication processes? Highlight these unique qualities and emphasize their value to potential customers.

Tips for determining your unique selling proposition:

• Focus on the customer: Understand your target audience's pain points and position your CRM solution as the answer to their needs.
• Showcase your innovation: Highlight any innovative features or functionalities that differentiate your software from competitors.
• Emphasize the benefits: Clearly communicate the benefits and outcomes that customers can expect from using your CRM solution.
• Provide social proof: Share testimonials or case studies from satisfied customers to build credibility and demonstrate the effectiveness of your solution.
• Stay true to your brand: Ensure that your USP aligns with your overall brand identity and messaging.

By determining your unique selling proposition, you can differentiate your CRM SaaS business and effectively communicate your value to potential customers. This will help you establish a strong market presence and attract the right audience for your software solution.

Create A Pricing And Revenue Model

Creating a pricing and revenue model is a crucial step in developing a successful CRM SaaS business. It involves determining how you will charge customers for your software solution and designing a strategy to generate revenue for your business. Here are some important considerations to keep in mind:

• Understand your value proposition: Before creating a pricing and revenue model, it's essential to clearly define the value your CRM SaaS business provides to customers. This will help you determine the price you can charge for your software solution and justify its value to potential customers.
• Research the market: Analyze the pricing models of competitors in the CRM SaaS industry. This will give you insights into industry standards and help you determine whether you want to adopt a similar pricing strategy or differentiate yourself through unique pricing approaches.
• Consider different pricing strategies: There are various pricing strategies you can choose from, such as subscription-based pricing, usage-based pricing, or tiered pricing. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, so evaluate which option aligns best with your business goals and target audience.
• Include value-added services: Apart from the base software offering, consider offering additional value-added services that customers can opt for at an extra cost. These services could include enhanced customer support, data migration assistance, or personalized training sessions. This can help you increase the overall revenue generated by your CRM SaaS business.
• Test and iterate: Pricing and revenue models may require adjustments over time based on market dynamics and customer feedback. Be open to experimentation and collect data on customer response to different pricing strategies. This will allow you to refine your model and optimize revenue generation.
• A/B test different pricing levels to find the optimal balance between attracting customers and maximizing revenue.
• Consider offering a free trial or freemium model to encourage customers to experience the value of your CRM software before committing to a paid plan.
• Regularly assess customer needs and market trends to ensure your pricing remains competitive and aligned with the value you provide.

Develop A Marketing And Sales Strategy

Developing an effective marketing and sales strategy is crucial for the success of your CRM SaaS business. This is the step where you outline your plans to promote your product and attract customers. Here are some important considerations:

• Identify your target market: Understand who your ideal customers are and what their needs and pain points are. This will help you tailor your marketing messages and sales approach to resonate with them.
• Create a compelling value proposition: Clearly communicate the unique benefits and value your CRM SaaS software offers compared to your competitors. Highlight how it can solve customer's challenges and provide them with a better customer experience.
• Choose appropriate marketing channels: Determine which channels will be most effective for reaching your target audience. This could include online advertising, content marketing, social media, email marketing, or partnerships with industry influencers.
• Develop a content marketing strategy: Create informative and engaging content that educates your target audience about the importance of CRM and how your software can help them improve their business processes. This could include blog posts, ebooks, webinars, and case studies.
• Implement lead generation tactics: Use various lead generation techniques such as offering free trials, demos, or gated content to capture potential customer's contact details. This will allow you to nurture and convert them into paying customers.
• Build a strong sales team: Train and equip your sales team with the knowledge and resources they need to effectively sell your CRM SaaS software. They should be able to articulate its value and address customer's concerns.
• Measure and analyze your marketing efforts: Track key performance metrics such as website traffic, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, and customer lifetime value. This will help you identify which marketing and sales initiatives are most effective and optimize your strategy accordingly.
• Invest in user-friendly demo videos and tutorials to showcase the features and benefits of your CRM SaaS software.
• Consider offering incentives for referrals to encourage satisfied customers to promote your product.
• Build relationships with industry influencers who can endorse your CRM SaaS software and expand your reach.

Identify Potential Partners Or Investors

When starting a CRM SaaS business, finding the right partners or investors can be crucial to the success and growth of your venture. Partnerships and investments can provide the necessary resources, expertise, and networks to help you establish and scale your business.

Here are some key steps to identify potential partners or investors:

• Define your ideal partner or investor profile: Determine the specific qualities, skills, and resources you are looking for in a potential partner or investor. Consider factors such as industry experience, financial capabilities, and compatibility with your business values and goals.
• Tap into your network: Utilize your professional network, industry contacts, and industry events to connect with potential partners and investors. Attend conferences, join industry associations, and leverage online platforms to expand your reach and establish meaningful connections.
• Research potential partners or investors: Conduct thorough research on potential partners or investors to ensure they align with your business objectives and have a strong track record. Look into their previous investments, partnerships, and reputation in the industry.
• Engage in discussions and negotiations: Once you have identified potential partners or investors, initiate discussions and build relationships. Clearly articulate your business proposition, highlighting the unique value your CRM SaaS business brings to the market. Be prepared to negotiate terms, such as equity shares, investment amounts, and involvement in decision-making processes.
• Seek advice from industry experts: Consider seeking guidance from industry experts or business advisors who have experience in your specific market. They can offer insights and recommendations on potential partners or investors that may be a good fit for your CRM SaaS business.

Remember that finding the right partners or investors is a crucial step in building a successful CRM SaaS business. Take the time to research, network, and engage in meaningful discussions to identify partners or investors who can contribute to your business's growth and success.

Define Your Organizational Structure

In order to effectively run your CRM SaaS business, it is important to define your organizational structure. This will help you establish clear roles and responsibilities, ensure efficient workflow, and create a strong foundation for growth and scalability.

Here are some key steps to consider when defining your organizational structure:

• Determine key functions: Identify the key functions necessary to operate your CRM SaaS business. This may include areas such as development, customer support, sales, marketing, and finance.
• Assign roles and responsibilities: Clearly define the roles and responsibilities within each function. This will help ensure that everyone knows their specific tasks and objectives.
• Establish reporting lines: Determine the reporting lines within your organizational structure. This will define how information flows within your business and ensure effective communication.
• Consider team size and growth: Determine the number of employees required for each function and anticipate future growth. This will help ensure that you have the right resources in place as your CRM SaaS business expands.
• Balance workload: Distribute workload evenly among team members and ensure that everyone has a manageable workload. This will help prevent burnout and maintain productivity.
• Regularly evaluate your organizational structure to ensure it aligns with your business goals and objectives.
• Consider hiring experienced professionals who have expertise in the CRM SaaS industry to help drive your business forward.
• Encourage open communication and collaboration within your organizational structure to foster a positive and productive work environment.

By defining your organizational structure, you will set the framework for a well-organized and efficient operation. This will not only benefit your internal workflow but also contribute to customer satisfaction and overall business success.

Create A Financial Plan

Creating a financial plan is a crucial step in developing a successful business plan for your CRM SaaS business. A well-crafted financial plan will not only provide a clear picture of your expected expenses and revenues, but it will also help you make informed decisions and secure funding from potential investors or partners.

Here are some important components to consider when creating your financial plan:

• Income Projections: Start by estimating your expected income, including revenue from subscriptions, licensing fees, and any additional services you may offer. This will help you set realistic targets and assess the potential profitability of your CRM SaaS business.
• Expense Forecast: Identify and detail all the expenses associated with running your CRM SaaS business. This may include costs for software development, infrastructure, marketing, salaries, and other operational expenses. Be sure to account for both fixed and variable expenses.
• Cash Flow Management: It is crucial to monitor and manage your cash flow effectively. Create a cash flow statement that outlines the inflows and outflows of cash on a monthly basis. By analyzing your cash flow, you can identify potential gaps and take appropriate measures to ensure sufficient liquidity.
• Break-Even Analysis: Conduct a break-even analysis to determine the point at which your CRM SaaS business will start generating profits. This analysis can help you understand how much revenue you need to cover your expenses and determine your pricing strategy accordingly.
• Consider consulting with a financial advisor or accountant for expert guidance in creating your financial plan.
• Regularly review and update your financial plan as your business grows and evolves. This will help you stay on track and make necessary adjustments to achieve your financial goals.
• Be conservative in your financial projections to account for potential challenges and uncertainties.
• Keep detailed records of your financial transactions and maintain accurate financial statements for future reference.

In conclusion, writing a business plan for a CRM SaaS business requires careful consideration of various factors. By conducting thorough market research, defining your target audience, analyzing competition, and determining your unique selling proposition, you can develop a solid foundation for your business. Additionally, creating a pricing and revenue model, developing a strategic marketing and sales plan, identifying potential partners or investors, defining your organizational structure, and creating a financial plan will help ensure the long-term success of your CRM SaaS business.

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11 Successful CRM Strategies to Grow Your Business

What is it? A CRM strategy is a business plan to grow sales and improve customer service via marketing campaigns, customer support, and sales teams. Why CRM? Customer relationship Management systems help this strategy by fascilitating the communication with and the service of customers.

A CRM strategy sounds intimidating to many small businesses. Is it about technology or sales? How high-level should it be?

We’ll walk you through the basics to help you start your successful CRM strategy from scratch.

What was once the traditional buyer-seller model has shifted to customer-centric. Customer relationships today require more maintenance, which is why businesses now have entire CRM strategies dedicated to managing them.

Consumers have higher expectations when it comes to customer service. If you can’t give them what they need, they’ll look somewhere else.

When we hear the words ‘CRM strategy’, we’re inclined to think about CRM software or CRM technology. But software is only one piece of a much larger puzzle.

The best strategic customer relationship management incorporates both people and software. It needs:

• CRM database (with contact information)
• Management tools
• Marketing efforts

Table of contents

What are the benefits of a crm strategy for my business.

• 11  successful CRM strategies  

Launch your CRM strategy today

There are a number of reasons why your business needs a CRM marketing strategy.

A successful CRM strategy will help you:

• Provide an enjoyable customer experience at all touchpoints of the customer journey, leading to customer loyalty
• Strengthen collaboration between sales, marketing, and customer service teams
• Clearly and quickly identify the most worthwhile leads and opportunities, and move them down the sales pipeline with the help of marketing automation
• Keep track of your leads and customers as they move through the sales funnel
• Segment contacts into effective target audiences
• Run targeted marketing campaigns 
• Provide data insights for sales forecasting and inform your future business strategies

Read more: 8 Key CRM Benefits for Small Businesses

11  successful CRM strategies  

Our top CRM strategies to follow to drive sales and improve performance.

1. Define your CRM strategy vision and goals

The first thing to do before creating a CRM strategy is to revisit your overall business strategy and high-level business goals.  

Create a vision of what you want to achieve from the CRM strategy. That way it has a clear purpose from the very beginning. 

Think about how you want to contribute to the success of your business.

Increased customer satisfaction, higher productivity and efficiency, and decreasing customer churn rates are all examples of common CRM strategy goals.

Remember, your CRM strategy is not an end in itself. It exists to drive business goals. So you need to integrate it into the overall strategy of the business.

2. Define your target customer with buyer personas

Create a buyer persona that represents your ideal customer based on market research and the marketing team's collective insights. Make it as detailed as possible. Include customer information such as demographic and behavioral characteristics, as well as interests, challenges, and aspirations.

Here are some research methods you can use:

• Interview your sales and customer service teams 
• Study different customer profiles and even interview customers directly
• Send customer surveys
• Hold a focus group with customers/clients
• Use Google Analytics to gather demographic data about website visitors

To maintain strong customer relationships and attract quality leads, you need to understand exactly who is purchasing from you and why .

Having a clearly defined buyer profile is essential to becoming a customer-centric business. It’s key to ensuring your teams are focused on the true needs and expectations of your customers.

That’s not the only benefit. Knowing exactly who to target will also ensure your sales and marketing don’t waste time on unsuitable leads.

3. Study the market and decide your positioning

It’s always a good idea to look to the competitive landscape for inspiration when developing CRM strategies.

Ask yourself:

• Where does your company fit into the market?
• What is your unique selling proposition (i.e. what makes you different from others in your space?)
• How do your competitors differentiate themselves?
• What opportunities exist?
• Can you learn anything about how your competitors handle customer relationships?
• What are the trends in your industry right now?

4. Define your customer journey

Customer journey example from GCH Hotel Group ( Source )

To master customer relationship management, you need to know each and every step of the customer journey. Then you need to ensure a top-notch customer experience at each of those touchpoints.

Start at the beginning.

Map every single customer interaction from the moment they first discover you. It might be through social media posts, email marketing , direct contact with team members, or other processes.

This is where you’ll highlight areas for improvement and establish who is responsible for what.

When mapping each stage of the buyer journey, ask yourself:

• Which team/process is interacting with the customer at that moment?
• How can these interactions be improved?
• Look at the buyer personas developed in Step 2. Based on what you know about your customer, is this his or her preferred means of communication? Could there be a more effective way to get your message across?
• What’s the customer trying to achieve?
• What challenges does the customer face? How can you offer better support?
• What content is the customer coming into contact with?

5. Plan how to provide a 360° customer experience

Your CRM strategy planning so far should have highlighted the areas that need improvement.

Now you’re going to look at the structure of your internal processes. Do you have the resources in place to provide a 360-degree customer experience?

Do an audit of roles and responsibilities to check all the necessary bases are being covered.

Here are examples of areas to optimize processes:

• Presales: How are you doing when it comes to analyzing customer needs, gathering information, and putting together business cases?
• Sales processes: What sales tasks can be automated to increase efficiency?
• Customer relationship management: Are your offers tailored to your customers’ needs? Are your communications personalized and relevant?
• After-sales: Have you got the necessary support systems in place to resolve customer problems quickly? What feedback do you receive on the quality of your customer service? Do you need to be able to follow up with customers regularly?

In short, ask yourself ‘How can I do it better?’ and then make the necessary changes within your organization.

Further reading:   11 Customer Experience Trends for 2024

6. Automate the customer journey

When you have a general idea of your touchpoints, streamline that customer experience with automation workflows. Use automation to stay in touch with leads and send them information, tips, offers, retargeted ads and more.

For example:

• Set up a welcome email and onboarding series to get leads familiar with your brand or service. 
• Funnel contacts into workflows for special offers and discounts.
• Use cross-selling workflows to recommend new products.
• Launch retargeting Facebook ads to recapture prospects that didn’t bite.
• Send push notifications when a contact’s favorite item is on sale.

With marketing automation , you can target specific steps in the customer journey to bring leads through your sales pipeline.

7. Know your product or service

Take the time to revise and develop your product/service narrative and elaborate your value proposition.

What are the messages you want to transmit? What benefits do you want to highlight? Why should a customer choose you over your competitors?

Communicate this narrative internally and implement employee training where necessary. Everyone needs to be on the same page, relaying the same message.

This is also a good opportunity to define your brand tone of voice and put in place best practice guidelines for communicating with customers.

8. Implement CRM software

A CRM system streamlines collaboration between teams, stores, gathers, and refines customer data, and tracks all interactions between you and your customers.

CRM solutions simplify contact management and are essential for understanding and catering to your customers.

It’s impossible to drive your CRM strategy forward without CRM software for your business.

A CRM solution streamlines contact management

To choose a CRM platform, evaluate your existing business processes and get input from your various teams. The main factors to be considered are price, capabilities, and ease of use . It’s important to choose a CRM tool that integrates with the other marketing tools you use.

The Brevo CRM Suite, for example, has a Sales Platform fully integrated with the other marketing channels offered. Manage deals in the pipeline and assign tasks to your salesforce for an effective workflow.

If you already use Brevo for marketing, communication history will appear in each contact profile along with engagement metrics. You can set task reminders and send emails directly from the contact profile page.

With the Meetings feature, you can also create custom booking landing pages and schedule demos, consultation sessions, and other meetings directly with potential customers.

Get started with Brevo's sales solutions

Define best practices to support your CRM strategy using the tools in your software. When and how will your teams use this software? How will you use it to create an engaging experience for your customer base?

Then, set up what counts as a lead, a prospect, or opportunity according to your CRM strategy. Remember to clean your contact list before importing it to start off with an organized and up-to-date database.

9. Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

All strategic actions need to be backed up by figures and data – and your CRM strategy is no exception. You need to be able to measure its progress.

You outlined your CRM strategy goals. Now, you’re going to give your sales team some concrete targets to work towards. 

Remember to set smart goals for your marketing and sales teams. S.M.A.R.T stands for S pecific, M easurable, A chievable, R ealistic, and T ime-bound.

Examples of performance metrics you may wish to include are:

• Customer satisfaction
• Customer retention
• Customer churn (when a customer leaves the company)
• Profits (overall total, totals per customer/account)
• Sales cycle length

Some goals might be increasing your SMS contact list by 30% this year or improving customer satisfaction rates for better long-term retention.

Real company, real success: Fashion retail company Videdressing needed to improve email engagement with customers. Videdressing signed up with Brevo and increased click rates by 15% using data from the CRM to personalize its email campaigns. Read the whole story  here .

The success of your CRM strategy depends on the levels of engagement and collaboration of your teams and the capabilities of your strategic CRM.

Get your employees on board from the beginning. Keep them informed, educated, and up to date on all aspects of your CRM strategy.

10. Segment and personalize with CRM data

With CRM software in place, you have the tools to build rich customer insights right on your computer. Your CRM can segment customers into groups who share common characteristics. 

Group contacts based on how often they buy, what stage in the customer journey they are, or even based on their purchase history.

Then, create targeted and personalized content for these contact groups. 

• Send activity-based messages like 1-year anniversaries like Spotify’s Wrapped (year in review) campaign. 
• Personalize campaigns for frequent shoppers or loyal customers. 
• Send back to school discounts for young adults.
• Promote city party essentials for contacts in urban locations.

You can personalize content for any audience group you like and reap the benefits.

Further reading: The Best Customer Segmentation Examples for Digital Marketing

11. Keep improving with reports and analytics

The journey doesn’t end with making a sale. Track your performance and continue improving your sales cycle and marketing efforts. 

Whether it’s tracking revenue, sales cycle length, or finding where you lost customers, CRM reports simplify analysis. 

Knowing how your campaigns perform with concerete analytics will help you see what’s working and what needs to be worked on. 

In Brevo, for example, you can get reports for your sales and marketing campaigns. For sales, see revenue, win rate, reasons for losses or wins, and other key metrics. Marketing campaigns give you insight into conversions, open, bounce, unsubscribe rates, and more. 

Brevo conversion rate sales report

Brevo win/loss sales report

Reports take the guesswork out of improving CRM strategies. The result is efficient problem-solving and more time for your team to spend where it counts most.

A well-thought-out CRM strategy will do wonders for your customer retention and sales.

Follow the 11 CRM strategies above and you’ll be well on your way to customer relationship management success! The best CRM is the one that fits your business needs and budget.

Brevo offers all the sales tools you need to drive revenue and deliver seamless customer experiences. Track deals, book meetings, make phone calls, and collect payments — manage the entire sales cycle and all your contact data in one place with Brevo.

About the author

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Crm Business Plan (Why You Need One & How to Write It)

Starting a CRM business may sound like an easy thing to do. However, it's not the case since starting such a business involves a lot of things to settle. In general, there's so much more to starting a CRM business that you need to have a business plan to be successful. Otherwise, you will end up being overwhelmed with so many things.

Now, if you're wondering about a business plan and how it's essential as you start your CRM business, you've come to the right place!

A business plan for a CRM business generally illustrates your goals, financial strategies, research, and everything else involved with your business. It contains the strategy for guiding and helping you start and run your business.

In this article, we'll talk more about the business plan for a CRM business and every concern you may ask about, mainly how to write one.

Without further ado, let's get into it!

What is a CRM business plan?

A CRM business plan is a document that defines (in detail) a CRM business' objectives and how it plans to achieve its goals.

For instance, a CRM business typically needs an initial investment. As such, you need to include the said amount in your plan and how you can acquire such, either from your pocket or through a business loan or any other financing option (learn more about a CRM business financing .

Profit and goal are other examples. It is also included in your business plan as a goal to achieve within a set period, usually within months.

Overall, the business plan is the document that lays out a written road map for the CRM business from a marketing, financial, and operational standpoint. You should also have a basic idea about a CRM business profitability .

Business plans are essential for startups and established businesses, and the CRM business is no exception. Every business, regardless of the type, should have one.

Further, business plans are critical documents for internal and external audiences. For instance, you may use these plans to attract investors before establishing a track record. It can also help you secure loans from financial institutions.

Business plans can also help keep your CRM business' leadership team on track for meeting established goals and on track with strategic action items.

Overall, business plans are particularly helpful for new businesses, including the CRM business. Ideally, goals should be reviewed and updated periodically to reflect achievements or changes. When an established business changes direction, a new business plan is created.

Why do you need a CRM business plan?

You need a CRM business plan for several reasons. However, the main reasons are to help you establish your company, set the goals you want to achieve, and evaluate your CRM business’ status after a specific timeframe.

As a general rule, your business plan serves as a guide. Revising and adjusting this plan may also be necessary as circumstances change throughout your actions.

You should know that if you plan to apply for a business loan (which any knowledgeable entrepreneur should do), lenders want to see a business plan.

For your CRM business to succeed and meet your goals, you need a precise and robust business plan.

Learn more about starting a CRM business :

Where to start?

-> How to start a CRM business? -> How to finance a CRM business? -> How much does it cost to start a CRM business? -> Pros and cons of a CRM business

Need inspiration?

-> Other CRM business success stories -> Marketing ideas for a CRM business -> Crm business slogans -> Crm business names

Other resources

-> Profitability of a CRM business -> Crm business tips

How to write a CRM business plan?

When creating a business plan, you need to include more than just the steps on how you start. It also includes how you will sustain it and how you can develop it even further as you move forward. Simply put, it should include everything related to your CRM business.

If you’re wondering how to write a business plan for your CRM business, here are the things you need to include:

1. Executive summary

The executive summary in a business plan includes a gist of your entire CRM business. Further, it includes the general reason why it will turn out successful.

2. Company description

The company description details every information about your CRM business. As such, it includes your advantages over your potential competitors and the things that make your business stand out above other similar companies.

3. Organization and management

The organization and management are the part of your business plan that states the structure of your CRM business.

It includes the entire staff, especially the ones who will run your CRM business, whether you’re solo, with a partner, or with a group of people. Simply put, it shows what type of business you run and who is responsible for it.

4. Market analysis

The market analysis is the part of your business plan that shows your perspective on the industry where your CRM business belongs.

Since it’s about marketing, it includes your target market or customers. Further, it includes your potential competitors since they can take away your potential customers.

5. Financial plan

The financial plan is the part that concerns everything related to your CRM business finances. This document consists of a detailed financial statement and an analysis of your finances and the required funds .

6. Marketing strategy

The marketing strategy outlines the concerns about reaching out to potential customers . Moreover, it demonstrates how to expose the products and services your CRM business offers.

Besides attracting customers, it also includes strategies for gaining new customers and keeping the regular ones from leaving. Finally, it outlines strategies for increasing sales for your CRM business to grow.

What makes a good CRM business plan?

A good CRM business plan serves as a roadmap that outlines the strategies and actions required to achieve the goals and objectives of a business. It typically includes information about the business's products or services, target market, competition, marketing and sales strategies, operations, financial projections, and management team.

Here are some key elements that make up a good business plan:

• Executive summary : This is a brief overview of the entire business plan, summarizing the key points and objectives of the company.
• Company description : This section provides detailed information about CRM business, including its history, mission statement, and legal structure.
• Market analysis : This section should describe the industry and market that CRM business operates in, including target customers, competitors, and market trends.
• Products or services : This section should describe the products or services CRM business offers, highlighting their unique features and benefits.
• Marketing and sales strategies : This section should detail the strategies that CRM business will use to promote and sell its products or services, including pricing, distribution, and advertising.
• Operations : This section should outline the day-to-day operations of CRM business, including manufacturing, production, and distribution.
• Financial projections : This section should provide detailed financial projections, including income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements.
• Management team : This section should introduce the key members of CRM business's management team, highlighting their qualifications and experience.

Overall, a good CRM business plan should be well-researched, realistic, and focused on achieving specific goals and objectives. It should also be adaptable and able to evolve as the business grows and changes over time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can i write a crm business plan myself.

Yes, you can write a CRM business plan yourself. It requires a clear understanding of your goals, target audience, competition, financial projections, and marketing strategy. Research successful plans and use templates. Ensure it's comprehensive, realistic and seek help if needed. Ultimately, a good business plan sets you up for success.

How long should a CRM business plan be?

There is no standard length for a CRM business plan. It can range from a one-page summary to a comprehensive document of 50+ pages. The length depends on the complexity of the business, audience, and purpose. A concise plan that covers key elements is often more effective than a lengthy one.

In a nutshell, creating a business plan for a CRM business is a bit complicated, but you still need to do it.

Overall, a business plan will help you make the right calls, obtain the funding you need, and strongly start your new CRM business. As such, you must make a robust and precise one.

The six parts we included above should be handy throughout this process. With this information, you can begin writing your business plan and see what it takes to become a professional entrepreneur.

• How Much Money Do Crm Businesses Make? (2024) 1 of 11
• 250+ Catchy CRM Business Slogans 2 of 11
• 10 Tips For Starting A Successful Crm Business (2024) 3 of 11
• How Much Does It Cost To Start A Crm Business? (In 2024) 4 of 11
• 14 Crm Business Success Stories [2024] 5 of 11
• How Profitable Is A Crm Business? (Updated for 2024) 6 of 11
• How To Start A CRM Startup 7 of 11
• 1,000+ Best Crm Business Names 8 of 11
• 37 Pros & Cons Of Starting A Crm Business (2024) 9 of 11
• 87 Marketing Ideas For A Crm Business (2024) 10 of 11
• How To Finance A Crm Business? [2024] 11 of 11

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How to create a successful CRM strategy for your business

A solid customer relationship management (CRM) strategy is crucial for any business planning to use a CRM platform.

The two go hand in hand — using the software without the strategy is like steering a ship without a rudder. In effect, a CRM strategy determines how a business uses the CRM software, as well as its people and processes.

In this article, we’ll highlight the benefits of using a CRM strategy and show you how to create a successful one for your business that works in tandem with a robust CRM system.

Try monday sales CRM

What defines a successful CRM strategy?

A CRM strategy is a company-wide plan for your business to enhance customer relationships, grow revenue, and ultimately increase profit using specific actions and technology.

Many people often use the term CRM (customer relationship management) to describe the software used to manage customer relationships. However, CRM also covers the strategy, processes, and people a business uses to engage and convert potential customers while retaining current ones.

The CRM cycle involves several key stages for managing and improving customer relationships across sales, marketing, and customer service activities. These stages typically include:

• Reach: The first step involves generating brand awareness through various marketing channels like social media and paid adverts.
• Acquisition: The next stage involves reaching out to potential customers and acquiring them as leads or prospects.
• Conversion: Once leads are acquired, the focus shifts to converting them into paying customers through targeted sales and marketing efforts.
• Retention: After acquiring customers, the goal is to retain them by providing excellent customer service and maintaining ongoing communication.
• Loyalty: Building customer loyalty is the final stage of the CRM cycle, where you create long-term, loyal customer relationships.

( Image Source )

By understanding and effectively managing these stages, businesses can improve their sales, marketing, and customer service efforts to increase customer satisfaction and company revenue.

Why a CRM system is essential for your business

A CRM system enables you to manage your customers throughout their entire lifecycle so that every team can access the same information.

While implementing a CRM system before creating a CRM strategy is unnecessary, they are interconnected. For example, with a CRM system, you get access to features like:

• Contact management : Get a 360-degree view of your customers with up-to-date contact and account information records. Log activities, send emails, and access all past interactions, deals, and projects associated with an account or contact in one visual format.

• Lead management : Collect and qualify leads from various sources in one central location and use email templates for fast automated email follow-ups.

• Deal management: Check where deals stand with a customized visual pipeline and track all contact interactions in one place.

• Sales forecasting : Keep track of your sales projections and report on forecast vs. actual sales. Drill down forecast by month, sales rep, or any other criteria.

• Performance tracking: Manage your team’s quotas over time and make data-driven decisions with real-time tracking and reports. Gain insights with fully customizable pre-built dashboards.

• Account management : Track the onboarding progress of your clients and manage renewals.

You get all of these features, and more, in monday sales CRM .

What are the benefits of creating a CRM strategy?

A successful CRM strategy will help your business:

• Strengthen collaboration between sales, marketing, and customer service teams.
• Deliver a satisfying customer experience every time.
• Keep track of your leads, prospects, and customers throughout the pipeline.
• Identify the best opportunities for sales teams to target and bring in more revenue.
• Create more targeted and personalized marketing campaigns.
• Gain valuable insights to improve future performance.

What you need before building your CRM strategy

Before building your CRM strategy, there are several steps and considerations to keep in mind. Here are the essential elements you need to address:

• Audit your business: Conduct a SWOT analysis to identify your company’s current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Refine your vision: Develop a clear vision that your teams can collaborate on and execute, such as increasing revenue, improving customer relationships, and enhancing the overall customer experience.
• Audit your customer data: Understand your target customers and their typical journey — such as demographics, touchpoints, and product feedback — and identify areas for improvement in your interactions with them.
• Integrate your systems and data: Ensure all teams can work seamlessly with the same customer information in one centralized system.

How to create your CRM strategy in 10 steps

Now that you know what defines a successful CRM strategy and how it can benefit your business, let’s walk you through how to create one for your organization.

Step 1: Define your CRM strategy goals

First, you need to determine what you want to achieve with your customer relationship management plan. For example, perhaps you want to shorten your sales cycle, increase your customer satisfaction survey scores, or reduce churn. Ensure your CRM strategy goals align with your overall business goals and objectives, and make them SMART:

Once you’ve defined your goals, evaluate whether or not you can realistically achieve those goals with your current resources. For example, do you have enough team members and the right tools, like a CRM system, to accomplish your goals?

Setting your CRM strategy goals keeps you focused on your business and its bottom line.

Step 2: Define your target customer (with buyer personas)

It’s essential to understand who your customers and prospects are so that you can create buyer personas. Understanding exactly who is purchasing from you and why, will help you attract quality leads with the right tactics and messaging and maintain strong customer relationships.

You can combine your existing data with new research to build your ideal customer profile. For example, you could:

• Use website analytics to gather demographic data about visitors.
• Discover their preferred social media networks.
• Interview your sales and customer service teams.
• Interview customers directly or send customer surveys.
• Hold a focus group with customers/clients.

Use our buyer persona template to help you better understand your customers and target market based on demographics, geography, needs, interests, and behavior.

Step 3: Outline your customer journey

Once you’ve defined your target customer, you need to map out their entire journey from the first touchpoints to the closing sale. Analyze their demographic data to find out where they spend their time online. Understanding their online habits can help you identify where and how to connect with them.

 Here are some key questions to ask when mapping the customer journey :

• Which team is interacting with the customer at each stage?
• How can these interactions be improved?
• Is this your target customer’s preferred style of communication?
• Which content does your customer interact with the most or the least?
• What is the customer trying to achieve?
• What challenges does the customer face?

From these answers, double-check that the customer journey relates to your buyer personas.

Step 4: Plan your 360-degree customer experience

The next step in your strategy is ensuring you have the resources and processes to provide a 360-degree customer experience . Check each team’s roles and responsibilities. For example:

• Can your marketing team analyze customer needs and gather information effectively?
• Can your sales team automate any sales processes to increase speed and efficiency?
• Can your customer service team onboard and support customers effectively?

Remember to make your communications relevant and engaging to your customers throughout their lifecycle.

Step 5: Define your KPIs

Having defined your CRM strategy goals in Step 1, you need to give your teams some concrete targets to work towards. Some metrics you may wish to measure include:

• Sales cycle length
• Sales close rate
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer retention
• Customer churn
• Profitability per customer/account

For example, using a SMART goal , you might ask your customer service team to increase customer satisfaction rates by 3% in Q2 . Or, if a CRM strategy goal for the after-sales team is to increase customer retention, an important KPI might be to increase the number of renewal opportunities in the pipeline year-to-date (YTD) compared with the same period last year.

Step 6: Leverage data to improve productivity

A CRM platform lets you consolidate customer data from different departments, such as marketing, sales, and customer service, in a single dashboard. Teams can leverage this data quickly and efficiently to improve their productivity. For example, a single source of truth can prevent sales teams from wasting time asking customers the same questions or handling data twice.

Outline processes in your CRM strategy that facilitate this, including employee education, keeping data error-free, and integrating disparate data.

Step 7: Refine your tone and messaging

Because your CRM strategy applies to the entire customer lifecycle, you must ensure all staff use the same tone and messaging in all your customer-facing content. For example:

• Does your company use a serious, humorous, sarcastic, or optimistic tone of voice?
• Do you use light-hearted abbreviations like “lol” or follow strict grammar rules?

Consider creating brand and style guidelines, so everyone consistently uses the same tone and messaging.

Step 8: Deliver personalized customer experiences

A solid CRM strategy ensures that all your business processes, from marketing and sales to IT, work together systematically. This helps you better understand who your potential customer is and what they need.

There’s a whole raft of statistics to show that customers prefer a personalized experience. For example:

• 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience.
• 63% of consumers won’t buy from brands that have poor personalization.
• 42% of customers are frustrated by impersonalized content.

Personalization improves the customer experience and, ultimately, drives revenue and customer loyalty.

Step 9: Reduce costs with automation

With a CRM system, you can save time and money by automating repetitive administrative tasks, such as feeding lead data into your sales pipeline. For example, instead of manually typing in data, you can set up your lead capture forms to automatically sync with your pipeline.

Another benefit of automation is that you can set up email templates correctly formatted with your tone of voice and personalized with the correct contact name to save time and boost sales. Automating your sales processes will free up additional time for your sales reps. They can invest this time nurturing leads and closing more deals, shortening the sales cycle and reducing your costs.

Step 10: Track your CRM performance

Finally, you want to ensure you track your team’s performance to ensure they’re achieving their individual targets and meeting your CRM strategy goals. You can easily track performance with the help of CRM reporting and analytics features that come built-in with most CRM platforms.

Use CRM dashboards to analyze what went well and what didn’t, identify opportunities for improvement, and experiment with new techniques. This will help you learn from mistakes, optimize processes, improve customer experiences, and refine your CRM strategy.

Bonus Step: Make use of AI

AI is now standard in most CRM platforms, so you should consider how to incorporate its features in your CRM strategy. For example, you could use AI in sales to:

• Turn ideas or meeting outcomes into actionable tasks to move deals forward automatically.
• Create different types of emails that hit just the right note every time.
• Craft polished content for every step of the customer lifecycle.
• Summarize call transcripts and meeting notes.
• Build formulas for the most complex pipeline reporting needs using your own words.

This can really take your strategy, and in turn your business, to the next level.

Read also: Generate emails with monday AI email generator

Manage your CRM strategy with monday.com

Although you might be feeling overwhelmed with all these steps, keep in mind that developing a CRM strategy will benefit your business enormously. Whether you’re planning to implement a CRM in your small business or large enterprise, creating a CRM strategy to understand why you’re using it and how it aligns with your overall business strategy, sales goals, and company culture is critical.

And, if you’re looking for a visual, intuitive, and fully customizable CRM platform to manage your leads, prospects, and customers, then monday sales CRM can help you manage your pipeline, automate your sales processes, streamline communication, and gain valuable insights into your entire CRM cycle.

Try monday sales CRM yourself with a 14-day free trial.

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• CRM Cost Comparison
• Monday CRM Pricing
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• CRM Implementation
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8 Steps to Creating a CRM Strategy for Your Business

Implement your CRM strategy using the software tools used by leading companies (and your competitors).

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Effective customer relationship management (CRM) involves nurturing customer relationships throughout the sales process. Managers or small business owners must create an effective CRM strategy before choosing a solution.

The nature of customer relationships today requires choosing the right CRM software, which is only possible through proven CRM strategies. You can only effectively utilize your CRM data and enjoy customer loyalty by meeting customer expectations.

This article will teach you the importance of a CRM strategy, how to create one for your business, and the best strategy examples.

Let’s get started.

What is a CRM Strategy?

You need to know what CRM stands for to define a CRM strategy effectively. CRM is short for customer relationship management, designed to manage your organization’s communications, relationships, and interactions with your customers.

Companies can improve relationships with their current and potential customers with CRM systems.

A CRM software can store contact information, predict future sales, guide customer service interaction, offer tailored recommended products, and create and send personalized email and SMS drip campaigns.

With CRM software, you can thoroughly manage interactions and relationships with external contacts like generated leads and existing customers from a particular platform.

There is a clear difference between a CRM platform and a strategy. You can describe a CRM strategy as a roadmap, while a CRM platform is the vehicle to move based on the direction given through the roadmap.

A CRM strategy is a well-crafted plan that a company comes up with to improve customer relationships. It is a series of tools and methods often utilized alongside other marketing strategies to improve sales and existing processes.

By incorporating a CRM strategy into your business strategy plan, your sales, marketing, and customer service team are better positioned to have a more successful relationship with existing customers.

Why You Need a Customer Relationship Management Strategy

CRM is not bespoke, which means different organizations and companies cannot apply the same strategy. The best approach is for the companies to identify the strategy tailored for their operations and implement it.

Your business size can influence how you tailor your CRM strategy to serve you best and meet your individual needs.

Based on your business plan to scale up the business at the right moment, it is appropriate for you to go for CRM software that perfectly fits your business needs and serves you better.

Small businesses take advantage of CRM apps differently from most enterprises, which implies that the CRM strategies applied will also differ.

Using strategies to improve customer service functions has provided a much-needed competitive advantage to business growth. It is visible in the increase in customer retention rate.

1. Better Collaboration

Effective collaboration between respective customer service, sales, and marketing teams boosts the efficiency of all your business processes. You can achieve this with an adequate CRM strategy.

2. Better Sales and Marketing Campaigns

Customer service teams provide an enjoyable customer experience during the customer journey process. Your CRM strategy helps position the business to create targeted marketing campaigns to help further drive customer acquisition and retention.

3. Provides Better Service to Customer Needs

By keeping track of the sales funnel , pipeline, and buyer's channel, your business is better equipped to deliver a much-improved customer experience to its wide customer base using a good CRM strategy.

4. Provides Data and Insights on Future Performances

A CRM strategy uses the figures and permutations provided by the CRM system to give a detailed estimate of the future business strategies and their expected performances.

8 Steps to Create a CRM Strategy

Creating a successful customer relationship management from scratch involves certain vital steps you must follow diligently.

1. Define your CRM’s Vision and Goals

A successful CRM strategy begins with revisiting your high-level business goals and the overall business strategy. Create a clear and achievable vision of what you intend to achieve from the CRM process , giving the strategy a clear purpose and direction from the start.

Come up with sustainable ideas on how you can improve and contribute to the business's success. Drawing up the CRM process is not the main goal; rather, proper application of the CRM strategy to give you the desired result is what you are after.

With this in mind, integrate the CRM strategy into the overall business strategy to drive the business goal and vision effectively.

Examples of popular CRM strategy goals include:

• Increased customer satisfaction
• Reducing customer churn rates
• Higher productivity and efficiency

Tailor your CRM strategy in the direction of these examples.

2. Define your Target Customer with Buyer Personas or Avatar

Craft a buyer persona or avatar that perfectly describes your ideal customer. You should ensure that the customer description is detailed with all the necessary information.

While creating the buyer persona, include certain vital pieces of information such as:

• Aspirations
• Behavioral characteristics
• Demographic

Here are some research methods you can apply to create an effective avatar.

• Send surveys to existing customers with online survey software tools .
• Interview customers directly and also do a thorough study on various customer profiles.
• Interview your customer service, sales, and marketing teams.

A clear and precise understanding of who (customer) is purchasing from you and why (motive) the individual will choose to purchase the product from you, not your competitor is vital.

Understanding these significant factors will help you attract quality leads, sustain strong customer relationships and ensure customer retention is on a scale.

With a detailed buyer persona, your organization can ensure that all its activities are geared towards meeting the true needs and customer expectations. Your organization becomes more customer-centered with its goals customer focussed.

The precise knowledge of your target audience eliminates the stress and time wasted by your marketing and sales team when you are working on unsuitable leads.

3. Define Your Customer Journey

Having a clear understanding of the customer journey helps you to master customer relationship management, which ensures a great customer experience at each touchpoint throughout the journey.

Sales reps use the customer journey map to track the movement of customers from the prospective stage down to sales closure.

You can understand the customer journey by mapping every customer interaction from when they learned about you to date.

Mapping customer interactions with your organization is possible through campaigns, email marketing efforts, and direct contact with other team members.

Using these platforms to map customer interactions with your organization will help you identify areas where you need to improve and establish who is responsible for what.

While mapping the customer journey, here are some vital questions you are to ask and generate answers to:

• Are the means of communication suitable, or can you employ a more effective means to pass across relevant information?
• What are your customer's goals, or what does your buyer intend to achieve with the product?
• What kind of information is your buyer coming in contact with from you and other external sources regarding the product?
• What best means or strategy can you apply to improve interactions and make communication more effective?
• What problems and challenges do your customers encounter, and how best can you provide solutions and offer better support?
• What process or team is in contact and interacting with the customers presently?

4. Establish the Processes for a 360° Customer Experience

At this juncture, you should have identified specific areas where there is a need for improvement regarding customer relationships. You need to do proper auditing or specific roles and responsibilities to ascertain that all the necessary bases are covered and there are no lapses.

Evaluate the structure of your internal processes to see if you are well equipped with adequate resources to provide a 360° customer experience.

Here are some areas that often restrict the best available experience for customers.

• Presales: How is your performance regarding gathering information, analyzing customer needs, and putting together business cases?
• Sales Processes: Identify the sales and marketing tasks you can automate to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales reps.
• After Sales: You should access the feedback you receive based on the quality and efficiency of your customer service. Consider if you have the capacity and support system to solve customer problems quickly.

All these processes all work together to provide a better and more complete customer experience. C onsider the most appropriate means to offer your services better, and based on the answers you have acquired, you should make the necessary adjustments.

5. Study the Market and Know Your Positioning

Study the market carefully and clearly understand the competitive landscape for inspiration when developing your CRM strategy.

You need to determine your business organization's position in the market, build a unique selling proposition that distinguishes you from your competitors, and seize opportunities to widen your control span as they arise.

By studying the industry trends and how other successful businesses manage relationships with customers, you are better equipped for the business world.

Here are some questions you should ask and provide answers to:

• What are the present trends in your industry at the moment?
• Where does your organization fit in the market at the time?
• What are the presently existing opportunities you can take advantage of?
• What can you learn from your competitors regarding customer relationships?
• What distinguishing factors separate your competitors from others in your industry?
• What factors make your company different from other organizations within the industry?

6. Knowing Your Product or Service

In creating a CRM strategy for your business, take quality time and resources to devise a product or service narration that spells out your value proposition.

The value proposition is an advertising narrative of the business. Construct it to sway potential customers out of the reach of encroaching competitors.

Consider important factors like what particular benefits you want to highlight, why your customer should choose you over another organization by your customer, and what important messages you want to communicate.

You should effectively communicate these narratives internally, and the necessary employee training should follow. Everyone should be on the same page, of the same mind, and communicate the same message.

Your product or service narration determines your brand tome. Instill it into your sales, marketing, and customer service teams as they convey your message to prospective customers.

7. Invest in the Right CRM Software

Investing in the right CRM solution effectively drives your CRM strategy forward.

With an accurate CRM platform, certain activities like storing customer data, monitoring all interactions between you and your customers, and collaboration between teams become feasible and effective.

You can define your basic CRM software needs by carefully evaluating the present business processes, and team members can also give suggestions.

Are you looking for free CRM software or a cheap CRM solution ? Do you want a simple CRM software that requires no learning curve for your team? Do you need the best long-term CRM software systems ?

Here are some vital factors you should consider when deciding on the best CRM software.

• Capabilities
• User-friendliness
• Ability to integrate with your existing tools.

After acquiring the required software, you should properly define the applied rules. Appoint an admin to manage user access and create a schedule detailing when and how your team will use the software. You should clarify a lead, opportunity, and prospect.

Organize a pilot committee solely for training the team members on how to use the software effectively. Properly structure your contact list before importing it to ensure you start with a well-organized and up-to-date customer database.

8. Setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Each Team

You should record and backup all strategic actions by figures and data; your CRM strategy is vitally included. Backing up all your strategic actions helps to measure progress. Set SMART goals and objectives for your team.

Key performance indicators ( KPIs ) help you track the progress of your CRM goals. Some vital performance metrics you need to track include customer satisfaction, profit, customer retention, customer loyalty, and customer churn.

The success of your CRM strategy largely depends on the level of collaboration and interaction between the sales, marketing, and customer service teams. These teams are the front runners (carrying out all major aspects of your CRM strategy) and have direct access to customers.

Different Types of CRM Strategies

You cannot use the same CRM strategy for every type of business. The type of strategy that would work for a particular business in the same industry may not be appropriate for another. CRM strategies also differ based on industries and business sizes.

CRM Strategy for Small and Medium Size Businesses

Your strategic approach to small and medium-sized businesses differs from larger ones and will produce the desired result when properly applied.

1. Get Your Employees on Board

Most business teams do not have prior knowledge or exposure to CRM software. If your employees are just being exposed to CRM software, they may not know how it works.

After introducing the platform to your employees, you need to establish it as a fundamental organization tool.

Expose your employees to extensive training to get them abreast with the fundamentals of the software and how to maximize the CRM features through the software to the organization's advantage.

Assign one or more team members to take up the role of CRM expert for proper accountability. By assigning the role of CRM expert to a team member or multiple team members, they will easily resolve communication concerning issues relating to the software.

2. Establishing Cause and Effect

By letting your teams know the importance of collecting and compiling customer information, they are better motivated to carry out their tasks. These data can be cumbersome and feel like a burden, especially during sorting and compiling.

With knowledge of the data, the project teams are better motivated to carry out these tasks as it benefits the business and its operations.

3. Perfecting Communication Processes

Your CRM platform should span the duration of your target customer life cycle. The success of your CRM team largely depends on the methods and tone used to convey information to customers.

Managing ongoing communication among different teams is often designated to the executive arm of the business as they are conferred with oversight functions.

Your ongoing communications include consumer-driven email messages, marketing ads, and customer-centric content. The tone of these messages should be professional in meeting the company's standards, as the first impression does matter.

4. Establish KPIs and Core Processes

Your CRM team needs to feel included in all the key CRM industry processes. By sharing key performance indicators with your team, they can now have a template on what to achieve and better keep track of their accomplishments.

Distributing tasks to respective team members is important. It sets the right tone for them as they are now accountable.

Customer service staff are tasked with writing and compiling customer service responses for the various communication networks. They need to collaborate with other teams to get the job done quicker.

CRM Strategy for Large and Enterprise Businesses

Larger organizations have more robust and complex strategies as they deal with larger customer data than smaller-scaled businesses.

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Incorporating AI into your CRM platform empowers your CRM software to undergo more complex tasks. AI can help make detailed and accurate predictions based on available data, which goes a long way in reducing the workload of teams.

Some tasks that your AI can perform include automated tracking of customer actions, sales forecasting, and managing communication systems that readily reply to customer questions.

When creating your strategy, consider how to include A.I. in your platform for better business structure. Some of the best artificial intelligence software tools include MATLAB, New Relic, TensorFlow, InRule, and ArcGIS.

2. Predictive Analysis

Predictive analysis is the ability to predict the likely occurrence of your business based on patterns. It is particularly useful for repeat customers.

This strategy works hand-in-hand with A.I. technology to provide CRM systems with the ability to make calculated predictions on prospective business outcomes.

Predictive analysis can directly affect the efficiency of your business by making changes to your business reporting process.

3. Systems and Data Integration

Your CRM strategy should make consideration for CRM system data integration. It ensures all teams are available with the same updated customer information integrated into their CRM software and platforms.

A proper data integration system makes your information flow between teams as the inputted data is scrutinized and arranged for use by other teams. You can manage user access to these data on a need-to-know basis.

4. Employee Empowerment

Employee empowerment is important to every business operation. Areas regarding operations that the CRM software cannot adequately cover are left in the hands of various employees.

Use a CRM system that empowers employees to perform certain tasks and make independent decisions based on their information.

CRM platforms help employees make confident decisions that directly affect the business's operations. These platforms provide them with valuable information to ensure they are autonomous in their decisions and do not carry out tasks in the dark.

Examples of Effective CRM Strategies

After completing every groundwork required to carry out before implementing a CRM strategy, the next step is to create the strategy that properly fits your business.

CRM implementation varies and depends on the choice of strategy to be used. Many CRM system software come with ready-to-use templates of effective strategies. You can edit these templates to align with your ideal customer base.

1. Use of Automation

This strategy is advantageous to businesses that perform regular repetitive tasks.

Using a CRM system helps to take some load off basic administrative business functions such as managing a sales pipeline and customer interaction.

This, in turn, frees up valuable time for the sales, marketing, and customer service teams to focus on more demanding and time-sensitive tasks.

2. Regular Assessment of Customer Database

Regular checking and updating your ever-growing list of customers is key to avoiding the occurrence of repeat business.

Customer data is very cumbersome and requires thorough sorting by the CRM team. It is particularly helpful for email marketing as it reduces the occurrence of PR disasters due to issuing out wrong information to customers.

This strategy provides the organization with an estimate of its active and dormant customers based on the level of response by conducting simple customer surveys. You need customer database software to manage your customer data.

3. Use a Custom Analytics and Reporting Dashboard

CRM technology helps save time on report compilation. Using an appropriate CRM system, the presence of a CRM tool called dashboard is handy to assist in providing customer-centricity.

A custom reporting dashboard is available on various CRM platforms to ease the process of data generation.

By managing how the data is generated and who has access to this data, valuable time that you would spend on sorting is saved and can be used for other business processes.

4. Creating More Personalized Communications

Building a better customer experience relates to a sense of close interaction between the business and its customers. Sending personalized communication messages and bulletin helps build a stronger connection among customers.

The specific data and information gathered on respective customers help determine the best means of communication for various target audiences.

Launch Your CRM Strategy Today

The success of your CRM, to a large extent, depends on the strategy you are implementing. Creating a CRM strategy helps you understand how CRM implementation is linked to your overall business strategy.

When implementing a CRM system into your business plan, your CRM strategy is pivotal to ensuring the sales pipeline is always flowing for a better customer experience.

The best CRM software systems to help you craft effective strategies for your business include:

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Martin luenendonk.

Martin loves entrepreneurship and has helped dozens of entrepreneurs by validating the business idea, finding scalable customer acquisition channels, and building a data-driven organization. During his time working in investment banking, tech startups, and industry-leading companies he gained extensive knowledge in using different software tools to optimize business processes.

This insights and his love for researching SaaS products enables him to provide in-depth, fact-based software reviews to enable software buyers make better decisions.

6 Steps to Create Your CRM Strategy (+ How to Track It)

Whether you run a small or mid-sized business, there’s a set of people you must please — your customers. Bad customer experiences can sink a brand regardless of its size and revenue. So let me ask, “Do you map out a decisive Customer Relationship Management ( CRM ) plan that turns your prospects into first-time clients and then to repeat customers?

A page from history will help us appreciate why CRM is now more important than ever. In 2010, the U.S had 27.9 million small businesses. Fast forward to 2021, and this number has risen to 31.7 million .

That’s a 13.62% increase in small businesses , which signals rapid development. But it also means customers are now picky because many companies are striving for their attention. And do innovative companies allow customers to slip by because of the competition? Of course not. They delight their customers at every touchpoint and make a good profit, enabling them to survive for many years. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS):

• 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years
• 45% fail within the first five years
• 25% of new companies make it to 15 years or more

You want to be among the 25%, and we know you can! This is why you need a robust customer relationship management strategy for acquiring and retaining customers.

In Sam Walton’s words:

There’s only one boss. The customers. And they can fire everybody in a company by spending their money somewhere else.

This (and more) is precisely what an effective CRM strategy prevents — losing customers.

In this post, you’ll learn:

• What a CRM strategy is
• Why a CRM strategy is important
• Pros and cons of implementing a CRM strategy
• And how you can create an effective CRM strategy

Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

What is a CRM Strategy?

A CRM strategy is an organization-wide plan that involves the adherence to CRM best practices and the use of CRM software to boost your customer relationships. 

Every CRM software has its pros and cons. Ours is EngageBay CRM . Others include HubSpot CRM , Agile CRM , Insightly , Drip , SharpSpring , ActiveCampaign , Keap , and a lot more.

Irrespective of the CRM software, they all perform a similar function. They gather customer insights from multiple channels, organize the data, and help you make accurate business decisions that impact your revenue growth.

Why is a CRM Strategy Important?

It’s important to set up a CRM strategy with clear objectives because it will help you understand how the CRM functions within your company, what tasks are required of those who use it daily, and what metrics you can use to measure CRM success.

Although a CRM strategy may require some time and money, implementing a CRM solution will help you understand your customers better and create more growth opportunities.

You can quickly evaluate the acceptance and usefulness of CRM software by checking its historical usage data. According to Statista , CRM software revenue has been growing year on year since 2010. Plus, Grand View Research suggests that the global CRM market size will expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.6% from 2021 to 2028.

These stats imply that businesses are increasingly adopting CRMs in their business operations. But why? That’s a good question. And one answer is – they want to improve customer retention and brand loyalty. 

With businesses innovating and creating new products, consumers are always looking for the next shiny product. When this happens, many consumers quickly throw their loyalty out the window. This increases customer churn rate. Luckily, using CRM software and developing an effective strategy helps. 

A CRM strategy aids you in identifying customer segments that want to churn. This allows you to put your sales, marketing, and other customer-facing teams on top gear so that they win customers before you lose them. 

Aside from lowering your customer churn rate, a CRM strategy has many other benefits.

Pros and Cons of Implementing a CRM Strategy

Implementing a company-wide CRM strategy has many advantages. And the downsides? There are none, except that failing to have CRM software and a strategy could negatively impact your business.

Pros of Implementing a CRM Strategy

• A CRM strategy keeps all customer interactions in one place. This enhances your customers’ experience, makes the buying process easier, and enables personalized service for every client.
• Well-executed CRM strategies foster cooperation among customer-facing teams. If your marketing, sales, support, IT, and finance teams worked in isolation, your CRM strategy brings them together to achieve organizational goals.
• CRMs eliminate plenty of manual efforts, allowing teams to use their time better. Can we now halt data entering into numerous excel sheets, writing on post-it notes, and so on? That’s a yes!
• Adopted CRM strategies reduce delays in communicating with customers. Think live chat. Automated replies are a time-saver and give your brand a quality outlook.
• CRM systems guide every decision that affects your customer, thanks to data.
• Using a CRM strategy gives you a clearer view of your sales pipeline and enables you to know the stage of customers in your marketing funnel .
• CRM adoption improves your organization’s ability to have better sales forecasts .

Downsides of Not Implementing a CRM Strategy

• Without a CRM strategy, businesses go through the hassle of manually managing customer data on excel sheets.
• You could lose data that aren’t entered into sheets. CRMs automate data entry.
• You’ll have to purchase multiple tools for live chat, email marketing, SMS, sales, and so on without a CRM. But CRMs like EngageBay are an all-in-one marketing tool that reduces your operational cost.
• Deals get lost easily without a CRM strategy. A post-it note doesn’t cut it anymore.

Now that you know why a CRM strategy is essential, the next step is creating one that works for your organization.

👉Overcome CRM implementation challenges with our expert guide – explore the best strategies now ! 🌟

How to Create an Effective CRM Strategy

1. start with your crm goals.

Successful CRM strategies begin with clear goals. CRM goals not only impact company-wide CRM adoption but also make everyone committed to the CRM program.

To set your CRM goals, you need to identify everything you want to accomplish in your organization. Some companies have many employees and revenue; others are regular brick-and-mortar businesses, and some run online-only operations. Whatever your category is, set your goals accordingly.

An overarching goal of your CRM operation could be to reduce customer churn to 5%. This is admirable, but it isn’t specific. You need to get granular and apply the SMART goals approach. The SMART goals approach helps you dig deep into the different departments in your organization and see how each helps realize your goals.

For example, if the overall CRM objective is to cut customer churn to 5%, the teams you’d need might include:

• IT (for technical support issues)
• Finance (for customer billing issues)
• Sales (for follow-up on customers)
• Helpdesk (for support tickets)

Next up, you want to ensure that each team has a shared responsibility. How do you do that? You could use an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey to get feedback on your IT, finance, and helpdesk teams’ performance.

By breaking your CRM goals into bits for every department, team members will grasp what you want and why they should act on your CRM KPIs. For instance, here’s how the SMART approach could work in the NPS survey scenario:

See how easy it is? Do this across every department of your business . This way, every team knows they have a role to play in your CRM success.

2. Identify Your Customer

I’ve never seen a plant grow from a rock. You can water the rock all day; still, nothing sprouts. It’s the same with your customers. No matter how hard you try, some customer profiles will never be a fit for your business. So it’s in your best interest to find and prune those that won’t likely become clients. According to George Leopold , bad customer information costs businesses between 15%-25% of total revenue. 

In his words:

The bigger the data, the better the chances much of it will be “bad” data.

This is why a CRM data cleanup is necessary. Aside from sanitizing your CRM solution of bad data, identifying your ideal customers ensures you send quality MQLs and SQLs to your sales team. And knowing these customers isn’t hard. It depends on many factors, including your product and its price. 

For instance, if your organization offers a B2B product with a deal size that’s upward of $5,000, you’d need to think hard about who you’re targeting and how you target them.

A simple way to clean such a CRM system is to filter unqualified leads by:

• Company size
• Number of employees 
• Company location

What if your product or service isn’t B2B or is priced for much less? All you’d need is to figure out who your customers are using their demographic, behavioral, and psychographic data.

3. Map Your Customers’ Journey

Identifying your ideal customers is an excellent step. But outlining their different touchpoints before and after they become customers is even better. Doing this gives you a broad view of how customers interact with your brand during their engagement, acquisition, and post-engagement phases. 

For instance, the LANCOME brand experience map shows how customers move from onlookers to brand advocates. Yours can get deeper. It depends on your business and the number of touchpoints you have.

During the engagement phase, you’ll need to account for many variables like:

• What do our customers need?
• How do we educate prospects about our solution to their challenge? 
• How do we stir prospects to buy? 
• What are the objections of our ideal customer? 
• How tough is the competition? 
• Does the competition do paid ads?
• Do we need to meet our prospects one-on-one? 
• Is there any gap the competition isn’t harnessing? 
• Are my product pricing and quality competitive?

These are a few questions you need to ask. You also need to consider your number of customer segments. The more customers profiles you have, the more customer journey maps you’d need.

Similarly, when you’ve acquired your customers, you need to answer questions about the use of your product or service and how it makes their lives better. All of these individual actions work together in creating a memorable brand experience that improves customer loyalty.

4. Use a Single Source of Truth

How do you manage your customer data? Excel sheets, outdated CRMs, post-its notes (and something else to insert here) are all time-consuming and inefficient. Moving all of your customer data to a cloud-based, unified CRM gets you a single source of truth that guides the customer experience strategy of your organization. 

If you use an outdated CRM, you’ll need to migrate your data to a better CRM. And it isn’t hard. While you have to pay for migration services with some CRM solutions, at EngageBay, our CRM migration service is free . You can wave goodbye to the stress of importing your existing automation, contacts, forms, templates, and more. 

But before deciding to use a CRM software that guides your customers’ experience, you need to be sure of the CRM’s capabilities. An excellent CRM must be able to handle everything about your customer in one place. 

The CRM should have social , communication , and mobile capabilities. It must also be easy to use . These days, mobile CRM accessibility is non-negotiable for sales teams. Sales reps need to access their prospect’s data regardless of their location. This allows them to monitor deals easily. 

To discover the potential of a CRM, you can check G2.com customer reviews and online forums. You can even find out what your competitors use in managing their customer relationships.

Alternatively, you can check out some of the CRM software reviews we wrote. 

Related Posts:

• Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp vs. EngageBay: Which Tool Is Better?
• Aweber vs. Getresponse vs. EngageBay: Which MA Tool Is Best?
• ActiveCampaign vs. HubSpot vs. EngageBay – Which CRM Is Best?
• ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp vs. EngageBay For Email Marketing
• 5 Best Lifecycle Marketing Software: Pricing, Features Compared

5. Marketing Automation

One of the core benefits of using a CRM system is the ability to automate repetitive tasks. Statistics show that automation is a huge driver of increased speed and efficiency of teams.

For instance: 

• 61% of overperforming leaders use their CRM solution for automating parts of their sales process .
• 20% of marketers automate their email marketing campaigns .
• Email automation campaigns are among the top three tactics used by email marketers to improve performance.
• And finally, 68% of businesses use automation in some way.

You can automate many processes in your CRM. A perfect example is follow-up emails by sales reps. You don’t need to create these emails manually. Simply create an automated email sequence . Once a prospect doesn’t open, reply or take action in their first email, they’ll receive the follow-up email. This significantly increases your sales reps’ productivity and allows them to focus on closing deals in your sales pipeline.

Another part of your sales process to automate is your customer inquiries via live chat. Customers regularly need technical support, billing support, and so on. Instead of replying to thousands of similar messages, get your customers’ questions and create automated replies. The good news is, you can do this at zero cost with free live chat software . All of this helps in reducing the response time to customer complaints, improves your customers’ experience, and strengthens brand loyalty.

6. CRM Training

One of the toughest challenges to CRM implementation is getting your team to adopt the CRM. It’s possible to create an excellent CRM strategy, outline your CRM goals, and purchase excellent CRM software. However, if your front-line team (sales, marketing, and customer support) fails to use the CRM, every effort becomes futile. 

It’s not uncommon for a sales team (or other teams) members to give an excuse like, “I’m not a tech person. This CRM won’t work for me.” This is a dicey situation, and the way out is to train your team one step at a time. Don’t rush the process. Breaking down your CRM training into small bits gives your team enough time to absorb the information and act on it. You also need to train your team on the impact of using your CRM system. If they don’t see how their CRM usage fits into organizational goals, chances are they won’t use it. 

Another way of training your team to adopt the CRM is by getting your leadership team involved. Once your leadership executives use the CRM software to display growth forecast, explain some reports garnered from the CRM, it sends a clear message about the usefulness of the software. And this will largely improve the chances of your CRM success.

Read more: CRM Implementation Guide with Exact Steps

How to Track the Success of Your CRM Strategy

The right CRM solution will help you easily evaluate the successes and failures of your CRM strategy. To do this, you need to monitor CRM metrics or KPIs for every department of your customer-facing team. This helps prevent churn and informs you if your team is drifting away or getting closer to your overall CRM goal.

So, what are some of the CRM KPIs you should track?

1. Length of the sales cycle

The length of your sales cycle is the time it takes to move a lead from prospect to customer. Tracking this CRM metric helps to improve the efficiency of your sales reps. If your sales team spends much time on leads, that indicates your sales pipeline needs attention. In this case, you should find the sales pipeline stage causing the delay and figure out a way to optimize it.

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2. Customer satisfaction

Customers have many reasons why they churn. Did they create a support ticket that took forever to get a response? Did they churn because of a product feature your competitor has? Did they churn because your product isn’t competitive on price and quality? All of these are customer retention challenges. And the solution is to conduct NPS surveys frequently. Getting feedback from your customers whenever they contact your team helps you quickly identify lapses that could lead to churn.

3. Conversion rate 

Your conversion rate helps you keep a tab on the company revenue. This metric directly reflects the general outlook of your business and hence tells you how popular it is getting (or not) among your target audience.

Wrapping Up

Every quality CRM strategy puts the customer first. Why? Without customers, there’s no business. And without business, your CRM software has no use. To get the full benefits of your CRM software, you need to take your customers’ experience seriously. A quality customer experience is the vehicle that moves your organization to increased revenue.

To recap, here are the steps for creating an effective CRM strategy:

• Start with your CRM goals
• Identify your customers
• Map your customers’ journey
• Automate your marketing workflow to cut on repetitive tasks
• Train your team to make CRM software adoption easy
• Use CRM software instead of multiple excel sheets, post-it notes, etc.

Need CRM software? You can try EngageBay for free (forever). 30,000+ customers couldn’t be wrong.

Want testimonials first? You can read plenty of user reviews here .

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Precious Oboidhe

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How to Build your CRM Strategy (+10 Example CRM Goals)

Best practices.

Building Your CRM Strategy

Companies that buy customer relationship management software without having a clearly defined strategy might not reap the revenue-boosting, cost-saving benefits of their CRM tool. A vision with clearly defined goals, robust employee onboarding and strong executive knowledge of CRM strategy is essential for success.

In this article, you’ll learn what a strategy for CRM is, its benefits and how to design one. To further illustrate the point, there are 10 example goals to help you see how a strategy will maximize ROI on your CRM investment.

In a hurry? Jump to the sample strategies.

What is a CRM strategy ?

A CRM strategy is a cross-departmental plan of action to help a business grow revenue, increase profits and improve internal processes. This is achieved by taking a data-driven approach to learning about your clientele in-depth and using that information to strengthen customer relationships. In turn, a strategy for your CRM helps leaders streamline data, identify redundant processes and automate workflows so they can focus on the most profitable actions.  

When your company’s end-to-end customer experience inspires positive feelings in your prospects and loyal customers alike, the results can be game-changing. CRM software gives you a clear vision of each lead, the ability to manage communications across channels and a hub for customer data that all departments can access. Plus, with all that high-quality data about each lead, you can deliver personalized, slick customer service and support.

A CRM strategy helps you make the most of the technology you have so you convert more leads, retain more customers and send revenue skyrocketing.

Why do you need a CRM strategy?

A CRM strategy is essential for businesses for several reasons:

• Improved Customer Understanding: A CRM strategy allows businesses to gather and organize customer data in a centralized system. This data includes customer preferences, purchase history, communication history, and other relevant information. By analyzing this data, businesses can gain insights into customer behavior, needs, and preferences, which helps in better understanding and segmenting the customer base.
• Enhanced Customer Engagement: With a CRM strategy, businesses can engage with their customers more effectively. By having a comprehensive view of customer interactions and preferences, businesses can personalize their communication and marketing efforts. This enables them to deliver targeted messages, promotions, and offers, resulting in higher customer engagement and satisfaction.
• Streamlined Sales and Marketing Processes: CRM systems provide tools and functions to automate and streamline sales and marketing processes. This includes lead management, opportunity tracking, email marketing, campaign management, and more. By utilizing these features, businesses can improve efficiency, reduce manual efforts, and ensure consistency across their sales and marketing efforts.
• Customer Retention and Loyalty: A CRM strategy helps in nurturing customer relationships and improving customer retention. By understanding customer needs and preferences, businesses can provide personalized experiences and deliver superior customer service. This leads to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy, reducing customer churn and boosting long-term profitability.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: CRM systems generate valuable insights and reports based on customer data. By analyzing this data, businesses can make informed decisions regarding sales and marketing strategies, product development, customer service improvements, and overall business growth. Data-driven decision making enables businesses to allocate resources effectively and focus on areas that yield the best results.
• Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing: A CRM strategy facilitates collaboration among different departments within a business, such as sales, marketing, and customer service. By centralizing customer data and interactions, employees can access relevant information, share insights, and collaborate more efficiently. This improves internal communication, coordination, and overall productivity.

In short, a CRM strategy helps businesses become more customer-centric, efficient, and competitive in today’s market.

What Are the Benefits of a CRM Strategy?

A CRM strategy ensures that every action your team makes is done with a goal in mind. It helps leaders prioritize what’s most profitable and derive maximum information from the customer data at their fingertips. 

According to a study from eMarketer, companies can reap the following benefits when they correctly implement a strategy of CRM:

• More complete and higher-quality customer data: Knowledge is power, and well-managed CRM data vastly improves both forecasting and marketing. Segmenting customers based on data-derived similarities can help you consistently make more sales and maximize CX unilaterally.   
• More organized and streamlined processes: Breaking down overarching organizational goals into more precise, measurable objectives delivers extraordinary results. Regularly analyzing the effectiveness of your CRM strategy also helps you identify silos, identify obsolete or inefficient processes and streamline workflows. 
• Higher sales and faster growth: The result of using data to design customer interactions and improve communications is increased sales. Likewise, streamlining processes slashes costs. Higher sales and lower costs equal more profits and faster growth. 
• Improved customer experience:  Using data to shape how staff interacts with customers drastically enhances customer experience. Using information to design delightful, customized content and campaigns bolsters lead generation and conversion. When customers consistently have a wonderful experience with your brand, they’re more likely to return and write positive reviews.  
• Better customer retention:  A strong customer experience inspires a strong connection between your customers and your brand, which leads to higher retention and lifetime customer value.  
• More leads: When your marketing campaigns and content are designed based on data-driven insights into your target audience, you’ll get more leads. 

We’ve identified a few more advantages that benefit companies adopting and maximizing the potential of a CRM strategy:

• Provides a high-level framework for essential processes
• Helps sales teams organize and share customer information across departments
• Improves your marketing department’s grasp on lead generation, email campaign management, ad performance, customer data and retargeting
• Allows customer service and support teams to manage information and communicate better with customers  
• Automates manual internal workflows, customer service processes and elements of customer communication, increasing operational efficiency

CRM Priorities 

For most leaders, the aim of implementing a CRM is to centralize company data, identify inefficiencies and automate time-consuming manual processes with the goal of improving customer satisfaction. However, it’s good to drill down into specific priorities to get the most of your CRM strategy. 

Let’s take a look at the top CRM priorities identified for B2B professionals in a study from eMarketer:

• Improving workflows:  Spreadsheets are time-consuming, prone to human error and overly complex. Using a CRM to manage leads and opportunities, and implementing automation where possible, is a major priority for many leaders.
• Improving customer experience:  Improving customer experience is the overarching goal of any CRM adopter in today’s people-centric market.
• Aligning marketing/sales/customer success teams:  Departmental silos contribute to low productivity and missed opportunities. Many leaders adopt a CRM to align teams . 
• Reducing costs: All the actions mentioned above can either reduce costs or increase revenue, which are top priorities for all businesses. 
• Consolidating technology:  If you’re still pulling data from email, phone, social media and various software platforms, you’re wasting time and money. CRM technology and strategy are often implemented to consolidate technology. 
• Unifying customer data: Businesses want to streamline customer data to make it more accessible for all departments.  
• Improving adoption and utilization:  Unless you designed the CRM yourself, there’s going to be a learning curve in the beginning. Many leaders are keen to make the most of their CRM and want to improve adoption. 

How to build a Successful CRM strategy

Developing a powerful CRM strategy requires a clear vision and goals for your team to work toward. It’s an ongoing effort that will evolve as market demands shift and your company grows, so you should continually measure its success and refine it accordingly. Before getting started, you should audit your business model to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (also called SWOT analysis): 

• Strengths: What are your organizations internal attributes and resources that give it a competitive advantage or unique capabilities? Strengths could include factors such as a strong brand reputation, skilled workforce, innovative products or services, efficient processes, or a loyal customer base.
• Weaknesses: What internal factors that hinder the performance or competitive position of your organization? Weaknesses may include aspects like limited financial resources, outdated technology, poor brand perception, lack of expertise, or inefficient internal processes.
• Opportunities: What external factors and situations have the potential to bring positive outcomes or advantages to your organization? Opportunities could arise from market trends, technological advancements, changes in regulations, new partnerships, emerging customer needs, or untapped market segments. For example, Zoom was just establishing itself as a strong player in online meetings when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The pandemic was an opportunity.
• Threats: What external factors or challenges pose risks or obstacles to your success? Threats may come from factors such as intense competition, economic downturns, changing consumer preferences, disruptive technologies, legal or regulatory changes, or negative publicity. As with the previous example, a threat for an airline booking service would be a drop off in travel due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of a SWOT analysis is to provide a structured framework for assessing the current situation and identifying key factors that impact the entity’s performance. By conducting a SWOT analysis, organizations can gain a comprehensive understanding of their internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats. This analysis serves as a basis for developing strategies to capitalize on strengths, address weaknesses, seize opportunities, and mitigate threats.

In this case, your SWOT should be done through the lens of the ways a CRM can have an impact on your business.

Below is a nine-step guide to building a successful CRM strategy.

1. Define Your CRM Goals

Defining CRM objectives is the first and most critical element of implementing a CRM strategy. You need a clear vision, with KPIs, to inspire a sense of purpose and ensure the actions you and your team make are aligned and profitable. Train employees on SMART goals to help ensure the objectives are beneficial:

• S pecific – call out the specific metric you will use
• M easurable – describe how you will measure it
• A ctionable – this goal can be acted upon with existing resources
• R ealistic – this goal is something than can be accomplished
• T ime-boxed – this goal has a date or period associated with it

Following this system ensures that all actions contribute to the goal in a meaningful way. SMART goals are quantifiable, achievable and can help you identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks in your current processes.

2. Map Your Customer Journey

Know thy audience is the first rule of marketing, but in today’s competitive economy, you should go a step further and map customer journeys with your goals in mind. Creating these maps is about seeing your end-to-end customer journey through the eyes of a prospect and identifying its strengths and weaknesses. It provides a realistic perspective of your current customer experience and allows you to refine it in line with your KPIs and customer expectations.

This exercise is best performed in a collaborative environment where teams are working together to document the journey. It typically starts with the marketing team talking about ways prospects enter the funnel, goes all the way through the sales process including billing and renewals, and identifies and documents the onboarding and customer support/success process. This is a strong example of “it’s the journey, not the destination” since the exercise often uncovers gaps and poor hand-offs that may never have been visible otherwise. Incidentally, the resulting document is a great tool for new employee onboarding since it shows how your full team serves the customer.

3. Analyze Your Sales Process

Once you and your team have walked through the customer journey, you’ll have a clearer picture of your sales process from the customer perspective. Use what you’ve learned to streamline the sales process and align it with your goals. 

Again, it’s typically the pass-offs between teams that cause issues, and so this is a good time to examine them. Can you make improvements in how quickly is the sales team responding to inquiries? Is there a better way for leads to get passed from marketing to sales with more context? How long does it take for a closed deal to get passed to customer service? 

4. Identify Customer Touch Points

Use the data from journey mapping to determine which segments of customers interact most with each touch point. Knowing their preferred method of interaction is critical so you can meet consumers where they’re at. It’s also important to take note of who they interact with and how these interactions influence subsequent behavior. 

Are current customers attending webinars? Are open rates on the newsletter stronger in certain segments than in others? Are our customers following us on social media? Are transactional emails opened at an appropriate rate ( 40-50% per Inner Trends. )

5. Assess Which Data You Need To Collect 

While it’s tempting to attempt to use all available data, it’s not realistic. Your CRM can collect a multitude of data that can be overwhelming. Use your organization’s KPIs here as a way to hyper-focus on what’s important to your operations and growth. Refer back to the customer journey mappings to determine which data is most useful to your CRM strategy. Use your KPIs and information about customer journeys to determine which data is most useful to your CRM strategy. You might opt for time spent on your website, receipts, communication records, service notes and time spent with customer service. 

6. List the Tools Your Teams Use ( Technology Audit )

Implementing a CRM strategy can help you significantly reduce the amount you spend on subscriptions for separate systems. The simple task of listing all of the tech tools your company uses is eye-opening for many leadership teams. Typically, you’ll find redundancies in the form of multiple accounts, and software with overlapping capabilities. Can you cut any software that’s not in use and save some money? You can use this process to identify software that is not currently integrated with your CRM and/or other systems and look for opportunities to create those integrations. You should be able to easily integrate the best CRM platforms with existing tech if it’s working well for you and streamline processes this way.

7. Define Your KPIs

Now you’ve gathered all the necessary information, you’re ready to set KPIs. KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators. These are the metrics you will use to determine the success of your CRM strategy. Ask yourself, “Based on the issues and areas of improvement identified so far, what are the metrics we will use to see if we’ve been able to successfully move the needle to make positive change with our CRM strategy? You can use the samples in the next section to get you started, but these should be hyper-personalized to your organization.

8. Implement CRM Software 

Now you’re ready to implement CRM software to help you collect, manage and analyze customer data. The prior steps have provided a road map so you already know how to integrate existing tech, gather customer data, access information and share it across departments. 

 Using a CRM platform can help you achieve the following:

• You can collect and manage customer data, including interactions, demographic information, purchase history, preferences and location.
• Top CRMs have a dashboard that provides an overview of every lead and lets you create segmentation models.
• Knowing the above information lets your team preempt needs and deliver delightful, personalized experiences.
• You can organize customer data and generate reports about customer segments and individuals.
• You get insights to help teams understand pain points, needs and concerns without asking, facilitating a seamless and convenient customer experience. 
• By providing a personalized and smooth experience, you can increase retention rates.
• It can help you identify where leads are in the sales cycle so you can shorten the sales cycle and close faster,
• Shared and integrated customer data helps every department communicate better with each other and customers.

9. Onboard and Train Your Teams

Even if you have the best CRM software in the world and your leadership team knows it inside out, you won’t reap the benefits without thoroughly training your teams. CRMs have an extensive roster of functions to help you reach your strategic goals, and you should aim to make the most of them by providing employees with as much training and support as possible. 

The timing of training is almost as important as the training itself. For a mission-critical system like a CRM, you’ll want what is known as “just in time” training where the sessions are provided right before the new platform is put into use. This prevents people from learning too early and forgetting, while also ensuring they are not frustrated by the new system in the early days due to a lack of training.

CRM Strategy Pitfalls

Understanding the most common mistakes leaders make when adopting a CRM strategy can help you avoid those same pitfalls.  

1. Lack of Adoption/Buy-In

An estimated 70% of CRM implementations stall due to lack of adoption . According to data about the top CRM pitfalls, training time was the number one challenge when implementing a new system. However, training is critical for your strategy’s success. Every team member should have a high-level understanding of the details of the strategy, its function and its goals.

Optimize the onboarding process and take the pressure off your leaders by choosing Insightly’s CRM solution. Support is available for all users, but the Premier Support plan guarantees success. In addition to long-term adoption programs, you benefit from the guidance of a customer success manager, technical account manager and business reviews.  

2. Unclear Vision 

Not defining goals is one of the major pitfalls for any organization looking to make the most of its CRM strategy. Without SMART goals to work toward, your team will lack clarity, and productivity won’t be anywhere near optimal. Being vague about your objectives will lead to underwhelming results.

Examples of goals that aren’t clear enough include:

• Increase sales
• Reach more customers
• Improve customer service

3. Lack of Understanding

Whoever designs your CRM strategy must have a clear understanding of the objectives, problems that need solving and how the KPIs relate to one another. For instance, having a goal to increase page views by 10% is one thing, but if that increase is matched with a 99% bounce rate, it’s meaningless. You and your leadership team must have a high-level view of the business results you want to achieve.  

10 CRM strategy sample goals examples

Let’s take an in-depth look at 10 examples of CRM strategy goals to help your company develop an optimal plan when implementing a CRM. 

1. Improve Customer Experience

Sample Goal: Achieve 83% customer satisfaction by 12/31.

Sample Goal: Increase NPS scores by 10% in 6 months.

The most obvious example of a CRM strategy goal is to improve customer experience. Since relationships are at the core of the customer experience, and your new tool is about managing relationships, this is a great way to start. It’s an overarching goal that encompasses a number of processes and can be measured using customer feedback.

These examples  includes a CSAT and an NPS score, but there are a variety of satisfaction metrics to tap into. CSAT asks how satisfied your customer is, while NPS asks if your customer would recommend you to a colleague or friend. 

2. Acquire a 360° View of Your Customers

Sample Goal: Create new customer segments and demographics for the coming year.

CRMs are exceptional tools for collecting data, but you should have an underlying strategy when gathering it. Aiming for a 360° view of customers helps you understand customer interactions across every stage of the customer journey so you can enhance your value proposition and CX. Through your CRM data, you may be able to identify an emerging market, or divide an existing market of focus into two based on more deep information you now have. For example, let’s say you are selling to leaders of marketing at a company. You can use CRM data to see that you are having more luck closing deals with prospects that have a digital marketing title vs. a content marketing title, and therefore maybe you should change your messaging to be more direct to the pains of that role.

3. Use Better, More Accurate Customer Data

Sample Goal: Create new KPIs to track your progress every 6 weeks.

While having a KPI about setting KPIs might seem a little meta, it helps to ensure that you’re constantly analyzing success and evolving. Taking a continual approach to gathering data helps your efforts remain relevant and competitive. You may find that a goal established out of the gate was easily accomplished and therefore the goal post needs to be moved out farther. Or, perhaps a goal that was set will be difficult to measure, so we’ll need to adjust it to things we can control.   

4. Create Personalized Campaigns

Sample Goal: Improve prospect email click-through rates by 8% in Q3. Sample Goal: Decrease bounce rates by 20% by the end of Q4. Sample Goal: Increase social media followers by 25% by November 15.

Some may say that consumers are tired of generic, bland campaigns, which is why companies are rushing to customize interactions wherever possible. However, consumers have come to expect personalization from brands, and will even avoid brands that lump them in with others. Companies like Amazon and Netflix have created this demand, and smaller brands are now faced with achieving it (with much smaller budgets.) Your CRM can provide actionable insights to help you create emails targeted to specific, high-value customers or your highest-value segments. When you zero in on the personas that are most likely to buy, this will likely show up as better rates on your email opens, more website visitors that are staying longer, and an increase in your social media followers. Your CRM will help ensure you are talking to the right people and will tell you what messages are resonating with them. Then, you can double-down on what’s working.

5. Increase Customer Loyalty

Sample Goal: Increase open rates on customer emails by 4% in 6 months.

When it comes to maintaining a presence in customers’ hearts and minds, useful, informative content is king. Email is one of the most powerful tools your company can use for customer retention, but it’s only effective if people read it.

Applying personalization efforts to your emails, using data from your CRM, can help you increase customer lifetime value and bolster revenue. Did a customer recently add seats to their software account? Perhaps that means they are growing and should be contacted about an upsell to a higher plan level. Look at the data behind accounts that have recently expanded and see what indicators are there, then try to find those indicators in other accounts. Are your email open rates stronger with a certain customer type? Examine the email content and consider segmenting your lists with more personalized information based on customer actions.

6. Shorten the Sales Lifecycle

Sample Goal: Decrease time to sale by 10% in 6 months. Sample Goal: Shorten your sales cycle by 5 days within a year.

Reducing the time taken to move from prospect to purchase increases the amount of time your team can spend selling. One of the major benefits of having a complete CRM solution is being able to refine the customer journey to reduce the steps it takes a prospect to progress through the sales funnel.

Can steps be automated using workflow automation to decrease the time it takes to deliver a contract? Can lead assignment rules be automated so that hot leads aren’t sitting in an inbox waiting to be assigned? Can your team pull from multiple price books so that they don’t need to manually create quotes with discounts for a wholesaler?

You can also implement new sales protocols to help achieve this goal and measure their success using KPIs, such as site visit duration and time from initial interaction to purchase.

7. Use Automation To Reduce the Cost of Leads

Sample Goal: Decrease cost-per-lead by 10% in a year. Sample Goal: Decrease customer acquisition cost (CAC) by 5% in a year.

Automation can significantly reduce the cost of lead generation because it can identify and contact leads. A CRM can help you automate a number of processes, such as sending an email prompt to customers who abandon their shopping carts. An employee would take much longer and cost significantly more. Your CRM can also automate lead routing so leads are sent to sales team members instantly. This increases your speed to lead, which is proven to be a metric that matters: Lean Data shows that firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were 7x as likely to qualify the lead . As such, if you can get more from existing leads, your CRM is helping you reduce cost per lead and greatly increase the number of leads you generate and convert. As such, your CRM can help you reduce cost per lead and greatly increase the number of leads you generate and convert.   

8. Improve Sales Processes

Sample Goal: Increase the number of deals by 10% year over year. Sample Goal: Increase ACV (average contract value) by 10% year over year.

When you decrease the length of your sales cycle with automation, your existing team can work more deals in a given time frame. When you use customer data to identify the types of customers with the highest contract value, you can target your outbound efforts at prospects that fit that ICP. 

Your CRM strategy can go a long way to helping enhance your sales process because you can track metrics such as customer interactions, the effectiveness of sales tactics and time to sale. Furthermore, you can generate reports to analyze the success rates of the various strategies you deploy to continually improve your sales process.   

9. Track and Report Sales Performance

Sample Goal: Improve first response time to leads by 5 minutes within a month.

The new version of “the early bird gets the worm” is “the first callback gets the sale.” Hint: experts say the 30 minute mark is golden. You can use your CRM to track response time by product line, by rep, by time of day and more, and then use that data to improve your processes. Many firms create fun challenges to encourage  sales teams to improve response times. You can revisit and enhance this metric continually, and your managers can come up with creative ways to incentivize their workforce, e.g. a weekly shout-out to the person in the lead, and a monthly prize to the winner.

10. Save Time for Team Members 

Sample Goal: Automate five workflows this quarter.

Another huge advantage of using a CRM, beyond the scope of directly interacting with customers, is automation. Your team has a number of skills that machines cannot replicate, such as establishing an emotional connection with customers and designing strategies. Automation allows your team to get on with these experience-boosting endeavors by taking care of menial, error-prone tasks and simple processes. 

While you need to set up the workflows you want to automate, the time spent will pay you back tenfold. For example, you might automate the process of sending out emails to the team when setting a meeting.  Perhaps a closed-won deal should automate the sending of an email to customer service and a post to the ‘Wins’ channel in Slack or MS Teams. These are both tasks that a salesperson would no longer need to perform and these minutes add up every day.

Choose Insightly CRM to achieve your strategy

Your CRM strategy will ensure that you get the most out of this critical tool and elevate the customer experience. The steps above will ensure that you are on the path to ROI from your CRM investment.

If you are selecting your CRM, put Insightly on your list and set up a free demo and discover how you can grow your business today.

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• Best Sales CRM

Val Riley is a tech marketer with more than 20 years of experience. She specializes in Content Marketing at Insightly and previously worked for a marketing automation platform as head of Product and Content Marketing. Also known as The Decaf Marketer , Val is a regular contributor on LinkedIn .

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How to Plan and Prepare for a New CRM

Whether it’s your company’s first time implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) platform or you’re switching from your current solution to one that better suits your needs, preparing before the launch is essential. Implementing new software requires a lot of moving parts, and the more you can plan before it goes live, the more successful your team will be.

Launching a solution as comprehensive as a CRM may seem daunting at first, especially if your business is new to using CRM software. Fortunately, this guide outlines the essential steps to take as you begin revolutionizing your sales process with a CRM. 

Table of Contents

Why is it important to prepare for a new crm.

• Assess your business’s needs
• Establish measurable objectives for your CRM
• Identify key stakeholders

Going through the planning and preparation phase before you launch a new CRM is crucial because it lets you establish expectations and define criteria for a successful implementation before the solution goes live. What your team decides during planning will determine which solution you choose, what you prioritize during the first few weeks of use, and who oversees the project. 

Preparation also allows you to create processes to ensure the rollout goes smoothly. Taking the time to plan the logistics can clear up any confusion or miscommunication and make implementing your software smooth sailing. 

In a nutshell, planning for a new CRM saves you time in choosing a CRM platform, ensures everyone understands their role in the launch, helps you maximize your software once it goes live, and sets your team—and your customers—up for success. 

How to plan for a new CRM

Follow these steps to prepare your organization for a new CRM:

1. Assess your business’s needs

What made your business start considering implementing a CRM in the first place? Do your sales representatives need help managing customer data and nurturing leads into customers? Do you have inefficient sales processes that could benefit from automation?

A deep understanding of the challenges your business faces will guide your decision of which platform to invest in, making analyzing your company’s unique needs an important first step. Before comparing your CRM options and selecting a platform, develop a clear idea of what your business needs from the solution. 

How to determine your business needs

You can use many strategies to evaluate your business’s greatest needs. One step is getting feedback from key members of your sales, marketing, and customer service teams about the challenges each department faces. A CRM should help you run your business more efficiently, so find out where it needs to improve from those who know best. 

Another way to assess your business needs is to evaluate how well your company is meeting its sales goals. Does the sales team struggle to advance leads through the pipeline? One of your business needs might be providing them with more guidance during the sales process.

Uncovering where your business struggles the most will help you identify its greatest needs. Here are a few common business needs that the right CRM can meet: 

• Managing lead and customer data  
• Developing a sales pipeline
• Automating sales tasks like email campaigns
• Generating reports
• Creating tailored marketing campaigns
• Integrating CRM data with other tools

2. Establish measurable objectives for your CRM

Before you can choose the right CRM for your company , you need a vision of what the solution should help you accomplish. Outlining the specific objectives you want to achieve will inform your decision about which platform to select and help you measure its return on investment .

Keep in mind that a CRM is a means to an end, a tool for hitting a larger target. A CRM’s purpose is to help you accomplish your business’s most important sales, marketing, and customer service goals. Those goals should take center stage—then, you can look for features and capabilities that will help you achieve them. 

How to create objectives for your CRM

Your CRM objectives should relate to high-level business goals. What objectives do you have for your company or specific departments that your CRM should help you meet? They may include:

• Increasing lead volume 
• Boosting email campaign interactions 
• Recording communications between your team and leads 
• Tracking sales rep productivity 

It’s important to make these objectives measurable and attainable. Vague, unrealistic goals won’t help you truly assess what your CRM is capable of. Get as specific and relevant as you can, and give your goals a deadline to help with measurement. 

You can then set up key performance indicators (KPIs) to use with your new CRM platform once you’ve implemented it. Once you’ve gathered several months of data about your CRM’s performance, you can generate and analyze reports to track its success. 

3. Identify key stakeholders

The final step in planning and preparing for a new CRM is identifying the key team members who will be a part of the implementation. You might call this your CRM team. Think of it as a group of champions for the new platform—a unit of people who will play critical roles in your selection of a CRM and its launch.

A CRM team is important, especially if your business is large or multiple decision-makers are involved in selecting a CRM. These people will provide the insight you need to decide whether a platform fits your needs and help the rollout process go smoothly.

How to select key stakeholders 

It should be relatively simple to identify who on your team should be involved in the CRM implementation process. 

Here are a few stakeholders you might want to include on your CRM team: 

• Company executives 
• Department leaders 
• IT team members 
• Salespeople
• Data analysts  

Once you identify these key stakeholders, you can assign them roles and responsibilities for the CRM’s implementation. Depending on the size of your organization and the scale of your CRM project , a single person could fill multiple roles. You’ll need individuals in charge of tasks like: 

• Managing the entire CRM implementation project
• Researching CRM options and presenting the findings to other stakeholders
• Training and onboarding users for the CRM
• Cleaning and migrating data into the system
• Deploying the CRM and running performance tests
• Setting up automated workflows in your CRM
• Evaluating the new system’s efficiency over time

Partner with a CRM that makes implementation easy 

Implementing a CRM can help your sales team strengthen relationships with leads, empower your marketing team to drive engagement with customers, and so much more. And planning for your new CRM by identifying your business needs, creating measurable objectives for the CRM, and selecting a CRM team will help you make the most of those benefits. 

Once you’ve planned for your new CRM, it’s time to find the one that best suits your company and will help you achieve your goals. Introducing Nutshell, the all-in-one CRM that helps sales teams close more deals . Nutshell helps thousands of businesses across industries achieve their sales and marketing goals through a suite of powerful features like sales automation and email marketing .   

To see Nutshell in action, sign up for a free trial ! Still have questions? Contact our support team to get the answers! 

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The Comprehensive Guide to Business Plan CRM: Everything You Need to Know

Welcome to our comprehensive guide on business plan CRM! As you know, customer relationship management (CRM) is an essential aspect of any business, and having a solid plan in place can make all the difference. In this guide, we will take you through everything you need to know about creating a successful business plan for CRM.

🔍 What is Business Plan CRM?

A business plan for CRM is a strategy that outlines how a business will manage its relationships with customers. It involves identifying goals, assessing customer needs, and developing a plan to meet those needs. A good CRM plan can help businesses improve customer retention, drive sales, and boost overall profitability.

However, developing a business plan for CRM is not a one-size-fits-all approach. There are several factors to consider depending on the type of business, the target audience, and the objectives. In the next few paragraphs, we will explore these factors in more detail.

Understanding Your Business

The first step in creating a business plan for CRM is understanding your own business. This involves asking questions such as:

By answering these questions, you can identify the unique challenges and opportunities faced by your business in regards to CRM.

Customer Analysis

The next step is to conduct a thorough analysis of your customers. This involves profiling your target audience, understanding their needs and pain points, and segmenting them into specific groups.

Customer analysis can be done through several methods, including surveys, focus groups, and online analytics. Once you have a clear understanding of your customers, you can create a CRM plan that is tailored to their specific needs.

Setting Objectives

Setting objectives is a crucial part of any business plan for CRM. Your objectives should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Some examples of SMART objectives for CRM are:

• Reduce customer churn rate by 20% within the next 6 months.
• Increase customer retention rate by 30% by the end of the year.
• Boost customer satisfaction scores from 8/10 to 9/10 within the next quarter.

Remember, your objectives should be aligned with your business goals and tailored to your customers’ needs.

Choosing the Right CRM System

Another crucial aspect of a business plan for CRM is choosing the right CRM system. There are several options available on the market, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

You should choose a CRM system that is easy to use, customizable to your specific needs, and integrates well with your existing systems. It should also provide you with the data and reporting tools you need to measure your progress towards your objectives.

👍 Advantages of Business Plan CRM

Implementing a business plan for CRM has several advantages for businesses:

Improved Customer Retention

A well-executed CRM plan can help businesses retain their existing customers by identifying their needs and providing personalized service. This can lead to increased customer loyalty and repeat business.

Increased Sales

CRM can help businesses identify new sales opportunities by analyzing customer data and behavior. This can lead to increased revenue and profitability.

Better Customer Relationships

Good CRM can help businesses build stronger relationships with their customers by providing personalized service and addressing their needs. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Efficient Marketing

CRM can help businesses target their marketing efforts more effectively by segmenting their audience and tailoring their messaging. This can lead to more efficient use of marketing resources and better ROI.

Improved Communication

A good CRM system can help businesses communicate more effectively with their customers by providing a centralized platform for managing interactions. This can lead to better customer service and more efficient problem resolution.

👎 Disadvantages of Business Plan CRM

While there are many advantages to implementing a CRM plan, there are also some potential disadvantages to be aware of:

Time and Resource Intensive

Developing and implementing a CRM plan can be a time and resource-intensive process, particularly for small businesses with limited budgets and staff.

Resistance to Change

Some employees may be resistant to changes in how they interact with customers or adapt to a new CRM system. This can lead to a lack of adoption and suboptimal results.

Data Security Risks

Storing customer data in a CRM system can create security risks if not properly secured and monitored.

Integration Challenges

Integrating a new CRM system with existing systems and processes can be challenging and may require additional resources and expertise.

Implementing a CRM plan can be expensive, particularly for small businesses with limited budgets and resources.

🤔 Frequently Asked Questions

What are the different types of crm.

There are three main types of CRM: operational, analytical, and collaborative. Operational CRM focuses on automating and streamlining business processes, analytical CRM focuses on analyzing customer data to gain insights, and collaborative CRM focuses on improving communication and collaboration between departments and with customers.

What are some common CRM tools?

Some common CRM tools include Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho CRM, and Microsoft Dynamics.

How can a CRM plan improve customer retention?

A CRM plan can improve customer retention by identifying customer needs and providing personalized service. By showing that you understand and care about their needs, customers are more likely to remain loyal to your business.

What are some key components of a good CRM system?

Some key components of a good CRM system include customer data management, sales automation, marketing automation, and reporting and analytics.

How can a CRM plan boost sales?

A CRM plan can boost sales by identifying new sales opportunities and providing personalized service to customers. By tailoring your messaging and offerings to their specific needs, customers are more likely to make a purchase.

How can a CRM plan improve communication?

A CRM plan can improve communication by providing a centralized platform for managing customer interactions. This can help ensure that customers receive consistent messaging and can lead to better customer service and problem resolution.

What are some best practices for implementing a CRM plan?

Some best practices for implementing a CRM plan include involving stakeholders from across your organization, setting clear objectives and metrics, choosing the right CRM system for your business, and providing training and support to employees.

What are some challenges of implementing a CRM plan?

Some challenges of implementing a CRM plan include resistance to change from employees, integration challenges with existing systems, data security risks, and cost.

What are some metrics to track when measuring the success of a CRM plan?

Some metrics to track when measuring the success of a CRM plan include customer retention rate, customer satisfaction scores, sales conversion rates, and ROI.

How can CRM benefit small businesses?

CRM can benefit small businesses by helping them identify new sales opportunities, improve customer retention and loyalty, and provide better customer service. By implementing a CRM plan, small businesses can compete more effectively with larger competitors and improve their overall profitability.

What are some potential pitfalls to avoid when implementing a CRM plan?

Some potential pitfalls to avoid when implementing a CRM plan include choosing the wrong CRM system, failing to involve stakeholders from across your organization, not setting clear objectives and metrics, and not providing adequate training and support to employees.

What are some trends in CRM?

Some trends in CRM include the use of AI and machine learning to analyze customer data and provide personalized service, the increasing importance of data privacy and security, and the growing emphasis on collaboration and communication between departments and with customers.

What are the benefits of using a cloud-based CRM system?

Using a cloud-based CRM system can provide several benefits, including lower upfront costs, scalability, and ease of access from anywhere with an internet connection.

What are some common mistakes businesses make when implementing a CRM plan?

Some common mistakes businesses make when implementing a CRM plan include failing to involve stakeholders from across the organization, not properly training employees on the new system, and not setting clear objectives and metrics for success.

👋 Conclusion

Developing a business plan for CRM is crucial for any business looking to improve customer relationships, boost sales, and increase profitability. By understanding your own business, analyzing your customers, setting clear objectives, and choosing the right CRM system, you can create a plan that is tailored to your unique needs and objectives.

However, implementing a CRM plan does come with its own set of challenges and potential pitfalls. By being aware of these challenges and following best practices, businesses can maximize the benefits of CRM while minimizing the risks.

If you are considering implementing a CRM plan for your business, we hope this guide has provided you with the information you need to get started.

Don’t wait any longer! Start developing your business plan for CRM today and get ahead of the competition.

📝 disclaimer.

The information contained in this guide is provided for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal or financial advice. The author and publisher make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the information contained in this guide or the products, services, or related graphics contained herein for any purpose. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk.

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How to Write a Customer Relationship Management Plan

Last Updated: December 22, 2023

This article was co-authored by Michael R. Lewis . Michael R. Lewis is a retired corporate executive, entrepreneur, and investment advisor in Texas. He has over 40 years of experience in business and finance, including as a Vice President for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas. He has a BBA in Industrial Management from the University of Texas at Austin. This article has been viewed 91,770 times.

A customer relationship management (CRM) plan is a key component of running your business, as it describes how employees should deal with customers and provides a strategy for developing customer relationships. When writing a customer relationship management plan, it's important to define employee conduct and methods of handling customer inquiries or complaints in a manner that is easy to understand. The CRM plan also considers ways to foster a stronger, profitable relationship with a customer, not only dealing with him when problems or questions arise. Additionally, allowing room for improvements and adaptations as a result of periodic assessments will result in a more effective customer relationship management plan. The following steps will show you how to write a customer relationship management plan.

Reconciling Customer and Company Needs

• For example, if your goal is to increase repeat sales, you will need to focus more heavily on contacting and working with previous customers.

• Most of this information should be available in the marketing/sales plan if it has been developed.

Gathering Information

• Typically, the departments that interact directly with customers need guidelines on how to conduct themselves to best represent your company, as well as how to effectively handle inquiries they cannot resolve themselves. Depending on the type of company, this can pertain to departments such as sales, customer service, or repairs.
• Additionally, many companies send out email updates and newsletters to communicate new developments to customers.

• For indirect information gathering, look through your own records to figure out details like who your largest and profitable customers are, how often customers return after their first purchase, and which customers give you the most trouble (complaints, late payments, etc.).
• This information is easier to analyze if you have software for this purpose. CRM software packages may offer these tools.
• Identify your most valuable customers, which are usually customers purchasing profitable items or those who return often. Even though it may seem unfair, you need to incorporate in your plan a way to prioritize service to these customers.
• Use this information to identify the processes causing the most complaints. These could include missing prices, an inconvenient return policy, long checkout times, or late deliveries.
• You should also look for a way to cut off any customers that are more trouble than they're worth (excess complaints, unprofitable purchases, etc.). [1] X Research source

• Ask employees for any requests they may have gotten from customers for additional services or products that the business does not currently offer. Ask them for any ideas they may have for additional offerings based on their experience with customers. [2] X Research source

• You can also work to triumph over your competitors by identifying another way to provide greater value to your customers. This can be in customer service, as described, or in things like unique product offerings or comprehensive service packages. [3] X Research source
• Describe your findings in writing so you can refer to them as necessary.

Writing Your CRM Plan

• Evaluate your plans for additional offerings for risk and cost. Use this information to determine whether or not they are worth following. [5] X Research source

• Clarify who will be responsible for developing these relationships in your plan (which department, employee(s), etc.). [6] X Research source

• Depending on your business, you should think of aspects such as the maximum amount of time a customer should have to wait, how long it will take to handle complaints, and who will be responsible for gathering customer feedback. To explain this process, you might create create flow charts that you can use to instruct employees.
• Examine which methods are conducive for customer relations. For example, many companies use both telephone and email for inquiries and complaints, while others employ surveys to improve customer service, and yet others utilize all forms of social media to keep customers abreast of company news.
• Implement customer feedback when creating a customer communications policy.

Improving Your CRM Plan

• 4 Reward employees who stick to your CRM. Offer some positive reinforcement, such as a pay raise or a monthly lunch celebration, for employees who are working hard to implement the CRM. These kind of incentives will encourage other employees to do the same, in addition to raising morale.

• You may be able to get a full-service CRM package from one provider. However, you can also compile a CRM suite from different providers. Which you choose will depend on how much time and effort you want to spent on implementing the system.

Expert Q&A

You might also like.

• ↑ https://www.salesforce.com/crm/strategy/
• ↑ http://www.projectmanagementdocs.com/project-planning-templates/relationship-management-plan.html#axzz4CpKy6z8k

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