Customer-relationship management (CRM) is a system that helps businesses manage their customer database. The customers’ and prospects’ interactions with the company in the past are recorded, which can be used for marketing purposes in the future. If you’re a business owner, you should invest in a sales CRM and here are the reasons:

1. To Gather Customer Information

The human mind is a complex organ, and it can indeed do a lot of things. Although humans can be good at memorizing, in business it’s impossible to recall your past interactions with all your customers.

With CRM, you can record all your customer’s info such as email addresses, inquiries, whether they purchased from you or not, and so much more. You can customize CRM tools to gather necessary details, which you can use to study the behavior of your customers.

2. To Retain Customers

Customers are the lifeblood of your business. Your company couldn’t grow if nobody is buying your products or services. It’s great if a person takes a chance with you, but the tricky part is how to retain them. There are many reasons you could potentially lose a customer, including:

● Not happy with the product or service
● Unhelpful customer service
● No longer interested in your products and want to try other brands

All of these factors can be mitigated using CRM. You can use the data you’ve gathered to customize your marketing efforts to give your customers the best experience they could have when dealing with your business.

For instance, you can come up with new products or services that they need and are willing to buy. You can use prototyping tools when developing a product to see, test, and gain feedback to check whether it’s feasible.

3. To Turn Prospects into Customers

Retaining customers is important, but for your company to grow, you need to attract more. A lot of people could show interest in your business but don’t really purchase anything. What you need to do is to turn these prospects into paying customers.

You can also record the information of prospects into your CRM. It’s easier to turn them into customers than trying to sell to people who haven’t heard of your company yet. It’s because prospects already showed interest in your business, so a little bit more convincing could turn into sales.

You can also increase your chances of making a sale if you can integrate CRM with marketing automation to reach your prospects on multiple channels. Make smarter offers that target those specific prospects to finally convince them.

4. To Create Centralized Access to Customer Information

Your company could have more success if your team could work together seamlessly. With a CRM system, each member of your team doesn’t have to have separate lists of customers. You can share one database where everyone has access to it.

So, when a different team needs to use it for, let’s say, creating sales reposts or engaging with customers, they could get the information they need without having to go to you to ask for it. Plus, any of you can access it from wherever you are because it’s accessible online.

5. To Improve Security

CRM systems have better security than regular Excel spreadsheets, email folders, or calendars when storing customer information. It’s because such systems are used exclusively for customer information management. As opposed to having general use like storing email or important dates, the system is equipped to store sensitive data that should not be easily hacked by others.

6. To Reduce Risks of Data Loss

There’s nothing worse than corrupted data and losing everything. This could happen when you store your data locally on your computer. When you use CRM, the info is stored online and gets backed up into a cloud, so even if the servers crash, you have the assurance that you still have a copy of the data.