How can CRM tools provide organizations with a competitive advantage?

Today, organizations are continually looking for ways to gain a competitive advantage. Many organizations consistently focus on their product or service for their competitive edge. While this is vital to what an organization has to offer, they may overlook the advantage their internal systems and digital infrastructure can provide. Particularly how they track their leads, manage customer relationships, and market their customers. A Customer Relationship Management system or CRM is the most popular digital tool to accomplish these items. 

What is CRM?

“CRM software is a system for managing your relationships with customers. You can use CRM software to keep track of interactions, data, and notes about customers or potential. The data is stored in a central database and is accessible to multiple people within an organization. A CRM helps streamline sales, marketing efforts, customer service, accounting, and management for growing companies. Multiple people can access and edit the information about a particular client’s customer journey” (Hubspot, n.d.). 

“As the digital world develops, businesses will need to adapt to remain relevant. CRM’s have provided the support that corporate enterprises need to excel amongst increasing market competition, and the parallel evolution of advanced lead generation tools in CRM systems is poised to remain the holy grail of growth acceleration” (Wertz, n.d.). 

As Wertz mentions, CRM tools can provide organizations with resources and tools to get ahead of their competition. There are several common functionalities in CRM tools that give users valuable insights and capabilities:

• Lead management
  • CRM tools allow marketers and sales professionals to track clients/leads through their customer journey. The tool stores customer information and tracks the organization’s interactions with these leads or customers. These interactions might be tracked through automation or manual entry. Based on where an individual is in their customer journey, marketing and/or sales can create actionable tasks to move customers to the next step of their journey.
• Marketing
  • Based on where individuals are in the customer journey, many CRM tools can deploy automated (or manual) marketing campaigns. CRM tools can also deploy marketing campaigns based off other factors such as customer segments, purchase history, etc. Marketing automation via CRM is a great way to simplify complex marketing tasks and make an organization more efficient.
• Data
  • CRM tools can provide valuable data and insights on various aspects of a customer journey. Some examples of valuable insights a CRM tool can provide:
    • Customer/lead demographic data (who is inquiring about a product or service and who is converting into a customer)
    • Sales data (which sales efforts are producing ROI)
    • Marketing data (which marketing campaigns are producing an ROI and which marketing campaigns may need further optimization)
  • Many CRM tools provide reports and dashboards. Some CRM tools even allow organizations to create custom reports and dashboards tailored to their organizational needs.

While CRM tools provide many benefits, these are some of the most commonly used and valuable features that can easily help organizations advance their digital infrastructure and gain a competitive advantage.

What CRM tool is right for your organization?

There are many factors that come into play when selecting a CRM tool for an organization. Some of these factors include business needs, budget, company size, etc.

One of the most popular and flexible CRM platforms available is Salesforce. Salesforce provides the ability to customize the tool towards business needs, create custom reporting dashboards, automate marketing campaigns, automate sales tasks and much more. While this tool sounds like the right choice, Salesforce can be a very expensive platform. Also, in order to customize the tool, Salesforce often requires developer knowledge specific to their tool which many organizations do not have a Salesforce developer on staff or within their budget. While Salesforce is a powerful tool, it may not be practical or necessary for all organizations.

There are also many CRM platforms that are industry specific. These platforms are often more cost-effective and have a basic understanding of the industry needs, therefore, these platforms are built out with industry standards and needs in mind. For example, there are CRM platforms tailored to healthcare needs that integrate with other healthcare systems such as Electronic Medical Record systems or scheduling software. Other examples of industry-specific CRM platforms are real estate, travel, fitness, etc.

When evaluating what CRM tool is best for your organization, I recommend having a clear understanding of marketing/sales goals, company budget, and data needs. Once you have a clear understanding of your organizational needs, you can decide on which CRM software is best for your company and the bottom line.

In conclusion, by having access to CRM capabilities, organizations can position themselves better in a competitive landscape.

References

Hubspot. (n.d.). What is Customer Relationship Management? Hubspot. https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm/what-is

Wertz, J. (n.d.). How CRMs help businesses gain a competitive advantage. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jiawertz/2019/10/30/how-crms-help-businesses-gain-a-competitive-advantage/?sh=6457eb062ac2