Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is, in its simplest form, a tool that enables you to more effectively and intelligently manage your business interactions with leads and customers. While previously it centered around managing your contacts, nowadays, you can take full advantage of a comprehensive system that empowers your employees to best serve customers through multi-dimensional tools and customer behaviour insights. These advantages are what gives your business the competitive edge required to triumph in these challenging economic conditions. 

Because CRM has proven so successful, this has become a wildly competitive space, with a myriad of CRM solutions on the market, each lauded as the ‘must-have’ service that could catapult your business forward. The question is, how do you know which is right for you? 

The first answer is by talking to a CRM specialist, like StormSpace. With over 15 years of experience, we are well placed to advise you on the right, affordable CRM strategy for your business. What we can also do for you, right here, is explore the top CRM best practices that you can implement and offer advice on how we can help you advance your company’s growth strategy.

Why CRM is Critical 

CRM strategies govern the what, when, who, how, why, and where of your business interactions with leads and customers through incomparable access to data. And not just any data. Clean and insightful CRM data that reduces the number of missed leads, enhances inter-departmental communications and collaboration, saves time when it comes to searching for the right information, and streamlines reporting to executive teams.

Imagine the effect that such benefits could have on the sheer confidence alone of every individual and department when they are able to operate unshackled by the restraints of internal frustrations, and freed to do what they do best. To say nothing of their ability to make more informed and strategic decisions within the business in a timely fashion. 

This is the beauty and benefit of CRM and to help you navigate this world, we have gathered our top 11 CRM best practices that will empower your employees to perform confidently, swiftly, and intelligently in every step of their day.

1. Consider what the data will be used for

The first and most important thing when customising a CRM solution is to understand what you need and to be clear about your goals and paint points within the business. Take the time to analyse your needs before selecting a CRM service, because you really don’t need one that offers every feature and tool. Too many can be overwhelming and make the system difficult to embrace and employ to its fullest capacity.

2. Deal with new data properly 

Put your best foot forward when it comes to collecting data and import every detail without delay. One of our top priorities outside of analysing your needs is to review how you deal with any data that you collect. You want to ensure that you collect all the data you need and import it as soon as possible, not only because it delivers crucial information to your employees, but it also gives you the opportunity to fill in any gaps and weed out duplications and errors.

3. Continuous cleaning

This brings us to our next best practice, which is cleaning your data. While it’s important to import data quickly and tidy up any mistakes or fill in any pieces, this isn’t enough. You need to do more than clean as you go or perform a once-off cleansing. Data cleansing needs to be undertaken regularly in order to keep your data clean and usable for your teams.  

4. Clean data-driven decisions

Not to be overly dramatic, but there can be a sense of being buried by an ever-growing, cascading heap of irrelevant, flawed, and outdated customer data. It’s hard to make informed, strategic, and timely decisions in this figurative quicksand of dirty data. However, when you are operating with intentionally cleaned and stored customer and lead data, you can more effectively track your interactions, improve your support team’s customer service, and make better decisions and offer better customer experiences. 

5. Social listening 

A new but essential CRM best practice for 2021 is social listening. This relatively new trend, also called social media scanning, is the practice of actively observing what is being said about your competitors, industry, and your own brand on social media channels, like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Social listening divulges competitor insights that can’t be collected elsewhere and when added to your CRM strategy and used correctly, this gives your business a real edge over the competition.

6. Proper training and support

There’s little point in choosing a CRM system that isn’t adopted by those who need to use it, either because it isn’t user-friendly, understandable, or trained on. To enhance user adoption, make sure that you opt for a solution that isn’t overly complicated. Simply, you want to a solution that’s easy to deploy and train people to use. Our advice in 2021 is to go one step further and put into place KPIs that will encourage employees to make realistic and measurable improvements in the customer relationship processes they have been trained on.

7. Get automated

One of the more effective solutions that CRM software enables you to utilise is the ability to uncover tasks that can be automated. There are anywhere from a handful to several clutches of tasks that can be automated, which speeds up processes, frees your people to do their jobs more effectively, and streamlines your business’ operations.

8. Simplify workflows

What you’ll discover when reviewing your CRM needs is the horrifying existence of redundant and repetitive tasks and scattered internal workflows. In addition to automated workflows, you can also weed out unnecessary steps and simplify workflows for employees. For example, with the right solution you can provide safeguarded access to clean customer data from a centralised database, giving employees the autonomy to get more done by operating more efficiently. As opposed to fighting through redundant and manual steps and relying on (or rather, waiting on) others to supply the correct information required, which slows everything down and is extremely frustrating. 

9. Be proactive

Dealing with customers on the back foot and being late to the party on a new opportunity in the market happens to the best of them, but it does rather hinder your sales strategy. Thankfully, intelligent CRM analytics features have put paid to this disadvantage and is why it makes our top list of CRM best practices. We frequently advise clients to use more detailed CRM analytics to identify new opportunities in the market and address customer needs and concerns proactively so that they’re leaps ahead of the competition.

10. Measure and adapt 

Not everyone learns at the same pace, not every feature is useful in application, and your business needs may change over time. That’s why it’s so important to have a ‘measure and adapt’ approach so that you can be responsive to the changing needs of your employees, customers, and your business as it progresses. Our top best practice advice here would be to consider a customisable and scalable CRM that can grow and adapt as you do.

11. Bring in the professionals

Ultimately, the right CRM solution will unleash deeper customer intelligence, improve your support teams’ collaboration with sales teams so that they are able to win more customers, allow you to proactively offer customer-enriched experiences, and boost your sales team’s ability to close deals. However, given that the market is saturated with increasingly more services and tips, our final CRM best practice is to bring in the professionals to help you make strategic, cost effective decisions.

Book a discovery call with us so that we can outline the dedicated and customisable CRM support that you can expect from a real CRM specialist that like StormSpace.