If you are running a business, you would definitely wish to push your business to greater heights by constantly working on improving the bottom line. You can accomplish this either by increasing the sales or by reducing the costs or by doing both. One of the best ways to achieve this is by implementing a CRM, which can help you to accelerate your sales and also reduce your cost, thereby increasing your bottom line.
Would you like to know more about what is a CRM and how can it help you to reduce your business cost? Read on to understand more.
What is a CRM?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, a process, which helps and ensures enriched relationship with both your existing and potential customers. CRM helps in streamlining and making systematic efforts in lead capture, lead tracking and lead management. It helps businesses to convert leads into customers, quickly and effortlessly. There are lots of cloud-based CRM software available in the market these days such as HelloLeads, Zoho, and Hubspot, which can reduce both time and cost in managing the customer relationships.
How can a CRM Software help reduce costs of your business?
Here we give you the top 8 ways in which a CRM can help your business in reducing the cost.
1 . Organized Business Operations:
A CRM helps you to do your business operations, in a more well organised and systematic way. Traditional ways of organizing the data manually or through spreadsheets are inefficient and time consuming and add to the business cost due to the repetition of the mundane tasks. A mobile based CRM helps in keeping the data in a centralised database and makes sure that the jobs are done in a systematic and organised manner. Automated follow-up activities with the prospective customers, better customer interactions by integration with the various communication mediums such as, email, WhatsApp, SMS and Social medias and proactive customer support to the existing customers etc are some of the examples of how a CRM can help to take care of the business operations in a more organised way and thereby reducing the cost significantly.
2 . Streamline Sales Process:
The entire sales process, from identifying the potential lead, effective communication, scheduling an appointment, follow-ups, setting reminders for follow-ups to efficient sales team management can be very well streamlined with the help of an efficient CRM. The CRM dashboard helps in getting a clear picture of the entire sales process and improves the efficiency of the sales team. This decreases the overall time and cost of completing a deal allowing the sales team to focus more on acquiring new customers.
3 . Reduce Paper Consumption:
The main concern of today’s world is the deforestation and global warming. We know how many trees are cut each day for various human consumption and usage, especially by paper industry. Reducing the paper usage has become a must now to save our mother earth from all the environmental threats. Go green initiatives and go digital is the new norm of the corporate world. CRMs can greatly help in reducing the paper waste and almost all the business operations can be handled with mobile phones or laptops. This will greatly reduce the overall business cost.
4 . Lower customer acquisition cost:
For any business to grow, getting new customers is imperative and this involves a huge chunk of customer acquisition cost. Huge amounts are spent on marketing to get the relevant leads for the business and on sales to convert the leads into new customers. When you start using a CRM, the team size of the marketing and sales activities can be drastically reduced, as all the activities are automated in the CRM. If the team size is reduced, related overhead expenses can also be reduced. As the activities are now digital based, travelling expenses to meet the potential customers or conducting expos and tradeshows can also be minimised to a large extent. Thus, by using a CRM, the customer acquisition cost can be very less.
5 . Follow ups and tracking made easy:
Follow ups and Tracking is made easy when you use a CRM for your business. In a CRM all the lead data are kept in a centralised location and the lead stages are clearly assigned. The follow-ups can be handled in a more efficient way by setting reminders and hence, the sales team can make sure that there are no missed follow-ups. Follow-ups can be made using various ways such as email, WhatsApp, SMS or Call, sitting from wherever we are and hence, the travelling expenses can be largely reduced. Tracking capability in the CRMs are so good that the management can track the performances of each team, such as, sales, marketing and customer support and make the necessary management decisions. This will greatly help in reducing the overall business costs. Tracking the customers will help to orient the service according to their needs and will help to accelerate the sales.
6 . Reduced conversion cost:
In a traditional way a doing business, the lead to customer conversion is a very lengthy process and involves huge cost. Getting the leads, managing them, assigning the leads to the sales team members, frequent follow-ups, conversion and customer support everything involves time, manpower and related costs. This can be largely reduced when a cloud-based mobile CRM is used where everything can be done with just a touch of a button / one click. As things are getting automated, the conversion can be handled even with limited manpower in the sales, marketing, and support teams. As the conversion time gets reduced, this will result in a reduced conversion cost.
7 . Reduced Sales Team and related costs:
When we streamline our selling process with the help of a CRM, the efficiency and performance of the Sales team will improve tremendously and the number of people necessary in a sales team will also come down drastically. As most of the activities such as communication, follow-ups and support can be largely automated the manpower required will come down. Hence, the salary, overheads and related costs can be reduced when a CRM is used, resulting in the overall cost reduction and improved ROI.
8 . Customer Service:
Customer support services can be handled in a CRM very efficiently. As the CRM is the centralised repository of all the customer data, addressing their queries, issues and concerns becomes very easy. Personalised attention can be given to each customer and this helps in keeping the customers happy. After sale service is very important in keeping the customers and this can be done very efficiently while we use a CRM. This can be achieved with the less manpower and thus reducing the cost in an effective way.
Conclusion:
Opting for a CRM is not only beneficial to improve your sales, but also helpful in reducing the business cost, thus improving the ROI. There are lots of cloud based mobile CRMs that are available in the market, such as, HelloLeads, Zoho and Hubspot, which can be used to improve the business. Now, what are you waiting for? Just jump in and choose a simple and easy to use CRM and reap the benefit.
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