Top 10 Ways B2B CRM Strategies Assist Marketing & Sales
Prologue
In a fiercely competitive & ever-evolving B2B landscape, marketers must optimize their B2B CRM strategies to better interpret the complex nature of customers’ psychologies to optimize their marketing & sales endeavors. The best B2B CRM strategies encompass business to business Customer Relationship Management & deploy systems & technologies towards managing the relationships with the existing as well as potential customers.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing the relationships of the companies with their existing as well as potential customers. The goal is simply to improve business relationships.
A CRM system helps companies to stay connected with their customers, streamline their sales cycles to optimize revenues & improve their profitability.
Roger Cole, a CRM consultant at reseller CPiO, elucidates the significance of CRM software as follows:
“The big benefit of CRM is the visibility of everything relating to customers going on in your company. If you want to provide a better service to your customer, you have to be able to manage everything from complaints to sales opportunities.”
In general, the terminology CRM refers to a CRM system, a tool that helps with contact management, sales management, productivity & much more.
Having wide-ranging B2B CRM strategies helps marketers focus on their organizations’ relationships with individual people, service users, colleagues or suppliers. This relationship building is a dynamic process & continues throughout the lifecycle of customers including finding new customers, winning the deals & providing support & additional services throughout the relationship.
How Integrated & Optimized B2B CRM Strategies Benefits Businesses
B2B CRM strategies are characterized by companies having CRM software to boost their sales and improve their customer services. B2B CRM strategies, thus, not only are profitable for the businesses but also are the powerful tools for collecting & sorting data – the essentials that comprise & contribute to the seamless omnichannel customer experience.
As the following quote from Bob Thompson, CEO of CustomerThink Corporation, implies, success with B2B CRM strategies can give marketers competitive advantage & much more:
“Successful CRM is about competing in the relationship dimension. Not as an alternative to having a competitive product or reasonable price- but as a differentiator. If your competitors are doing the same thing you are (as they generally are), product and price won’t give you a long-term, sustainable competitive advantage. But if you can get an edge based on how customers feel about your company, it’s a much stickier–sustainable–relationship over the long haul.”
Let’s delve deeper into how deploying optimized B2B CRM strategies boosts sales & improves customer service:
1. B2B CRM Strategies disclose Clients’ Needs in Real-time:
With real-time data at disposal, sales departments can send up-to-date quotes to the customers. There is precision in the quotes being sent in real-time. Thus, having effective B2B CRM strategies ensures that updates on information about prices, inventory composition & prices reach the marketers as soon as possible.
2. Supports the Launch of Hyper-Targeted Marketing Campaigns:
The modern-day B2B CRM strategies are intertwined with several third-party software & marketing automation tools. As a result, not only understanding & acting according to the psychology of the customers is easier, but the platforms also allow marketers to segment & sub-segment the customers on the basis of intent data & data based on demography, technography, firmographic insights as well as based on the past buying behaviors of the prospects & their browsing histories.
Leveraging first & third party intent data for optimizing the business revenues of the brands seems to the foremost advantage of having integrated B2B CRM strategies in place.
Furthermore, multiple hyper-personalized & automated marketing campaigns reach the B2B CRM systems & can be acted upon efficiently & effective from there. Third-party CRM email marketing platforms are amongst the most effective B2B CRM strategies used to run large campaigns, as well as to track the effectiveness of each of them in terms of ROI.
The marketing team can quickly identify potential clients & can focus on communicating with them.
3. B2B CRM Strategies Allow In-depth analysis & Reporting of KPIs:
The only way to figure out the effectiveness of promotional campaigns is to check their results. By comparing the Return on Investment (ROI) from several campaigns, the marketers can figure out which campaigns have been the most successful for them in terms of fetching sales revenue.
Accordingly, marketers can make their sales forecasts. The analytics & reporting feature allows marketers to figure out which actions fetch them Return on Investment (ROI).
Consequently, B2B marketers can prepare a sales forecast for the next quarter. CRM system has a dashboard that shows all the needed metrics & generates accurate reports by aligning the key business objectives of the organizations with the revenue goals realized.
4. Aids Data Organization for Improving Customers’ Experience:
Effective B2B CRM strategies are imperative for data organization. The data can then be refined further & analyzed for data-driven decision making. Improving customer experience relies majorly on the apt execution of B2B CRM strategies.
5. Leveraging Customized Solutions to meet Targeted Goals:
Though no one-size-fits-it-all rule can be applied for perfecting B2B CRM strategies, marketers need to customize the CRM software to analyze their key performance indicators. Integrating B2B CRM strategies with other departments such as backend processes ranging from accounting to automatic marketing programs ensures that the marketers can earn optimum benefit from the CRM strategies deployed for marketing.
6. Reduces Errors & Improves Competence:
Deploying effective B2B CRM strategies helps sales teams avoid lost information & repeated phone calls or other actions & ultimately improves efficiency as well as the accuracy of the sales teams. If the prospective customers can look up to the brands’ sales teams as a group of subject matter experts (SMEs), it helps them in the closing a greater number of sales deals.
7. Prevents Accounts from Being Stagnant:
Effective B2B CRM strategies ensure that no accounts become stagnant. While the sales team can easily cherry-pick more vital accounts & more profitable clients, a CRM tool sends constant reminders to ensure that no stone is left unturned in the quest of sales.
Thus, finally, a CRM system ensures that all the clients have been properly followed up to ensure that brands don’t miss out on any business that they would like to retain as clients.
8. Makes every day – a Productive Day:
Successful B2B CRM strategies help marketers optimize their daily schedules. By taking certain tasks on a priority basis the marketers can send reminders & save a considerable amount of time otherwise ventured into administrative tasks. As customers feel cared for, B2B marketing efforts are directed towards increased sales.
9. Helps Organizations Automate & Personalize Solutions:
According to a report by bpm online, 97% of the B2B organizations use CRM tools & as per marketing experts, B2B businesses will continue to invest in the CRM-based systems.
An array of marketing automation solutions can be integrated with effective B2B CRM strategies for deciphering the most apposite methods for defining prospects, attracting & engaging customers & capturing the important pieces of information pertaining to leads to figure out ways to streamline the buying cycles of the prospects & deliver them with the phenomenal experiences at the same time.
The importance of CRM in deploying automated sales & marketing solutions was quoted in the Harvard Business Review as follows:
“On average, sales and marketing costs average from 15%-35% of total corporate costs. So the effort to automate for more sales efficiency is absolutely essential. In cases reviewed, sales increases due to advanced CRM technology have ranged from 10% to more than 30%.”
10. Assists Managing Sales Teams:
Optimization of B2B CRM strategies means that marketers can easily track what their teams are doing. CRM system can track the calls a team is making, the sales goals each representative have, conversion rates, number of referrals or other indicators of success.
Several CRM systems also allow marketers to gauge their KPIs on dashboards & assess what’s happening in real-time by taking a glance at the numbers.
Wrapping It Up
The marketers need to modernize & optimize their B2B CRM strategies & convert their clients into CRM cases. Leveraging CRM data correctly can scale up the sales processes for bolstering profits & also leads to the improvement of critical processes concerning marketing & sales, including bridging the gaps between the marketing & sales endeavors.
Well-integrated B2B CRM strategies deviate sales pipelines towards better visibility & efficiency, simplifies data-driven decision making leveraging AI-equipped lead scoring & helps organizations realize their overarching goal of optimized sales revenue.
The most significant objective of having effective & optimized in place is that it helps to improve business relationships. As the existing gaps between the clients’ expectations & reality are bridged, this increases the ROI of sales & marketing activities & ultimately acts as a catalyst to fuel organizational growth. Also, continuous monitoring of trends allows organizations to look beyond guess-work & rely on data-driven-decision-making to optimize their marketing & sales strategies in an era of digital transformation & experience economy.
