Why hiring a CRM specialist can benefit your business

How do you engage your customers, priortise their needs, and help solve their pain points? How do you continue to make them feel valued, and want to return to your business?

Taking time to understand your customers is integral to taking your business to the next level. This is true no matter how small or large your business is. The trick is examining every interaction your customers have with your brand. There’s something valuable to learn at each of these points. But with so many channels to track, as well as a vast amount of customers, this can be difficult to keep on top of. An Excel document or spreadsheet just might not cut it. So how do you know what to implement that will best impact your customer’s experience?

Here’s where a CRM specialist comes in. CRM stands for ‘customer relationship management’. A CRM specialist is a marketer who is an expert in using CRM software systems. These are digital platforms that can be used to manage customer data. This information is key in offering valuable customer insights. CRM specialists can help you navigate how to provide the best experience to your customers. They’ll also help you justify and manage the costs of these activities.

Here, we’ll discuss how a CRM specialist can radically transform your business.

What does a CRM specialist do?

Simply put, customer relationship management specialists look at your entire organisation from different customers’ points of view. From these multiple perspectives, they can see how it can be improved. This can cover sales, marketing and customer care.

It’s all about data

They do this by managing and analysing your customers' data. This is done using a CRM software system. This is a specialist type of software which gathers a wide range of customer information. Think of it as a group of multifaceted communications programs. Or more simply, a series of databases. Information collected include your current and existing customers, as well as potential customers. These can be known as leads and/or prospects.

These customer relationship management software systems collect data for the entire customer lifecycle. This can be from the first time they come to your website, how long they look at emails, what activities they do on your website etc. CRM specialists will track the entire customer journey and sales funnel - from visitor, to lead, to customer. These complicated data sets can be analysed by these specialists. 

CRM specialists can use this information to analyse customer behaviours across sales and marketing activities. These are also known as customer lifecycle optimisation strategies. 

In doing this, they can develop campaigns tailor-made to keep different types of customers engaged with your business. They can also identify where customers and prospects may be dropping off from your website. This may include:

• Particular landing pages that have low engagement
• What pages have high bounce rates
• Pop ups that might detract from the customer experience 
• Complicated payment processes
• Underperforming marketing campaigns
• Less-than-stellar customer service experiences

They can monitor, analyse, and improve customer-centric results across your business. CRM specialists will build CRM strategies, generate reports, and distribute these to relevant stakeholders. They’ll also ensure that all information collected by the CRM system is correct and reliable.

Why optimise customer lifecycles?

Customer lifecycles are key to the longevity of a business. It’s valuable to understand their journey with your brand, in order to understand how to keep them engaged. CRM specialists can help you with this. They may look at:

• Where visitors came to your website/social page, and what were they looking for?
• How many visitors become leads by signing up to your site. What are they interested in? How can you meet this interest?
• How many leads become customers. What did they purchase? Is there anything else that you offer that could help them?
• Review current customer processes and see how they affect the customer experience

This journey is known as the sales funnel. To improve customer lifecycles, you want to encourage customers to go through the sales funnel more than once.

What a CRM specialist can help you with

CRM Specialists are primed to help your organisation with the following:

Organisational

• Centralising all of your organisation’s communications into a single hub. This makes it far easier for other teams to access customer relationship management data too.
• Setting up and/or maximising the functionality of a CRM software system.
• Helping to establish a customer centric organisation, and priortising the needs of customers. This is key to closing deals and earning their loyalty.
• Prioritising CRM tasks and sharing with relevant stakeholders, and managing competing demands.
• Getting buy-in from different departments and stakeholders regarding CRM opportunities. 
• Regularly checking, maintaining, updating, and purging CRM data.
• Developing and automating workflows to hit CRM targets.
• Troubleshooting any system errors.
• Undertaking and/or supporting user research initiatives.

Analysis

• Delving into nitty-gritty data points. This is known as data mining. This is the stuff your organisation doesn’t want to miss. Getting deep into customer data can reveal crucial points of the customer experience that may not be obvious at initial glance. It’s all about the details.
• Segmenting users into different categories and groups. This can help the organisation understand exactly who their customers are, and how to meet their specific needs.

• Analysing and interpreting how customers interact and engage with marketing campaigns. This includes email, social media, PPC, and SEO.

Strategy

• Understanding the best outreach channels for specific customers and leads. This can be across phone, email, social media, and so on.
• Identifying, analysing and forecasting insights into buying trends, based on current customer behaviour.
• Identifying and analysing hot and cold leads, as well as the best opportunities for follow ups, cross-selling and up-selling.
• Building a CRM strategy that takes into consideration all aspects of the customer journey.
• Helping marketing teams tweak their communications and message delivery.
• Developing and automating workflows to hit CRM targets.
• Ensuring all CRM activity falls in with legal requirements.

Results

• Increasing sales. Looking at the sales journey means looking at ways to improve the relationship between sales teams and customers. The better the relationship is, the more customers will return to buy from you. This can really drive sales.
• Nailing and improving customer care strategies, practices and initiatives.
• Prioritising CRM tasks and sharing with relevant stakeholders.
  

The benefits of working with a CRM specialist

Working with an effective CRM specialist will help you hit your CRM objectives. This is what benefits this can bring to your business:

Efficiency

• Provide a return on investment. Time spent on sales and marketing activities, as well as costs, will be far easier to manage. They will also be able to provide you with historical data to base decision making on.
• Automate tasks, saving time and money. Think welcome emails, onboarding emails, abandoned cart emails etc.
• Develop a central point of customer data. This means it will be far easier to collaborate with different teams.

Removing guesswork

• Provide actionable facts. They’ll give you the data to support decision making.
• Ability to quickly access the latest and correct customer information and records.
• Run complicated data sets that they can easily explain to stakeholders.

Customer satisfaction

• Help to build a better customer experience, personalised and tailored to their needs. This can improve customer lifetime cycles, encouraging loyal and longterm customers. 
• Help your organisation focus on giving your customers exactly what they want.
• Build a customer-centric culture.
• Align tasks and processes from different departments so they remain customer-focused.
• Help with managing brand reputation. They’ll help provide insights where your customers aren’t having the best-in-class experience.

Types of business that would benefit with a CRM specialist

Any businesses that have a stake in customer relationships would highly benefit from a CRM specialist. This can include marketing, sales, and finance companies. These types of businesses can include:

• B2C (Business to Customer)
• B2B (Business to Business)
• Ecommerce
• Billing organisations
• Marketing agencies
• Manufacturers
• Service providers

Should you hire a CRM specialist?

Before you hire a CRM specialist for your business, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• Are you familiar with CRM?
• Does your organisation already have a CRM system in place?
• Do you have a budget for a CRM system?
• Do you have the resources required for setting up a CRM system?

It’s recommended that you hire a CRM specialist before you implement a new piece of CRM software. That way you can ensure that it is used to its full capacity as soon as its implemented.

Find a CRM specialist in 72 hours

Becoming a specialist in a particular business area can take time, particularly when it comes to navigating CRM software. Save time and money, and hire a CRM Specialist. They’ll be able to kick start your CRM project with a bang.

Find a specialist that fits into your budget here at Passionfruit. We connect startups with the best growth marketers.

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