Are You Making this Big Customer Relationship Mistake?

by | May 1, 2013

The customer relationship is at the center of any successful sales strategy today.

Whether the customer has found your company in a search, email campaign or any other lead generation activity, the buyers want smart, tailored and useful information that will allow them to make a good decision.

Even with marketing automation, the sole purpose should meet the needs and best interests of the customer if you want to deepen the customer relationship and grow your sales.

online CRM – from a raw sales lead to a loyal repeat customer – it is possible to maintain a 360 degree view of the customer.

Lots of companies do not fully use the tools in their CRM software to add this highly valuable approach to a customer relationship.

In most companies, sales and marketing gathers information useful to the sales process.  In many, during the vital information gathering stage, it is only the individual sales person who has most of the data about the prospect. Then, when the sale closes whatever customer information has been shared goes to other departments such as operations, support or delivery. There is no visibility of data between departments and the customer relationship suffers.

A Way to Win More Customers

The customer’s primary need at any point of the relationship is useful and timely information. They want to get exactly what they want and nothing more. They want to have that information given to them without being passed from one person to the next or waiting on someone to return their call.
If your company is being compared to a competitor, customer responses can make or break the sales. Every interaction with your company needs to show the customer relationship to be at the heart of your business.

We all know about situations where just a few minutes can make all the difference in the world. If the company’s internal communication makes response time inconvenient to the customer, you are losing sales and damaging the customer relationships that are already in place.

Improve Service and Responsiveness

If you are the owner of your business, do you have access to this kind of information without getting the sales person involved?

  • The documents put together by the sales rep.
  • A presentation showed to a customer.
  • An email that was sent or an email with a proposal attached.
  • Or just some notes about a conversation with the customer.

How about your support manager or operations manager?  Without this information, you can’t immediately respond to your prospects and customers.  You are not giving them solutions at the time of their inquiry.  This one shortfall may be jeopardizing all the time, money and effort put into your lead generation and sales lead follow up.

Information Silos

A web based CRM is an effective solution for allowing access to all the members of your team.  Many see CRM software as only a tool for making sales.  In our recent Sales Growth eBook series, we talked a lot about marketing automation, lead generation and qualifying sales leads.  But, your CRM can do much more to win and keep the customer relationship fine-tuned.  The 360 degree customer view will reap many rewards over the lifecycle of the customer relationship.