In a business, managing relationships is extremely important. Many things could happen when your client first hears about your company and when they become a paying customer. That’s precisely the reason why lead generation CRM is crucial for your brand.
Without a CRM (Customer Relationship Management Software), there would be too many shifting pieces you should remember without someone or something falling through the cracks.
One good thing about CRM tools is you can easily integrate them into your lead generation strategy.
Now, let’s get to know what lead generation CRM has to put on the table for business owners like yourself.
What is CRM?
Image Source: Ehmtic 2014
CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management.” As the name suggests, CRM is a system that allows you to manage relationships with your customers.
The most important and most valuable asset of most brands is their customers.
In the early days of your brand, client details such as who they are and how they’ve interacted with a particular organization are scattered in different places. Some pieces of information are in the accountant’s stack of invoices, in a sales rep’s inbox, and the CEO’s brain.
However, today, you can do better than that! You would need one central place to store all those pieces of information.
You don’t want your team to be slowed down with essential questions such as:
- Who are our customers?
- How can we reach out to them?
- How do they interact with our content?
- What does the pipeline of the new business look like?
Your clients and prospects won’t be thrilled if they realize that they aren’t on the same page with your sales team. Remember that your customers think they have a relationship with one company, not with many people and departments.
Therefore, every single person on your team should understand your client’s current state, wants, and needs, so they can easily pick up where the conversation was left off.
These are the common problems that CRM lead generation can solve. With one central place to compile your customers’ and your leads’ details, everyone on the team can instantly gain insight into every customer relationship status and business state.
Who Should Use Lead Generation CRM?
Are you wondering if your company needs to invest in an excellent CRM tool?
Well, the answer depends on you. If you want your brand to maintain a relationship with its customers, then lead generation CRM can benefit you.
To be more specific, there are two types of companies that can benefit the most from this software:
B2B Companies
Businesses under this category need to track customers and leads across long sales cycles and through upgrade paths.
Some examples are recruiting firms and software companies.
B2C Companies
These are considered-purchase services. Some examples are realtors, landscaping services and jewelers.
Image Source: SelectHub
If your brand doesn’t fit the above two profiles, it doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy the advantages that CRM systems have to offer.
To determine if CRM can help your business, you can start listing down your company’s challenges that lead generation CRM can solve.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Are you looking for a better way to understand your sales team’s productivity? Does your team follow a structured process?
- Do you need to maintain a central list of leads’ and customers’ information? Do all the details you have stored in various places?
- Are your clients interacting with numerous people on your team? Is there a way that your people keep track of the conversation they have with each customer?
If your answer is yes to at least one of the above questions, then your business will more likely benefit from CRM and lead generation.
Benefits of Lead Generation CRM For Your Business’ Growth
Image Source: Arcadian Digital
Now that you learned that lead generation CRM could be used for your business, maybe you’re wondering how it could benefit your company.
Here are some of the benefits of CRM on your sales process and your business in general.
It streamlines your sales process
Back in the days when CRM was not yet in the picture, brands had to use other tools in managing their sales process. Some used email, Excel sheets and other types of static tools.
To be fair, those methods can work, especially on a small number of leads. However, as the number increases, you may find it hard to manage both your leads and clients.
Take note that static tools such as Excel can’t track your leads. Therefore, you will not be getting data on how your leads interact with your brand and how they are moving through your sales funnel.
Through CRM integration, you can track leads from the moment they showed interest in your business up to conversion and even after.
It can ensure that your funnel doesn’t have any loopholes or leaks.
Overall, CRM lead generation takes account of all the leads coming your way regardless of where they came from.
It helps you manage leads efficiently
What’s fantastic about most CRMs is they come with lead management tools. Those can help you keep track of your lead volume, no matter how big or small.
Apparently, you have been struggling with remembering where your leads are coming from and how they interact with your brand. With CRM, you can sit back and relax, as this tool will control and manage your leads for you.
This means no more sifting through thousands of leads in search of that one lead you need to reach out to as CRM can help you determine qualified leads in your system.
At the same time, it enables you to identify the type of interaction each lead is having with your brand and at what stage they are currently under. There are even CRMs that can predict the closure of a certain lead.
It helps you determine who to prioritize for calls
Want to know who to call first out of the thousands of leads you have in your system? Well, that can be very challenging for both veteran and newbie marketers without CRM.
It can be hard to determine which of your leads you should reach out to first, especially if you do not hold any data that can tell you which has a higher value than the rest.
When this happens, your sales team would be spending their precious time and energy on calling every single lead.
Unfortunately, this method can make your company miss leads that would actually do business with your company. It’s either they lost interest in your product during the process or have already made their purchase from your competitor.
With CRM and lead generation, you can prevent this from happening as it will help you prioritize leads. The leads can be grouped into a list based on their activities or each of them can be given a particular lead score.
As a result, you can effectively interact with your leads accordingly. No more missing out on the chance of closing a sale.
But make sure that you correctly communicate with every lead on each stage. For instance, if you get hot leads, it would be best to follow up immediately to increase the chances of closing a sale.
As for warm leads, you can offer them incentives like coupons or discounts they can use when purchasing from you.
While with cold leads, it would help if you nurture them through promotional content or emails. Consistently engage with them over some time until they are ready to make the purchase.
It makes customer interactions more personalized
You can be the best salesperson in the whole world, but you can’t still determine what exactly your leads want. To make matters worse, they can be very reluctant to share with you their buying intent.
Unless you’re sort of a mind reader, you can never guess what’s going on inside their head.
Fortunately, with CRM, you can be a psychic, a clairvoyant or whatever you may want to call yourself.
The good thing about using lead generation CRM is it has lead tracking and sales tracking options. Through those features, you can determine which pages on your website your leads are visiting and how much time they spend on each.
For example, if your company sells products online, CRM can help you know the most-visited categories.
Moreover, you can keep tabs on the conversation they had with your sales team.
With that data, you can gauge their interest in doing business with you and identify which products or services they are most interested in. As a result, you can offer them awesome deals that they may not be able to resist!
It saves time by automating tasks
The biggest time-wasters for a salesperson are small tasks. Try to imagine the influx of leads your brand generates every day. And how you are going to check each one and update their status accordingly manually.
We believe that those tasks can eat half of your productive day — uh-oh!
Luckily, with the advancements lead generation CRM tools have to offer, you can automate routine tasks so that you can focus on other aspects of your business.
It would take care of reminder emails and order forms without you having to lift a finger.
It makes your sales team more transparent
Transparency is essential for a team or organization to function effectively and avoid internal conflicts.
Your sales team may feel demoralized if they think that other employees are being favored more than them or if they are being mistreated.
With CRM, you don’t have to worry about those things anymore. Through this tool, you can encourage your team to communicate internally.
Perhaps one of the significant issues in the workplace is the lead assignment. Since the entire process is automated, it also means that it’s impartial. That’s crucial when you want them to maintain their morale.
It can also help them clearly see who has achieved the most sales in the company. That way, they won’t be asking around why a specific person on your team was commended for a job well done.
By avoiding such conflicts, your team would be happier and more excited to work with each other. And the positive environment in the workplace can translate to more sales.
It provides detailed analytics on your sales process
Your efforts would be pointless if you can’t keep account of your actions. Yes, an Excel sheet can help. But take note that it will only provide you limited insights and data.
On the other hand, CRM can offer powerful analytic options that can effectively provide insights on every sales activity you and your team performed.
With lead generation CRM, you can access everything, from demography to geography and the best lead sources. It can even show you the results of your drip and email campaigns.
Also, it helps you determine which clients are giving your brand the most revenue. Not to mention that it is useful in gauging the performance of your salespeople.
All the data you find in CRM is essential for making business-related decisions and setting realistic goals for your sales team.
Ways to enhance lead generation through CRM
There are four ways CRM can help lead generation.
Marketing automation
Image Source: Medium
When your business is running a marketing campaign, you expect to obtain leads and convert them into paying clients. And having automated marketing can help you collect data from your campaigns.
CRM can integrate with other software to help you gather data quickly.
Social media integration
Social media is full of potential clients. It may be easy to encourage users to click the CTAs you include in your posts, but the process would be extra convenient if you get more help.
With a CRM tool that you can integrate with social media, you can easily communicate with prospects. It can even bring leads into one platform for easy monitoring.
E-commerce integration
Integrating CRM into your e-commerce store can help you generate more leads. When a user visits your online shop and chooses a product they like, they will need to sign up to browse further.
With CRM, you can eliminate the need for manual entries.
Choosing the Best Lead Generation CRM for Your Brand
Selecting the right lead generation CRM for your business can be a challenging feat. With the hundreds of tools out there in varying prices and functionalities, you may end up getting a headache.
It’s incredibly stressful for people in charge of searching for their brand’s best CRM software.
Making the wrong decision can mean you’re putting your salespeople at a disadvantage. That’s we made sure to include some tips in choosing the best lead generation CRM for business.
Identify your needs
Whether this is your first time integrating CRM and lead generation or you are only planning to change your current CRM, it’s essential to put your immediate needs first.
It can be tempting to choose tools that come with additional features, but if your team has no use for them, then it might not be worth your money.
Image Source: SelectHub
The best thing to do is to make a list of your current needs. Or you can just focus on searching for a CRM that offers the three essential features, which are: contact management, pipeline management and reporting and analytics.
Come up with specific goals
Some CRM offers can be irresistible. You may think that it would be best to choose a tool that offers features your team may use in the future.
To make sure you’re making the right decision, ask yourself if those extra options would help your team sell faster and better.
Go to the basics of your goal and determine what needs to be done to achieve it. That’s the time you can pair it with a particular CRM feature.
For instance, the goal is “to respond faster to inquiries.” From there, you can work backward and think of ways on how you’re going to do it.
Tip: Ask yourself the “how” question three to four times. That would be enough for you to develop an actionable goal that can go together with a particular CRM function.
Consider suggestions from your sales team
Typically, the sales director is in charge of making the final decision about what CRM to use. But the problem is, what the sales director thinks the team needs can be different from what they actually need.
Therefore, you must involve them in the process of CRM selection to avoid problems later.
Talk to them first before considering any tools. You should ask them about the necessary features that can help them perform well. With the information you gather, you can begin searching for a lead generation CRM with the particular features they need.
As a result, you will not only be getting the best CRM software for your brand, but your sales team will also adapt faster.
Read reviews
Before making any purchasing — may it be from a physical store or online — it’s best to read reviews first.
Through those feedbacks, you can quickly determine which software has the best and easy to use features.
Fortunately, several websites offer reviews and comparisons that can give you a better insight into how other marketers are using the tool and how it has solved their pain points.
If you know people who work for other companies, you can ask them for suggestions. If possible, try asking them for a detailed explanation of the CRM tool’s function.
Contact the vendor
Reading reviews can help you in your decision-making process, but do not stop there. Although your colleagues or online testimonials can provide you a detailed explanation about software, it’s still best if it’s explained adequately by an expert.
This way, you’re going to develop a full understanding of what they offer and how it can fit your brand’s needs.
Once you get the chance to talk to the vendor’s sales team or sales representative, you should ask them the following questions:
- How does your lead generation CRM fit my company’s specific needs?
- Which brands are using your CRM and what are the results for them?
- Ask about issues you discovered during your research (if there are any) and determine if they can offer potential fixes.
Moreover, if you think your company requires unique needs, this is the perfect time to bring them up in the conversation. It’s also recommended that you dig deeper into each feature they have to offer.
Always have the future in mind
Remember that you should always focus on the present. In choosing the right lead generation software, you have to consider your company’s needs and budget today. Yes, today — not in a couple of years.
With this, you can make sure that you’re not only getting the tool you can afford but also the tool that can offer everything your business needs.
However, you’re inevitably going to outgrow the CRM you’re choosing today, which means you’re going to need some extra features that come with a higher price tag.
Although it’s possible to switch CRM at this point, it’s not recommended. Aside from it can be expensive, it’s also a time-consuming process. If you do it, you will likely notice a decline in your salespeople’s productivity.
Now, maybe you’re wondering what you can do instead?
It’s simple. When you’re choosing a lead generation CRM software, you should also look at the higher-priced options. You can then talk to the vendor and ask them what will happen when you outgrow the price tier you’re currently considering.
We’re saying here that you should opt for a CRM that can grow together with your business. Choose a software that allows you to add extra services on an ad hoc basis.
Or maybe you can find a tool that enables you to upgrade features as necessary.
So yes, you must keep track of what is needed today and tomorrow.
Conclusion
CRM can improve the quality of your leads and help your business fulfill its goals. It’s even considered the central pivotal point of lead generation. Aside from it can help you obtain better-quality leads, it enhances your sales process leading to more closed deals and better conversion rates.
Moreover, it can help you track all your leads and customers. It’s a big help for lead generation as it can keep tabs on all interactions performed via social media, email or phone.
Speaking of high-quality leads, LeadFuze is the leading prospecting tool in the market. It can help you gather the right leads for your business.
Like CRM, it’s an automated tool that can build an accurate list of leads for your brand. It can also be integrated with other sales outreach tools, making it easy for you to reach out to those freshly qualified leads.
You simply need to input precise details about your target audience such as keywords, industry, role, annual revenue and company size and Fuzebot will provide you fresh and qualified leads that fit the criteria you set.