Now Upgrade Your Customer Management Strategy

So you’ve recently upgraded your customer relationship management tool. Good for you! That means you’re growing and need a more robust system.

Yet now that you’ve upgraded your CRM, it’s time – yes, indeed! – to upgrade your customer management strategy.

A new customer management strategy for your upgraded CRM

Overhauling – or at least beefing up – your customer management processes and tactics makes perfect sense. After all, because your customers are the foundation of your company’s success, you definitely should (re)define processes, procedures, goals, etc. as you start to work with your new customer management tool.

What happens when a new management strategy isn’t created?

We’ve seen this in our customers: if your sales and customer management teams continue doing the same-old, same-old, you’ll often see your workers handling their duties as they see fit. Which can work, sometimes, so long as your employees had successful approaches before.

But even if your “rogue” employees (everyone were doing their own thing, remember) were successful, they operated independent of a clear customer management/engagement process. And, not to forget the poor performance of your non-stars, we imagine your results were, well, not as robust as they definitely could have been, even with the new CRM.

In a nutshell, creating a customer management strategy on which to run your sales and customer management process is the first step toward your success!

The simple elements of a robust customer management strategy

Your strategy needn’t be complicated. You basically need just three components:

Relationship management

Most CRMs are tuned to drive sales. And so because it’s not focused on customer management, your customer satisfaction – and therefore retention – can suffer. Your company’s sales culture guides your sales representatives’ understanding of how they should manager their prospect relationships. But what happens once those leads turn into clients? Your sales and customer service managers should work together to provide processes for both CSRs and sales pros. After all, your sales team members are the ones who created the first relationships with your now-customers; keeping them in the loop – at least for a time – is important in order to keep new customers happy.

Opportunity creation

Sales prospecting can be hard work and may not even provide a healthy return on investment if leads aren’t qualified.

This is why your marketing team needs to craft appropriate messaging to prospects depending on who those prospects are and where they are in their buyer’s journey. Marketing also need to ensure those messages get to prospects via the right channels in order to generate demand so that your sales pros can have meaningful conversations from the get-go.

Opportunity management

Most everyone wants to buy….something! The trick is to find qualified prospects and leads: those folks who have the types of problems your product or service solves.

Your marketing team will help attract qualified leads, but only if your sales pros help them define who the members of that target audience actually are.  Then, once a prospect becomes a lead, it’s up to your sales reps to start a conversation, learning as much as they can regarding potential customers’ issues, what influences their buying decision and how you stack up to competitors.

Sales reps can input this information into your Smart CRM, helping them then craft the right type of interaction for their next touch – until a sale is made.

A customer management strategy paired with a robust CRM means…

…you’ll have the insights to guide your sales representatives to follow a prospect and confirm that the opportunity is on track to a close – or, at the least, know why it died.

Aysling is far more than a smart CRM: it’s a complete cloud-based lead gen, marketing automation and enterprise resource solution that can help you manage all aspects of your business. It offers a complete business suite, allowing you to incorporate billing, finance, vendor management, project management, and more, all in one platform.

Its automation and lead generation capacity goes far beyond “merely” your marketing efforts. It can provide project updates, send and receive service tickets and sales notifications. It can even automatically send out marketing email campaigns, and much more.

As for its smart CRM capabilities, Aysling integrates with such marketing tools as Gmail, Outlook, Twilio, Clearbit and more. Basically, our platform gives your sales team members all the tools for success they could need to … be successful!

Learn more about how you can upgrade your CRM/ERP to Aysling.