Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is a software that helps companies manage their relationship with customers. These can range from simple tools that help with communications to feature-rich platforms that track all customer activity and help manage your entire sales process.
This article will look at the benefits and features of CRM solutions and templates for businesses.
CRM systems were designed to help companies manage customer interactions. Any department in an organization can use a CRM, but they’re most commonly used by sales, business development, recruitment, marketing, and customer support teams.
According to Grandview Research’s report, more than 91% of organizations with more than ten employees use CRM systems.
The purpose of a CRM is to streamline customer interaction processes and optimize efficiency. Spreadsheet.com’s Simple CRM template helps companies support their clients throughout all of their interactions, from acquiring a customer lead all the way to ensuring their satisfaction after they have purchased your services.
CRM platforms make it easy for different departments to share information about their client interactions across the organization, as all the data can be made available on a single dashboard.
CRM systems have come a long way in the last seven decades. Businesses and technology have seen these tools evolve from Rolodexes and mainframe systems into fully automated AI-powered software platforms.
The first mainstream customer management systems emerged in the 1950s. The Rolodex, invented by Danish engineer Hildaur Neilsen, was a flip-through desk tool containing written customer information, much like a diary.
In the 1960s, the first digital systems emerged in the form of massive mainframe systems.
In the late 80s, contact management software was introduced as the first form of database marketing. Developed by Conductor Software, Activity Control Technology (ACT) was initially created for manufacturing industries to track customer and prospect details in one centralized location.
The 90s saw the birth of sales force automation, pioneered by technologist Tom Siebel. The term “CRM” was likely first coined in 1995 by the Gartner Group. Around the same time, CRM systems emerged as online SaaS products. One of the first examples was the Siebel Sales Handheld, launched in 1999.
From the early 2000s until now, the industry has seen an explosion of technology and the proliferation of software providers. Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM achieved rapid success and dominated the decade. Today, the CRM marketplace is saturated by products from numerous companies like HubSpot, Zoho, SAP, Oracle, and many others.
Today’s CRM platforms integrate business tools into their workflows to make customer relationships a core part of businesses. Since the late 2000s, software providers have integrated social media data into their products, and more recently, platforms have started integrating AI capabilities to provide users with more comprehensive insights.
Using a comprehensive CRM system offers businesses many invaluable customer insights and benefits, including:
CRM platforms are centralized repositories of customer data. Because of that, CRM systems are indispensable tools for in-house and remote teams. Since every customer interaction is tracked and recorded, marketing and sales teams can operate more efficiently by making data-driven decisions.
Adopting CRM software lets teams automate a substantial amount of work and streamline everyday tasks such as data entry and client information management.
Automating repetitive tasks gives employees more time to work on other valuable projects like strategic decision-making, creative work, and empathizing with customers to provide better services. Employees remain more engaged and productive by focusing on these types of projects. Across every industry, automations are transforming jobs and positively impacting the efficiency of organizations.
As companies scale, their contact databases grow. Segmenting these customer lists manually based on specific requirements is labor-intensive and consumes numerous productive hours. By adopting CRM tools, companies can automatically segment their contact lists based on specific criteria and obtain invaluable data insights.
Database segmentation features in CRM systems allow sales teams to optimize their daily schedules and prioritize tasks related to their key prospects. With sales dashboards, teams can discover new opportunities for upsells and cross-sales. Companies can configure their CRM systems to alert their support team about clients’ requests and needs so they can address them before they turn into potential issues.
5. Simplified sales forecasting
Planning future tasks and targets is significantly simpler and more effective when companies can use insights from their past data. Historical metrics and trends can help uncover valuable insights and assist sales teams in prioritizing accounts and forecasting more accurately.
A CRM platform is much more than a fancy electronic Rolodex. When you work with the right software, its features will allow you to seamlessly manage the entire customer lifecycle.
Let’s look at some core CRM system features:
Leads and contacts are managed daily via multiple communication channels and with different touch frequencies. The frequency and touchpoints can differ based on the lead’s status in the pipeline, personal preferences, industry, and many other factors. Contact management is at the core of these rules. It allows teams to segment contacts into groups to better target them with the right promotional campaigns at the right time.
CRM contact management also helps companies achieve granular personalization levels by delivering custom messaging. This leads to higher conversion and retention rates.
Additionally, reaching out to prospects based on priority (a lead’s readiness to buy) can increase the chances of converting them into clients by addressing their needs on time.
Automation is one of the top features that CRM platforms offer. Leveraging automation workflows is key to increasing a team’s productivity. Using a CRM tool that assists in workflow automation can help simplify multiple tasks such as:
With the right CRM tool, workflows can be automated in a few clicks. Spreadsheet.com’s automations, for example, give users an easy way to automate repetitive tasks:
Setting up alerts based on custom triggers allows for greater efficiency. These triggers can include order processing, tracking, sharing delivery updates, and new lead notifications.
Notifications can be customized and shared via different channels. In Spreadsheet.com’s CRM Template, you can share notifications by integrating with popular work management tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Gmail:
CRM tools let users aggregate summary statistics and detailed insights with customized reports and dashboards. These reports deliver real-time data updates and let users access data from different locations, making CRM systems single sources of truth for organizational data. CRM systems synchronize all activities seamlessly, improving ease of access for team members across the organization.
CRM reports also help managers analyze company data and make strategic decisions based on real-time data.
Sales forecasting uses predictive analytics based on previous sales data from a sales pipeline (or sales projections) to project potential future sales. This information helps companies understand what actions need to be taken by their sales and marketing teams. For example, a company may want to increase their Google Ads budget to add more leads to the top of the funnel or add more sales reps to follow up with existing leads.
A well onboarded, trained, and incentivized team is a company’s greatest asset and lets them perform to their greatest potential.
HR and management teams can use CRM tools to monitor and optimize other departments’ performance. Spreadsheet.com’s HR templates help HR teams operate like well-oiled machines:
To train teams effectively, consider implementing the following steps:
Many CRM platforms are available on the market, but they typically come at a considerable cost. Often, startups and small businesses use Excel and Google Sheets as an affordable solution. According to Statista, millions of companies worldwide and over 730,000 companies in the United States use Microsoft Excel to run their businesses. These companies use spreadsheets to keep track of communications, lead management, customer interactions, sales pipeline tracking, and data visualization.
Spreadsheet.com offers the same spreadsheet capabilities as Excel and Google Sheets with more advanced features like automations and tools to let your spreadsheets act like relational databases, as well as ready-to-use templates like the Simple CRM template.
Use multiple views, like a Kanban stacked by Rating, for example, to organize, categorize, and sort leads based on their status.
If your business already uses Excel and you’d prefer to stick to the same system instead of exporting your data to Spreadsheet.com, there are a wide variety of pre-built Excel CRM templates readily available.
