How to Use CRM to Improve Close Rates

Customer relationship management (CRM) is both a process and a product. Today, you’ll find a host of CRM platforms and tools designed to help you manage and monitor the customer journey and all of your customer relationships. These tools are invaluable to your success, but they are only one part of the equation. 

In this guide, we’ll take a look at why you need a CRM strategy, what yours should look like in 2023, and how you can use CRM to improve close rates and conversions, no matter what you’re selling. 

Another way to improve your outreach is to enlist the help of Smith.ai. We can provide a dedicated team to handle your outreach campaigns, along with lead intake and more. 

Why do I need a CRM strategy?

In business, everything revolves around relationships. If you don’t have a strategy to manage those relationships, you’re not going to get very far. A clear strategy provides a game plan to ensure that your team is successful. When you have a strong CRM strategy that includes the right tools and target metrics, you’ll find growth to be a lot easier and close rates that come (almost) naturally. 

With a good CRM strategy, you can:

• More easily track leads through the sales funnel
• Focus and improve marketing and sales efforts 
• Organize sales management and relationship management efforts
• Streamline collaboration and communication across departments
• Cultivate amazing customer service at every touchpoint
• Utilize KPIs to forecast future plans and sales 

And those are just a few of the perks. More importantly, without a CRM strategy, your team will easily lose sight of targets, get confused about KPIs and goals, and lose prospects without knowing how or why they fell out of the sales funnel. 

So, with that in mind, how can you use your CRM to improve close rates? Here’s what you need to know. 

Perfect your timing 

When you choose a robust CRM platform to help you manage your customer relationships throughout the buying journey, you will be able to get your timing down to a science. That will allow you to reach out to the right people at the right points in the funnel with the exact right offer that will win them over. 

It also allows your team to learn the value of patience and letting customers find their way through the pipeline. You can see that while you might have a few leads coming up on deck, they’re not quite ready for that next outreach. Or, you’ll notice that you have a client that buys more during certain times or that comes back with a recurring issue—the benefits of timing are endless. 

Monitor, track, and modify goals and plans 

Having a solid strategy in place to manage your customers throughout the journey will ensure that it’s easier to monitor what’s going on. With CRM software, you’ll be able to track your own goals and plans as they relate to the customer journey. This can improve your initiatives, allow you to make more accurate goals, or change course entirely when you see another strategy that you didn’t anticipate. 

Constant improvement is the name of the game and you can’t do that without constant monitoring. That’s where your CRM really shines with improving close rates and driving more business for your company. 

Sales forecasting features galore 

The modern CRM has so many sales forecasting tools and reports that there’s no end to the information you can find:

• Sales pipeline reports
• Product reports
• Revenue reports
• Lead status reports
• Sales forecasts
• Daily sales activities

Having a solid CRM ensures that you can attend to the right prospects at the right time. It also makes it easier to create future sales plans and CRM strategies to improve close rates and get more conversions. 

Gain valuable customer insights 

Of course, the most obvious feature of a CRM is perhaps one of the most valuable. The customer insights that you can gain from a robust CRM dashboard are unlike anything you’ve seen before. You have a single, centralized database of information that is automatically updated and shared, making it easier for salespeople to create personalized connections with leads even from the very beginning. 

In today’s business world, the value of a personal connection can’t be overstated. When people see that you’re reaching out to them specifically because you have a solution they can use, they’ll appreciate that. When you use that CRM data to answer questions before they ask and calm any doubts they have, they’ll notice. 

All this will take your CRM to the next level, which means your close rates will also start to improve as a result. 

Identify new opportunities 

Along with all the information about your existing customers and target audiences, you can also glean a lot of new insights from your CRM data. For example, you might notice you have a new following on social media that needs some attention, or that there’s a sudden uptick in leads from a certain PPC campaign that you didn’t really put a lot of work into initially. 

The data you have will make it easy for you to see where you might be able to find:

• New leads
• Better-qualified leads
• Leads that are interested in a specific product or service 
• And more

Speaking of opportunities, why not take the opportunity to let someone else handle the leads?

At Smith.ai, we know that lead generation is a huge time-eater for business. However, it’s also an essential part of getting customers in the first place. Fortunately, a partnership with our virtual receptionists will deliver everything that you need. For starters, we can help you build successful outreach campaigns for better close rates, along with providing support for lead intake and appointment scheduling. 

If you want to make sure that you never miss an opportunity, we can even act as your 24/7 answering service. To learn more, schedule a consultation or reach out to hello@smith.ai. 

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