Want to boost your sales, improve marketing, tighten up data management and security, and make use of analytics? Here’s how you can, by making better use of CRM tools.

Understanding the full value of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system enables you to unlock all the benefits it delivers to an SMME. These benefits extend to sales, marketing, data management and security, data analytics and predicative capabilities, and provide an edge in challenging markets.
Sales Tracking and Management
A good CRM system enables you to manage basic customer information, as well as your sales processes more efficiently and effectively.
Marketing
A CRM is a vault of valuable customer interaction data. By tapping into CRM data across channels and using people-based marketing technology, a business can:
- Achieve a single customer view that’s easy to update and share with teams
- Create integrated 360° customer profiles
- Reach customers more effectively through multiple forms of media
- Recognise customers across channels
- Decrease wasted advertising spend
- Shift to one-to-one marketing at massive scale.
Related: Customer service made easy
Every member of your team can see when your business last communicated with a client, and what the nature of that communication was. This is critical information for a responsive business. Modern cloud-based CRMs also integrate to social platforms for automatic posting and profile management. Some even alert your business to deadlines and opportunities and collect all product-related mentions and comments.
Data Management and Security
There is a proliferation of laws worldwide relating to the protection of customer information, such as South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI Act) and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. At a minimum, your business must be able to account for a client’s data, namely:
- What data you have
- How it is used
- Who has access to it
- How and where it is stored and protected
- How long it will be stored
- How it will be destroyed.
A CRM ‘identity vault’ allows you complete control of your customer information, immediately complying with legislation and managing risk.
Data analytics
Analysis tools provide a Single Customer View and the ability to track clients and their communications across every channel. This view, linked to Customer Lifetime Value shows the total worth of a customer to a business over the entirety of their relationship. It can help you gain insights into organisation health, a key success indicator of how much to invest in customer retention versus the more expensive customer acquisition.
A CRM system also leads to improved analysis of data as a whole. Easily integrated with different tools or plug-ins, it personalises your dashboard views of customer information, sales goals and performance reports to reveal untapped opportunities. It assists you to maximise your resources, uncover inefficiencies and streamline business processes.
Related: 6 Ways to make your customer service better
Business predictions will become easier to make
A CRM allows you to track the peaks and troughs of customer activity, spending habits and demographics – required predictors for all aspects of business, ranging from cash flow and stock purchasing decisions to future niche marketing campaigns. With proper integration a CRM becomes a valuable asset, well worth the investment of time, money and resources.