Tuesday, February 17, 2015

CRM Solution Trends to Watch



CRM is increasingly being utilized for marketing and sales purposes in new ways. The reason so many companies are looking to their CRM is due in large part to the trends companies are following. Here are a few trends to watch for:


Reach Your Demographic in Real Time
Companies are using their CRM solution for more than just a contact database. The contact database component of it will always be important, but companies are seeing their CRM as a way to reach out to their target audience in a personalized way, and sometimes, in real time. For instance, when digging into the database on your customers, you should be able to find the information you need to reach them at the right time with the appropriate product at a price that will be competitive with other brands’ similar products.
Thanks to new technology, including mobile CRM technology that assists sales reps in providing more information to the database, you’re able to tap into the interests of your target audiences in real time, which means you’re also able to reach out to them in real time.
·         Better Integration and Automation Features
Marketing and sales reps are looking for ways to make their jobs easier, and more importantly, to do their jobs more efficiently. They don’t want to spend time performing tasks related to data entry. The sales reps, especially, want to put more effort toward communicating with clients or potential clients. Integrating applications with legacy CRM and automating work processes can assist more organizations in achieving their goals.
·         Using CRM to Personalize
You want your message to your clients to be personalized so it doesn’t annoy them. Too many marketing and sales reps reach out to potential customers only to find that they’ve missed the mark entirely and offered something to people who have no interest in it. When you personalize your engagements, you’re going to use your CRM solution to find out who needs what.

To do this, you’ll need to make sure your data is “fine grained.” This is the kind of data that can be gathered after extended relationships have been established and you’ve created a silo where all the data can be viewed in a sensible manner. Many companies have tapped into Salesforce.com to upgrade their CRM solutions. However, Salesforce doesn’t always work that well with the sales rep, lacking important functionality features.

What many sales departments have learned over the years is that they can spend a lot of time training sales reps on reporting tools so they can achieve more automation, functionality, and fine-grained data that provide more fact-based decision-making possibilities. However, without a mobile solution that involves easy-to-use reporting tools, sales reps are not going to provide consistent information to their company.

To get more traction that allows the above trends to be part of your organization, you need to adopt a mobile solution that integrates with your current CRM and other applications that you use on a regular basis.

Front Row Solutions is a leader in providing mobile CRM that integrates perfectly with the leading CRM solutions. It can also be used as a standalone solution. Contact us today and find out how we’ll integrate with your CRM.