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If you’re in B2B, you may be wondering how you can build sustainable long-term relationships with your customers and improve business results by leveraging your CRM. To optimize marketing and sales processes and build a loyal customer base, you need to adopt a CRM marketing strategy that will help you do that. So why does strategy play such a big role, and what aspects should you take into account when defining an effective CRM strategy for your business?
B2B companies often view the implementation of CRM strategies as something that is complicated, and hard to put into practice. But in reality, if properly planned, having a documented strategy makes it easy to understand for the entire team that has to implement it.
Having a structured and detailed plan with clear goals and logical steps helps your team. It enables them to properly plan resources and helps them see exactly what to do. The details in your documented strategy turn into concrete steps that set your organization’s CRM up for success.
Getting the most out of your CRM takes a lot of time and energy AND expertise, especially in larger companies with multiple business units or offices in other countries. The platform of your choice will likely have many features and different types of users, making it hard to implement and manage. It gets even harder when you are making important changes: you need to evaluate the importance and impact of every change on the organization and specific departments, so your current processes can keep on running smoothly.
So starting small and simplifying things then become a key factor in your CRM’s success. When you get started with a CRM, resist the urge to go all in when implementing things. Instead, start small with things you can apply immediately. Test what works well, and then later on expand on that.
First things first: you need to fully understand your business goals. It is important to fully understand the structure of your organization, its products or services and how it expects to market and sell them. You need to understand these things first before you can start putting together your CRM strategy.
What is the first step in defining a CRM strategy?
Conduct a thorough audit of the company. You must question and fully understand what the business goals are, the expected revenue, the structure of the products or services offered by the brand. And don’t limit your audit to only marketing and sales, look at other departments as well. Assessing and understanding these aspects is essential to outline a proper strategy.
After your deep dive into the company’s business objectives, you need to define your buyer personas. These are a semi-fictional representation of your ideal client, based on actual data and some assumptions. Check our buyer persona worksheet.
This is an important step: you need to have a clear idea about your personas. These will help you develop customer acquisition and retention strategies for your business. A thorough buyer persona exercise will help you segment your target audience properly and tailor your communication efforts to each persona. On top of that, will help you set up effective marketing automation flows with a high degree of personalization.
We cannot emphasize the importance of buyer personas enough. You may feel inclined to skip this step to save time and get your CRM up and running. And while we fully understand your eagerness to start using your CRM, it will not be very effective without completing this step of the process. Good personas pay off big time further down the road. Remember, it’s all about building sustainable relationships with your audience.
Today’s consumers interact with brands across multiple channels, from social media to email to in-store visits or live meetings with your team. An advanced CRM platform is able to unify all these interactions into one single customer view. This allows for a seamless multi-channel experience. By understanding how customers move between channels, businesses can create more cohesive and effective marketing strategies that meet customers where they are.
This requires your CRM to store all these interactions in it and present that information in one overview. And this also requires a data-driven approach. Not only do you need to make sure your CRM can capture all these data, for example with integrations, you also need good reporting and dashboarding. And your team needs the skills to understand data and use them to take the right decisions moving forward.
Having access to real-time data is critical these days. Advanced CRM platforms provide real-time insights into customer interactions and campaign performance. This allows businesses to make data-driven decisions quickly. Real-time data can help identify trends, measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts, and adjust strategies on the fly to maximize your marketing and sales results.
Just an real life example: I visited another company’s website yesterday evening, just browsing their services. This morning just after 9h00, I got a phone call from one of their sales people. He got an alert in his CRM system, triggered by my visit which was recorded in an IP tracking platform and then sent to the CRM platform, along with our company details.
And he could have gotten so much more out of this interaction too: we already spoke some time ago, but he didn’t look that up in his CRM. He could have also used the content I visited or specific details of our own company, do some research beforehand and tailor his approach to our company.
There are many more things you can do with real time data. Spend some time on data and analytics, it will definitely support your marketing and sales teams.
Defining and implementing an effective CRM marketing strategy helps your company build strong lasting relationships. But an effective strategy takes time and effort, and properly allocated resources to turn ideas and data into concrete actions. Streamlining these steps and integrating your CRM platform within your business will greatly contribute to a tangible ROI and long-term growth of your business. Once your CRM is up and running, calculate your CRM ROI. That way, you can measure ROI and report correctly to your manager.
Calculate your Hubspot ROI with our calculator and get a clear idea of what your business can achieve with different hubs.
