CRM strategy:
 key steps, guidelines & payoffs

With growing customer bases and increasingly complex customer-centric business processes, CRM solutions have become staple elements in the software ecosystems of both small businesses and large organizations, helping them put their CRM strategies into practice. These tools serve as centralized hubs to gather customer data and other relevant information from corporate or external systems. They can also support your sales, service, and marketing efforts through process automation.

• CRM software functionality depends on factors like the size of your company, your industry, and the range and complexity of your customer-oriented processes. Generally speaking, a basic feature set includes marketing automation, contact information management, sales pipeline tracking, document generation via templates, and automated customer support.

• You can develop custom CRM software or adopt an out-of-the-box solution, including SaaS platforms like Salesforce, Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and HubSpot. Custom CRM systems can be equipped with a bespoke set of features but require higher upfront costs for development, while off-the-shelf CRM platforms are usually faster and cheaper to implement but incur long-term licensing expenses.
• If you opt for an off-the-shelf CRM solution, make a choice based on the platform’s feature set, customization possibilities, and licensing model. In addition, evaluate the product’s usability via peer-to-peer review sites or free trial periods, whenever available.
• Provide your employees with extensive training and support so that they can learn how to effectively work with the new CRM system.

Defining a buyer persona, namely a generalized portrait of your target audience, can help you ensure that your CRM strategy meets the specific needs and expectations of your potential customers.

• To create a comprehensive buyer persona, you need to combine various types of data, such as behavioral data (browsing and purchase patterns, etc.), demographic data (age, gender, job, etc.), psychographic data (interests, values, attitude, etc.), and geographic data (region, city size, etc.).

• You can rely on a combination of research methods, focus groups with clients and customer surveys, to create more nuanced target customer descriptions. Furthermore, with the growing volume of digital customer interactions, you can analyze online behavioral patterns on your website or social media platforms via data analytics tools.
• While having clients with homogenous traits would simplify customer relationship management, businesses typically interact with a range of different customer archetypes that further expand as the customer base grows. You can group clients into segments based on their shared traits and behavior to plan targeted actions, such as personalized messages and offers tailored to their specific needs.

A customer journey map visually represents the experiences of a lead or a client with your brand as they move through the sales funnel and, later, become customers. Creating such a map can help you monitor the behavior of leads and customers at each touchpoint and then optimize your marketing and sales operations based on their needs and decision-making patterns.

• Collecting customer journey data enables your company to refine your CRM strategy. For instance, you can analyze the type (social media ads, blog posts, company website, etc.) and the number of touchpoints before a purchase to identify the most effective communication channels and actions at each customer journey stage.

• Social media analytics and web analytics tools like Google Analytics can shed light on customer interactions. Use them to find out how social media posts increase engagement and how ads drive traffic to your website, which pages your visitors viewed and which links they clicked, or the open rates for email campaigns. You can complement these insights with communication records stored in your corporate systems to track previous interactions and assess their effectiveness.
• Keep in mind that customer journeys are neither linear nor standardized. First, many customers can revert to earlier touchpoints while they assess your product or service offering, making their journeys more similar to loops than straight lines. Second, each customer segment is likely to have a different buyer journey requiring specific interactions, be it a targeted product recommendation on your website or a follow-up email.

Key performance indicators allow companies to compare measurable goals with actual outcomes and assess the effectiveness of their CRM strategy.

• Set relevant KPIs for your high-priority goals. Popular function-specific metrics include, for instance, sales conversions by campaign or web traffic for marketing, new leads in the pipeline or lead conversion rate for sales, and customer satisfaction and retention for customer support. Some of these KPIs can be further broken down into more granular metrics, such as repeat purchase rate and number of renewal opportunities to monitor customer retention.
• Companies can use CRM systems’ analytics and reporting features to collect performance data and visualize KPIs through their built-in dashboards. You can also integrate the above functionality with employee feedback tools to collect insights directly from your service, marketing, and sales team members and learn how your CRM strategy impacts their work with existing and new customers.