As compared to other business models, the B2B buying environment is a little bit complex and often multifaceted. With increasing workloads each day and high goals, strong business relationships are mandatory to close deals and drive company growth. Now the question is; how do you keep track of a long contact list and provide visibility? How to keep your marketing teams aligned? How to effectively market your company’s brand, product, or service? The answer is a B2B CRM.
B2B CRM (Business to Business Customer Relationship Management) helps B2B companies foster their existing and potential customers. It helps companies better understand contacts, their needs, and where they are in the buyer’s journey related to your business.
How B2B CRM works?
B2B CRM systems have several roles to play in every stage of the sales process. It would be best if you mapped the CRM to your company’s individual sales funnel” or sales pipeline. Mapping your CRM system enable easier tracking and measurement. The mapping of CRM with the sales pipeline gives the sales team the customer analytics and lead-specific data (purchase history, performance figures, bills, and more) they need to nurture their relationship with customers.
Once appropriately mapped, you can track every potential customer through every stage of the funnel, which helps you address their queries alongside highlighting the areas where they seem to be going out of the sales funnel. Using B2B CRM, sales teams can quickly know the customers’ needs, track conversations and create firm customer profiles to help businesses with tailored content delivery.
How B2B CRM is diffrent from B2C CRM?
Both the CRMs are designed differently as the customer acquisition process in both these business models is entirely different. In B2B businesses, CRM is the fundamental tool used by the sales team, or you can say they are wholly immersed in the weed of CRM for tracking their prospect’s progress. B2B and B2C CRMs are different from each other in terms of customer management, sales, contact management, integration, and much more.
Why Invest in a B2B CRM
Here are some of the key benefits of using B2B CRM :
Improved contact management
No company can keep growing without properly managing its client base. Using a B2B CRM software, employees can easily upload customers’ data like sales purchase history, contact number, email address and set reminders for calls or meetings with clients or prospects.
Real-time quotes made easy.
With a B2B CRM, your customer’s transaction, store inventory, prices are updated as soon as they’re changed. It helps the sales team send the correct quote to customers, avoiding confusion and your company’s bad reputation.
Data-Driven Decision Making
CRMs undoubtedly provide insight into the customer’s data and a bird’s eye view of your store. With CRM, you can have account activity, pipeline, deal closure rates, and more at a consolidated place, helping you make data-driven decisions on time.
Efficiency
With CRM, your sales team will be able to spend less time ion pulling together data and nurturing low-prospect leads who will hardly convert into paying customers. It leaves room for the sales and marketing team to patch up newly identified holes in the sales funnel.
7 Best practices for B2B businesses using CRM systems:
Choose a suitable one
There are several different types and sizes of CRMs available in the market. Before choosing a CRM for your B2B business, think about what challenges you are currently facing, what goal you want to achieve with your CRM, and how a particular CRM fits into all that. Ensure that your CRM aligns with the sales process, your marketing strategy, your customer service activities, your contact management routines, the volume of your customer base, etc.
In short, you need to properly research your options, right from the CRM’s capabilities to weaknesses and the vendors.
Get your team’s suggestions.
Before you switch your CRM, get your team’s thoughts over it. For example- you can have representatives/leaders from each relevant section at the initial software switching meetings. Make sure to loop your team members from the very start to make them feel as their ideas are valued.
Train your team
You will be able to reap the maximum benefits of CRM if your teams can use the new CRM effectively. Give them proper training to know the ins and outs of your new CRM software; regularly test your employees on what they’ve learned to make sure they’ve understood everything correctly. Retraining is also essential to make sure your employees are following the best practices of using CRM.
Automation
CRMs are designed to help your business handle your team’s manual work, like data entry and collection and update. It reduces the probability of human errors and enhances your team’s productivity level as they can easily automate repetitive tasks and more time on other core business projects.
Analyze your data
Your CRMs capture a large amount of data regularly. To truly maximize the CRM’s capability, you need to analyze that data. If your CRM systems have intuitive and built-in analytics features, the CRM will automatically present the data to you in a consolidated place.
Always keep customer information updated.
It is essential to update your customer’s data as soon as new data is collected. Your CRM system gives valuable customer insight and data. To get the maximum benefits of these lead-specific data, you need to keep your customer information updated as soon as a new customer is added to the database.
Update to the latest version
You need to constantly update your CRM software to the latest versions to ensure you are not missing out on the new feature and trends like artificial intelligence. It is essential to implement a CRM that is mobile and accessible on multiple devices.
Conclusion
CRM software is an effective B2B sales and marketing approach to provide the best customer services. In this competitive market where businesses are trying to know their customers on a more one-to-one basis, a good CRM system investment and following the best practices are vital.
Navneet Chawla is a content specialist with over 4 years in the industry. He has covered an array of niches like health, lifestyle, tech, and fintech. He currently works with amoCRM.
Twitter: @idroidlife
B2B stock image by Alexander Supertramp/Shutterstock
