Practical Benefits Salesforce CRM Offers to Consumer-Facing Managers

While often hyped and sold as a fantastic tool for the top management to exercise better control over the operations of the organization, the real value of the Sales force CRM platform lies in the way it makes life easier for consumer-facing managers and employees. Choosing the right platform will offer the following benefits to managers entrusted with the task of providing last-mile service to the firm’s customers. 

Data-based Decisions 

What makes your consumers tick? Why do some leads get converted into customers with minimal effort while other prospects never progress to the final category of your sales funnel? Does your firm receive a bulk of its business from male or female customers? Or, are demographics even relevant? What is your firm’s USP? Can you implement a premium pricing policy and still retain customer loyalty?

CRM platforms allow managers to take informed decisions based on real and accurate data. Running a campaign to attract leads, closing a sale, or keeping customers happy with quality after-sales support will become a lot easier if managers have access to reliable and accurate data. Maintaining data integrity will ensure numerous decisions, which were based on instincts or hunches in the past, can be taken after due consideration of all relevant information.     

Managing a team of employees providing last-mile marketing, sales, and support services to customers can be a very complicated task. The manager must focus on tangible metrics like revenue generation, cost reduction, and profit maximization along with qualitative factors like customer satisfaction, brand credibility, loyalty, and user engagement. 

CRM platforms offer on-demand reports and detailed dashboards that allow managers to track the performance of team members, the impact of campaigns, and effectiveness of operational policies on a real-time basis. Further, cloud computing ensures inputs from all members are assimilated together without any delays. 

Reports cover accounts, opportunities, contacts, references, tasks, and revenue targets achieved by the team. Dashboards offer color-coded breakup of sales goals, support activities, service performance, and even the extent of user adoption of the CRM platform. The dashboard facilitates intervention of the manager into different transactions depending on the performance of the team and the extent of micro-management required. Further, the availability of reliable data enables the   

Conventional methods compartmentalize tactical analysis and strategic assessment as independent activities. Managers often found it difficult to look beyond monthly performances and targets to assess the efficacy of opportunities and activities management of the team. 

Salesforce CRM allows managers to consider the bigger picture and pay attention to instances of loss of opportunities, performance issues, interpersonal factors, and other metrics that can lead to future complications. Further, the organization can rate or rank clients on the basis of immediate and long-term revenue potential and plan a comprehensive strategy covering outbound calls, emails, follow-ups, and other sales and marketing activities to ensure short-term revenue get converted into sustained long-term profits.      

A well-designed CRM platform that is deployed in an effective manner can help managers experience a huge boost in efficiency and profitability. Better understanding of the requirements and preferences of customers, in-depth analysis of the performance of marketing team members, and simultaneous focus on tactical and strategic activities are three primarily benefits managers can enjoy through smart utilization of agile CRM solutions.