“Customer relationship management” or CRM, can sound intimidating to small- and mid-sized businesses. After all, if your company only has a handful of customers, why do you need a dedicated process or system to keep track of them? A few spreadsheets and rules of thumb will do just fine.But what happens when business starts to boom? At some point, your organization will need to implement a customer contact management system that’s more organized to prevent contacts from falling through the cracks. At its core, a CRM is not just useful to large enterprise companies - it’s essential for businesses of all sizes.

Did you know that 75% of sales managers say that using a CRM helps to drive and increase sales? Or that CRM systems improve customer retention by 27%? It’s hard to argue with the numbers.

There are many CRM benefits that should excite marketers, salespeople, and business owners. Here are 4 ways a CRM can make you a more effective marketing and sales machine:

1|Better Lead Intelligence for Both Marketing and Sales

Implementing a CRM may allow your sales team to know how many times potential customers have visited your site or if they have ever talked to a member of your sales team. When a salesperson works within a CRM that integrates with their company’s marketing software, they’re able to access this type of detailed, real-time lead intelligence all from one place.

This isn’t just beneficial to sales, it’s beneficial to marketing as well. A CRM will allow your marketing team to see which leads turn into customers. More specifically, you can see what brought them to your website and what pages they looked at before becoming a customer. When a marketer works in a marketing platform that is integrated with a CRM, they can figure out which of their efforts are working best.

2|Better Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales and marketing both have numbers they need to hit each month, and when both teams have visibility into each other’s metrics they can easily assess each departments’ progress and identify and remedy problems early in the month.

Real-time reporting holds both departments accountable to their goals and helps teams work together toward shared outcomes. Meaning that such reporting hold the Marketing team accountable for lead generation and the sales team responsible for lead nurturing. It’s also worth noting that CRMs are used for customers, too, not just leads. Customer service communications and metrics can be easily documented for account managers to reference as well.

3|Help Sales Prioritize its Pipeline

A CRM not only gives complete visibility into the sales pipeline, but it also helps sales people prioritize who to call first so they don’t miss important opportunities. When sales and marketing set up a CRM, they can identify important criteria and implement a lead scoring system. A lead scoring system helps to rank prospects and identify high quality leads. Moreover, a CRM allows a business to better segment they’re contacts, even by lead scoring. Knowing which contacts are the most likely to buy or engage is critical to streamlining the sales process. Overall, organizational systems like these reduce time spent sifting through leads, and enable salespeople to prioritize the best opportunities.

4|Closed-Loop Reporting Let's Marketers Improve Campaigns

When you integrate marketing software with your CRM, marketing can easily analyze the effectiveness of its campaigns using closed-loop reporting. For example, when a salesperson converts a lead into a paying customer, he or she can mark it in the CRM, and it will automatically be noted in your marketing software, too.

This allows marketing to do two important things. First, marketing can automatically remove this lead for their nurturing sequences, and instead send it customer-focused information. Secondly, marketing is now able to attribute this new customer to a specific campaign and channel. Mapping marketing activities to sales events is critical for marketing to improve future campaigns.

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