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As an industrial manufacturer, you have many moving parts to oversee (see what I did there?). A Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) is a powerful tool for sales and marketing that helps streamline processes and increase revenue. Read below to learn the 6 advantages of a CRM for industrial sales and marketing.
CRMs can collect and house everything from industry, company name, company revenue, company size, contact name, lead status, past sale value, etc... These fields can be used to target accounts you know will result in the sales you want.
For example, if your industrial sales team wants to target accounts with at least 100 employees, over $5 mil in company revenue, lead status is equal to opportunity. With a CRM, you can easily pull a list of accounts that meet your criteria.
CRMs collect data on leads and clients. When you use a CRM to manage lead and client data, you streamline the sales process and identify trends and patterns. Trends and patterns can be used to increase future sales!
For example, let’s say you sell custom engineered parts to welders. Every time you close a sale with a welder, you notice that they result in a recurring custom part order every 3 months. Your CRM can help you identify this pattern and trend through sales alerts and reports you might not have found otherwise.
Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) integrate the various departments of your business. A Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) is basically the sales portion of an ERP. These ERP departments like engineering, supply chain, and purchasing all have a common purpose: to earn revenue. Revenue comes from client sales. Department systems can “talk to each other” and streamline their processes.
For example, you can build in a “challenges” field into your CRM, so you know the problems associated with each of your leads and clients. The rest of your ERP departments can use this to make informed decisions about which features, products, and services to provide. This is a better strategy than just guessing what leads and clients want. They’re telling you, and then you can deliver!
A cloud-based CRM means you can edit, update, and source information in real-time, from anywhere. You do not have to be “on-site” to access a cloud-based CRM or its contents. This flexibility is essential because your business is dynamic, so all departments need to access this information from anywhere, anytime.
For example, let’s say each time you want to request a sales document for a lead, you have to email the department and wait for them to respond. With a CRM, anyone who has permission to access it can do so from anywhere. Sales and marketing teams can pull up the CRM on their laptops while working from home. Floor managers can pull up the CRM at the warehouse. This makes for seamless collaboration and sharing of information.
A CRM marketing campaign uses contact data to drive marketing efforts. When you know who your contacts are and what they’re interested in, you can create a tailored marketing campaign.
For example, let’s say you have a diverse client base, but you’re launching a new collaborative robot that automates machine tending for a small client niche. You wouldn’t market the new product launch to every contact because the ROI would not be satisfactory. So instead, you pull up your CRM and see which leads, prospects, and clients fall into the small client niche that would be interested in your cobot. Thus giving you a greater chance at achieving your ROI goals!
The fundamental goal of a CRM is to streamline the sales process from start to finish, saving you time and money in the long run. A robust CRM collects data from your leads, updates prospect information as they move closer to a sale, triggers notifications to your sales team, and holds vital client data. CRMs are essential to growing organizations because the sales and marketing process is complex.
For example, imagine getting 500 leads per day to your website. Who would want to add hundreds of contacts every day manually? Who has that kind of time?! Most importantly, you’d lose out on sales opportunities because you’re spending time on intake. A CRM automates time-consuming manual parts of the sales process, integrates the data into the rest of the company, and streamlines the entire process, thus resulting in a better chance for a sale (hopefully, increased revenue!).
Need help setting up or perfecting your CRM? Contact our experts who've been helping industrial manufacturers achieve success with their CRM for 20+ years!