If you are new to the concept of a Customer Relationship Management Platform, you have every right to be confused. Let’s clear up that confusion now.
According to Salesforce, a CRM is “a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers”.
Let us clarify. When a business deals with its potential customers or clients, the interaction follows a journey known as the customer journey. For example, one such customer journey can be like this: A sales representative will reach out to potential customers. In the first meeting, the client may have shown some interest in the product or service sold by the representative, but they are not yet sure whether they will buy it. Then the sales representative may contact the client again for a product demo. Then, in the third meeting, the client may agree to buy and therefore wants to get a quote from the representative. After some negotiations, they will agree to a price and then sign the contract. Once the contract is signed, the product is delivered or the service rendered. After delivery, a bill is generated and sent to the client. The client pays the bill, and revenue is recognized by the company.
Figure 1.1: Salesforce Sales Cloud home page
It is possible to manage this workflow on spreadsheets and documents if the company is just starting with a few clients in the range of 10–50. But once the number of client interactions becomes larger than that, running into hundreds, it gets difficult to manage. Transparency is lost, communication is broken, and the process fails. Today, a lot of enterprise sales happen online and across geographies. In an era of online selling, selling without a CRM tool becomes very challenging. Managing your sales process using ad hoc tools becomes difficult. So, a CRM tool is a one-stop solution for managing the relationship with your potential customers.
Selling your product or service is just one part of the business. Next comes the more important part, that is, the delivery of the sold product or service. You need to manage order fulfillment, service delivery, invoicing, payment recognition, and so on. Depending on the experience your customer has after buying from you, they would either buy again or leave you for a competitor. A CRM also helps in managing the after-sales relationship with customers. This relationship management is very important for organizations to win renewal deals. So a CRM tool is a one-stop solution for managing the relationship with your customers as well.
Now go ahead and read the definition of CRM again. It will start to make more sense.
So, if a company is growing and has a lot of customers to cater to, it cannot manage with spreadsheets. That is the time when they invest in good CRM software that will not only help them manage the sales process but also the after-sales process.
Here are the top five benefits of using a CRM tool:
- Improved productivity of employees
- Increased collaboration
- Accurate reporting on business metrics
- Single source of information
- Improved buying experience for customers
Almost all companies have a CRM tool in place for managing customer relationships. Without that, it is difficult to function.
Figure 1.2: CRM helps to provide a single source for your customer-related information
What we have described is a basic requirement of a CRM tool. The CRM tools we have today do much more for example, they help sales agent understand the probability of winning a deal using artificial intelligence, give prompt reminders to follow up with a client, and enhance collaboration in an era of virtual selling among others. Life is much easier selling using a CRM tool.
There are many CRM software available in the market, each catering to different audiences. Some are suitable for small companies with 100-500 employees; some are more suited for big enterprises. CRM tools are available based on the revenue or the complexity involved in the selling process. There are on-premise CRM tools, which means your company has to provide the servers and other infrastructure to install and run the CRM tools. On-premise tools are used by companies that are in highly regulated industries or by government institutions. There are also many Software as a Service (SaaS)-based CRM tools. These do not require you to provide infrastructure. You just need to buy the user licenses, and then you can log in to their portals and start using them. These SaaS CRM tools are more popular today. Salesforce was the first company to provide SaaS-based CRM software and has not looked back since then.
For the scope of this book, we will focus only on SaaS CRM tools, as they are more popular today. We will not discuss on-premise CRM solutions.
Among many SaaS CRMs, here are the top SaaS CRM tools available today:
- Salesforce
- Microsoft Dynamics 365
- SAP C/4 HANA
- Oracle CX Cloud
- Zoho (for smaller companies)
In terms of market share, Salesforce has the largest share. It is one of the most popular CRM tools in the market today.