Customer relationship management (CRM) software facilitates a company’s approach to customer interactions. The goal of customer relationship management is to improve customer acquisition and retention by providing personalized experiences that keep your customers engaged.
Because it manages prospect and customer engagement points throughout the customer journey, your CRM can inform activities across marketing, sales, and customer service, creating a 360-degree customer view that empowers a truly connected experience.
So, what is the strategic importance of CRM? It continually gathers and analyzes customer data, allowing you to use that information to strengthen customer relationships and drive better business results.
Let’s take a look at six CRM capabilities and features and how they can help you support larger strategic initiatives for your business.
1. Ensure teams have customer records they can trust
To ensure the data driving your decision-making is complete, accurate, and high-quality, it’s essential to establish a solid customer data management strategy.
An integrated CRM solution can pull in and deduplicate data from across the customer journey—benefitting everyone who interacts with your customers.
- Marketers use it to craft relevant messages and follow up with prospects with the right offers at the right time.
- Salespeople draw on prior engagement data to gain a deeper understanding of any prospect they work with, so it’s easier to demonstrate relevant value, build trust, and close deals.
- Customer service teams refer to purchase history and contact records to understand support queries in context, allowing them to provide faster, more accurate service without requiring customers to repeat known details.
2. Accurately forecast sales with CRM
Accurate sales forecasting is critical to your entire revenue operation. CRM data helps sales leaders effectively manage pipelines and accurately forecast sales by week, month, quarter, or on a rolling basis.
A data-centric approach using AI makes it possible to pull in orders, invoices, and pipeline data along with quota, territory, and budget information.
Together, this information gives leaders and sellers a clearer idea of which deals are likely to close and which are not, so they can better plan next steps and communicate progress effectively.
3. Use real-time insights to build more accurate quotas
Setting actionable, realistic quotas for marketers, sellers, and service teams is critical for motivating and retaining top talent. Still, manually creating quotas is time-consuming and prone to mistakes.
Leveraging CRM data—lead scores, pipeline progression, and support queries, to name a few examples—makes it easier to gain insight into individual or team performance in real time. These insights can inform more accurate quotas that motivate teams rather than discourage them.
4. Segment accounts, contacts, and deals based on territories
Territories help your sales team focus their efforts and minimize disputes and confusion over which leads belong to whom. CRM helps facilitate the processes and actions sales leaders, teams, and individual sellers take to build and modify sales territories and accurately route leads.
Factors to consider include geography, business units, product lines, industries, seasonality, and named accounts. This approach helps your teams reach their full sales potential and makes identifying and rewarding top performers easier.
5. Help partners sell more
The 80/20 rule states that 20% of a business’s customers will generate 80% of its revenue. The same is true of sales partners. Managing the hundreds, possibly thousands, of partners on your roster can be complex and time-consuming.
CRM with partner relationship capabilities offers top performers the resources and real-time information they need to excel—like training, marketing resources, pricing, qualified leads, and opportunities.
6. Motivate employees with incentive compensation support
Getting incentive compensation plans right can drive operational efficiency, motivate employees, and grow revenue. By contrast, unclear plans with ambiguous terms and slow payouts have the potential to become disincentives.
Using CRM data to validate incentive compensation will help minimize errors and disputes. When teams trust that their compensation is accurate, they’ll spend less time tracking it manually and more time building customer relationships.
Empower your strategic initiatives with CRM
In today’s world of empowered customers, managing customer relationships is more important than ever. Having a CRM solution in place is strategically important to your business because it helps support the entire customer journey, streamlines the customer engagement process, builds customer loyalty, and ultimately drives revenue.
Oracle Sales is an integrated CRM solution that guides customer-facing team members with intelligent recommendations to ensure they provide the right experience with the right data—every time.
See why Oracle Sales outranked Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, and SAP on Paul Greenberg’s 2022 CRM watchlist.
Or take a brief product tour to see Oracle Sales in action.