One of the most essential elements of any business is its relationship with the customers. This particular thing can make or break one’s business. Today, we’re going to explore the CRM Use Cases in detail with examples.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps businesses automate the process of customer support and communication through reliable systems.

CRM is a group of coherent, data-driven software solutions that effectively improve how businesses interact with their customers.

Initially, a mere customer bookkeeping system, CRM now helps salespeople build durable relationships with their customers. Several CRM Use Cases confirms that almost every kind of enterprise benefits from this software.

The primary goal of CRM software is to automate and integrate marketing, sales, and customer support.

However, some CRM systems also come in handy while analyzing customer data so that business managers can make more informed decisions.

Use Cases of CRM Software

CRM software can be of many types, strategic, analytical, operational, collaborative, as well as campaign management. We must consider CRM Use Cases to understand how CRM can help businesses.

There are several CRM Use Cases that depict how this software can be implemented in real-life scenarios in companies. Here are a few CRM Use Cases that illustrate how CRM can be helpful in any given problem:

Prioritizing Leads

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Problem: A business has hundreds of leads but the sales rep cannot identify the hot leads from the cold ones and it is getting very tough to choose the best leads.

How CRM can help: One can solve this problem through a process called lead scoring. It is basically ranking the leads.

The rank will be based on how much the lead engages with the business. The CRM software can be programmed to score a lead based on certain rules.

Basic parameters of the lead such as the job title, industry, and even geographic location can be taken into account as per the rules.

The rules in this CRM Use Case can also be inclusive of more complex triggers like when the lead opens a promotional email.

For instance, consider that the lead is a chief technology officer of a startup. Define a rule that will make the CRM software give him a 10 score by default.

If they happen to open a mail given by us, then they get another 5 points. With the help of this system, the leads that are most likely to engage with the business will have the most points.

This CRM Use Case ensures that important leads are not missed while efficiently saving time for sales representatives.

Following Up The Leads

Problem: Consider a sales executive sending a whole lot of mails but getting replies in different ways. Some are replying right away or rather quickly and some are either ignoring it or forgetting about it.

The sales executive needs to follow up on all of them but evidently not in the same manner. The follow ups have got to be personalized and automated.

How CRM can help: In this CRM Use case, campaigns can be made to tackle this problem. Campaigns can be created with the help of CRM software which will work according to the behavior of the recipients.

Hence, if a potential customer replies within a day or two, a call reminder can be set up in the campaign to take the relation further.

Similarly, if they do not reply, a follow-up email can be scheduled. The campaign remains relevant and timely as the automated responses are executed on schedule.

Identifying Deal’s Age

Problem: A sales manager wants to know about the average time it takes for a deal to confirm.

He wants to see if his sales representatives are stuck in any particular stage or which stage has the potential to see deals through much quicker than the others.

How CRM can help: A simple sales cycle report in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software will show the manager the average time it takes a sales representative to close a deal with his client.

This CRM Use Case helps to show which rep is closing deals faster and their average time to do so.

The manager can also benefit from a sales velocity report which shows the individual stages of any deal’s duration and which rep gets stuck in which stage.

Help During A Call

Problem:  A sales rep sometimes needs his/her colleagues to take over the call during outbound sales. There is strong competition in the industry and he/she cannot tell the potential client that they will get back to them later.

How CRM can help: This problem can be tackled with Customer Relationship Management software that comes with a built-in phone connectivity.

In this CRM Use Case, the software will quickly check the list and see who is available to take a call and automatically transfer it to them.

Automating Mundane Tasks

Problem: Tasks like typing out cheerful emails and personalized messages for every new lead is tiresome and repetitive. A sales rep is trying to find a solution that can automate these tasks.

How CRM can help: Customer relationship management (CRM) software can easily be programmed to send automated customized placeholders with personalized messages. Sales reps can use CRM to create email templates to send whenever a trigger is set off.

You can define the triggers and trigger responses accordingly. For instance, in this CRM Use Case, every time the rep gets a new lead, he can set it as a trigger in CRM and instruct it to send a welcome email.

Understanding Customers through In-Product Activity

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Problem: The owner of a small startup wants to find out the key features of his product or service that are the most popular among his customers.

He has tried to hold a survey but hasn’t got enough insight to improve his product or service.

How CRM can help: You can install CRM software that tracks the customer’s behavior and provides an in-depth insight into the customers.

In this particular CRM Use Case, a specific code can be availed across several programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, Java, PHP, and Ruby.

All that the owner has to do is implement these codes inside their product. As a result, the owner will get a detailed report on every customer as a part of the activity timeline.

Understanding Customers Beyond  Sales Interaction

Problem: Customers have very detailed and extensive conversation with the customer support team about their problems and concerns.

These conversations have valuable information for the sales representatives that can come in handy while getting calls from those particular customers.

The rep wants to get access to every customer’s complaints or tickets so they can have a better relationship with them.

How CRM can help: You can integrate the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software with the helpdesk of customer support.

This ensures the sharing of vital information among the sales team and support team in real life. This CRM Use Case designed to take ticket conversations from the helpdesk and display them in the contact’s profile.

A CRM integrated help desk benefits the customer service agents as well. They can prioritize tickets if they see that a certain contact is part of a high-value deal.

One Company, Different Sales Processes

Problem: A small company makes 2 kinds of products, one for smaller businesses and one for medium market businesses.

Each market has different sales processes and one sales pipeline ( a visual representation of the different stages in any sales process) does not seem to suffice.

How CRM can help: In this CRM Use Case, it is evident that the company needs multiple pipelines for its sales.

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The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can create different sales pipelines for different sales processes.

The team that deals with whichever sales process can mark that particular pipeline as their default. This ensures that all new deals for that team goes automatically to that particular defaulted sales pipeline.

Efficient Way To Ride Sales Meetings

Problem: An on field sales rep meets customers and potential clients all across the city. The sales rep wants an option which will help him book his ride on the same mobile calendar screen that he looks when he wants to see an appointment.

This will help him go about much more easily without having to open and close several apps.

How CRM can help: Apart from Customer Relationship Management web software, CRM mobile app exists as well.

In this CRM Use Case, you can integrate the CRM Apps with ride-hailing apps such as Uber which will enable the rep to book a ride without having to leave the screen.

Protection Against Competitors

Problem: A company doubts its place in the market as stronger competitions arrive in the market.

With the competitors launching aggressive new marketing techniques every other day, the company is pondering over how they can retain their customers.

How CRM can help: Customer loyalty is the most important thing for a business to sustain and you can test it with every new tempting campaign a competitor launches.

CRM software helps personalize each customer’s profile retaining as much information as possible.

From sales team and customer service reps to analytical insights of customers based on their browsing history, purchases, and social media activities, Customer Relationship Management software compiles all the data and creates totally inclusive customer profiles.

Such a comprehensive profile of every customer allows the company to provide excellent service at every step of the customer’s journey with the company.

Strategic Marketing

Problem: The marketing department of a company needs insight from the sales and customer support team as to what existing customers expect and which marketing opportunities they can take up on.

For example, if any current product needs improvement or if the customers expect any complementary products.

How CRM can help: A CRM software is capable to gather and analyze the data from the sales reps or surveys.

This data in turn can help the marketing department of the company to identify the market trends in time and also interested customers in the different products of the company.

The marketing team can also benefit from the analysis of customer data in this CRM Use Case. This analysis helps them target certain customer segments and give them more personalized and thus effective messages.

Proactive Strategic Management

Problem: A company wants to monitor and detect problems in the market which may potentially harm the company. It wants a process through which they can interpret this data and make more informed decisions.

How CRM can help: A company will be able to know its problems with the help of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software before it starts losing any money or customer.

In this CRM Use case, the software programmed to look for reasons why a company might be getting fewer leads as well as weak responses from their loyal customers.

The CRM software can have customized dashboards which will cater to the different people in different positions in the company and help them make better and informed decisions.

Increasing Profit

Problem: A custom software development company is striving to up its profits and needs help in understanding their key customers better so as to provide them with better service.

How CRM can help: A simple customer data analysis in CRM software will tell a company more about it’s important clients so it can maintain stronger relationships with them.

Monitoring and analyzing data of the purchase history as well as sales responses of the key customers will help the company retain them.

Company executives can manage profitability and also predict revenues with these CRM data. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software system is capable of monitoring the much larger goals such as decreasing costs and increasing revenues.

Cold Email Outreach For Backlink

Problem: A better solution to setting up backlinks from the sites that have higher domain authority which is both time consuming and exhaustive.

How CRM can help: A CRM software will help you have a record of all the attempts to build a link and thus preventing further miscommunication and potentially spamming a partner.

It also helps you keep a track of where you are in each pipeline of a sales process by creating records of conversations and deals.

This CRM Use Case allows the company to dedicate a team of people who can safely work on the backlinks strategy.

The team members can easily share the progress and information amongst each other through this CRM software.

Sales Prospecting

Problem: The sales team needs a good prospecting strategy which will help them organize the details of every lead.

How CRM can help: In this CRM Use Case, CRM software import mass contact details, thus saving a lot of time for the research team which would otherwise be spent on just inputting all the data.

Capturing and organizing your prospect’s data is a very important aspect while you’re on the sales call.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software will allow you to do so and pass on this vital information over to the sales team and marketing department.

Conclusion

The above CRM Use cases only prove that the usage of CRM software is limitless.

You should see CRM software from a wider perspective and use its data to improve a company’s strategic development.

Almost every other business can benefit from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.

Harsh Kundariya

CEO, eSparkBiz

Passionate about everything happening in the field of SaaS & Cloud Apps. The Co-Founder of eSparkBiz@SaaS Application Development Company. Interested in exploring various aspects related to SaaS technology. Curious about knowing each everything that happens in the world of HubSpot Marketing. It has landed him to be among the top-notch Entrepreneurs with 6+ years of experience in India and the USA.