5 CRM Objectives and Goals to Set as Part of CRM Strategy

Customer relationship management (CRM) software systems can bring great benefits to your sales organization by helping marketers, sales representatives, and customer service agents track and manage customer information throughout the sales process.

However, simply owning and using a CRM system isn’t enough to utilize all of its benefits. Instead, business owners, leaders, and managers must create actionable strategies to utilize these tools to their fullest potential, called CRM strategies. And, these CRM strategies must fully align with your organization’s overarching short- and long-term strategies.

To support the overarching strategies of your business, exactly what sort of goals should you include in your CRM strategy? How can using a CRM help you achieve short- and long-term business goals? 

If you’re looking to improve your company’s operations by using a CRM system, but you don’t know where to start, this guide is here to help you find actionable objectives and goals to set as part of your CRM strategy. Ultimately, this guide is here to provide instruction and insight to help you leverage your CRM system so that you can use it to its fullest potential.

What Is a CRM Strategy?

A customer relationship management (CRM) strategy is a designated plan detailing how to use your CRM software to support your greater business goals, such as increasing revenue or expanding operations. Since CRM software governs the customer-facing functions in the company (marketing, sales, and customer service), a CRM strategy naturally focuses on supporting and strengthening functions related to customers and their purchases.

A company needs sales to survive, and it needs customers to make those sales. That’s why it’s important for companies to develop CRM strategies that use CRM software and tools to strengthen relationships that drive sales, marketing, and overall business operations.

In the following sections, we will take a look at the five CRM objectives and goals businesses should look at when developing their CRM strategy.

1. Acquiring More Customers

If your company’s marketing department is struggling to find and attract more leads, a major part of your CRM strategy should be acquiring more customers. 

Using a CRM system containing all of your customers’ data can help you acquire more customers by helping you send out targeted marketing messages to more people. With a detailed database of all of your past customers, managers and decision-makers can analyze patterns in your customer base to uncover hidden commonalities. A CRM system enables companies to look deep into its customer base to uncover patterns, such as a large portion of customers coming from the same social media platform, or a large segment of customers working in a particular industry. Your marketers can then target those traits and trends to hopefully attract more potential customers who fit the same pattern.

On top of a more data-driven and focused marketing campaign, a CRM can also help you attract more customers by automating and scaling your marketing campaigns. For example, a CRM can fill in lead names into email templates en masse and send them out according to a set schedule – all without your employees having to lift a finger. With a higher volume of personalized marketing materials sent out, your company is bound to see more customers as the end result of the process.

Additionally, with your lead generation tools plugged into the CRM, any new leads attracted to your company will automatically be entered straight into the CRM system for easy hand-off between your marketing and sales departments.

2. Improving Operational Efficiency

Alternatively, if you already have enough leads to fill your sales funnel, you might set your company’s and your CRM’s sights on improving your processing speed for those customers–in other words, your operational efficiency. By hosting all of your customer data in one place and automating tasks, a CRM can help your organization speed up its sales velocity.

In a standard sales process, a sales rep reaches out to an inbound lead to engage with them, nurture their interest in the product, answer their questions, and persuade them to close. This is a simple task for a single monogamous lead-and-sales-rep match. But as your business grows, sales reps must nurture multiple leads at once, and leads must be served by employees having the capacity to respond to them. During this process, it is possible for sales reps to become confused about each lead’s details or even forget to follow up with a lead entirely!

A CRM solves these issues by storing all of a lead’s interactions with the company in its database, allowing any rep to pick up the lead’s file and continue the sale flawlessly. This keeps sales reps on track with each sale and reduces the amount of time spent hunting for client details. 

Then, with workflow automation, the CRM can also automatically complete designated tasks, such as sending follow-up emails by itself, and push reminders to sales reps to complete tasks according to a certain schedule.

Finally, having a CRM system serving as a historical database for all of your previous customers makes it easy to quickly identify repeat customers and pull up their files, putting them on the fast track to closing since they’ve already been qualified. 

3. Raise Profits

Whether you have 10 customers or 100, your CRM strategy should aim to improve the dollar revenue you earn from each customer. This can be achieved by either raising the value of each individual purchase or by encouraging loyal customers to reach a high lifetime value.

As we mentioned earlier, a CRM records details about each customer interaction – including any preferences they might have mentioned to the sales rep or predilections they might have exhibited when browsing the product catalog. Explicit or implied, these preferences can be used to tailor a sales pitch and product offering to match each customer’s needs or desires, encouraging them to splurge a little more on a purchase that will make them extraordinarily happy. You could also consider upselling or cross-selling the customer on other products, potentially raising the total dollar revenue of their purchases.

Alternatively, with a CRM’s aforementioned automated messaging schedule, the sales department could hopefully convince a previous customer to make a repeat purchase, turning them into a reliable source of revenue. After all, while the probability of selling to a new customer is only 5 to 20%, the chance of selling to an existing customer is a whopping 60 to 70%, according to Invesp. Plus, it costs less to sell to repeat customers who are already familiar with your company, which leads to higher profit margins for your salesperson and for your company.

4. Increasing Sales Rep Accountability

Without using a CRM, sales managers can only judge a salesperson’s work by the number of sales they bring in, as there is no evidence of work performed that “almost” resulted in the closing of a big deal. Not having this evidence of work is what led to the prevalence of commission-based compensation structures, which can be harsh treatment for salespeople who might be down on their luck.

Nowadays, companies can use CRM logging to track and assess sales rep performance accurately. With all emails, phone calls, and potential customer interactions logged into the CRM, sales managers have a trustworthy metric to determine if salespeople are truly putting in as much work and effort as they claim, holding sales reps accountable for their performance.

While this may seem harsh, having a foolproof tracking system for sales rep performance means that sales managers can fairly compensate hardworking sales reps, and accurately determine which reps to focus their training efforts on.

5. Improving Customer Satisfaction

Finally, using CRMs can improve your business’s customer service operations. This, along with all of the previously mentioned factors—a more personalized sales pitch, faster sales cycles, adept sales reps, and tailored, high-quality product offerings—lead to increased customer satisfaction with your business.

In a 2018 survey of the most important aspects of a good customer service experience, the three highest-ranked elements to customers were getting the issue resolved in a single interaction, being served by a knowledgeable customer service rep, and not having to repeat themselves when transferred to a new agent. 

CRMs help customer support agents improve customer satisfaction by not only serving as a repository for customer information, but also for providing easy access to internal company documents and product guides as well. For example, when a customer calls in with a question or complaint about their order, a support rep could quickly look up their profile and order details, check company guidelines and policies for a solution, and modify the customer’s account – all from the same place. 

If the matter the customer calls about escalates further, the receiving manager will have the previous rep’s notes in the CRM to brief them on the situation rather than forcing the customer to repeat themselves. All in all, CRMs enable the service department to work efficiently and flawlessly to ensure customer satisfaction. 

Unlike the other previous goals that have clear-cut metrics, it can be a bit difficult to measure customer satisfaction. Therefore, we are advising you to use a variety of tools to measure customer satisfaction, such as CSAT scores, Net Promoter Scores, Customer Effort Scores, attribute satisfaction, and repurchase intentions.

Conclusion

CRM software has so many different features and functions that it can be difficult to draw up a designated strategy to use the software to its fullest potential. Hopefully, this list of the five most common CRM goals and objectives will help you hone in on the factors and benefits that matter the most to you. 

With some careful consideration and implementation, there’s no doubt that your company can skillfully use your CRM software to its highest capabilities, allowing you to close more sales than ever before.