What is CRM

The CRM abbreviation stands for Client Relationships Management. The essence of this management lies in the fact that each client should be offered exactly what he needs. Some customers are looking for the most affordable proposal on the market, some place a priority on the friendly service, others have strict deadlines. Knowing the needs of each client allows you to win their loyalty, and therefore expect that next time the client comes to you.

So the first task all the CRM systems solve is recording in one form or another the clients' needs, accumulating the relationship history that will give the employees an idea of who they deal with and what to emphasize to make the customer satisfied.

As for the rest of the options - every CRM system is quite unique and offers its own set of tools to work with a client base: some offer rich resources for designing forms and reports, up to the built-in programming languages. Some are integrated with advanced analytical capabilities, and provide a lot of different graphs. Others offer excellent opportunities to work via the Internet. Understanding all the variety of existing solutions on the market is a hard task, but the fact that the implementation of any automation system is accompanied by bringing order and, ultimately increasing sales is confirmed by statistics.

Of course, not all commercial activities are the same and if some types of businesses that use CRM systems experience magical effect, others may not receive any tangible advantages. When does the CRM work best? The greatest effect of the CRM implementation can be achieved if:

• you perform an active search for new customers and constantly work with the existing ones, i.e. sales managers do not sit waiting for incoming calls, and call the customers themselves and are actively looking for new clients
• you have lengthy sales cycles. i.e. the clients do not spontaneously buy your product, but spend some time deciding and agreeing various conditions
• your customers require an individual approach
• the intensity and quality of sales managers work considerably affect the company's revenue
• each employee works with a lot of clients and the details of each cooperation are difficult to keep in mind

Fortunately, most CRM systems offer a trial period so that you could see how the result of their use affects the development of your business. In most cases, you get a tool to record data about customers, their contact information and preferences with a possibility to find information, work collectively with the overall customer base. These functions are present is absolutely all CRM programs, constituting the basis for other functions. To help the staff to work with customer data, CRM systems also offer the following tools:

• planning a list of things the employee should do
• recording the history of communication with customers and convenient search for customer data
• possibility to analyze each employee’s work
• recording the information about customers' needs with the possibility to analyze the identified demand
• tools for supporting potential orders
• stage by stage support of actual orders

Such tools allow to use each employee’s time more efficiently and make sure that every manager is able to work with more clients and applications, and promptly offer customers the best solutions to their problems.

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