The social CRM market is booming at the moment, and for good reason. Andrew Yates, CEO at Artesian, explains how to use, social CRM to boost your bottom line
Modern sales teams all have more or less the same goal: to connect with customers effectively so that they can better identify any relevant opportunities or issues, and then use this information to sell more successfully.
Social CRM claims to support this goal, but in order to use social CRM for this purpose – and tap into this valuable business insight when targeting customers – social CRM applications will need to be integrated into other core business processes and, more importantly, linked to the sales function.
At the moment, the term ‘social CRM’ is being used to describe a wide variety of applications that help to support communities of internal users, customers, partners and other stakeholders with sales, marketing and customer service processes for the mutual benefit of enterprises and their customers. Because of this broad definition, however, many vendors who claim to be offering social CRM applications are actually doing little more than harvesting content from the web and social media websites on their clients’ behalf.
The real value of social CRM requires the use of specialist software like Artesian Surveillance to find key insights by carefully filtering the web and social media. In order to gain the greatest benefits of this approach, however, you’ll first need to break your campaign into three key steps:
1) Use social CRM to accelerate sales
Until now, the process of gathering social CRM information and transforming it into actionable sales intelligence has required most companies to follow a slow, manual process before they could create any real ‘triggers’ for the sales team. The time has come, however, to use the power of technology to address this issue, to leverage the power of social media more effectively, and to integrate these processes into your company’s wider CRM and sales activities.
Instead of just compiling information, social CRM should inspire action. You can start with simple things like ‘clipping’ an article that might be of interest to a customer or prospect. Or tweeting it. Or emailing it. The value to be gained from social CRM may start with listening and then collating data, but the benefits to be gained in this area will ultimately depend upon specific actions that will actively generate leads.
When used in this way, social CRM will have an important role to play in supporting your strategic customer management strategy, since modern businesses must be able to understand and respond to their clients’ individual needs very quickly. Opportunities are often missed, for example, through a lack of visibility of key customer developments that could trigger important sales opportunities.
2) Use social CRM to understand the customer experience
Social CRM can certainly help you find out what people are saying about your prospects, clients and competitors, but it can also help you to understand what people are saying about your own company, so that you can react accordingly and sell more effectively. In other words, social media can help you to improve your sales processes by understanding how your company is seen from the outside looking in.
As a starting point, it will be especially useful to consider any negative comments being made about your company in a social networking environment, as these are usually a symptom of something going wrong much deeper within the organisation. You’ll therefore need to do some digging around in order to get to the root cause of the problem and react accordingly – especially if there are any issues that may be stopping you from selling, whether that means a website that’s too difficult to navigate, an ordering process that is overly complex, and/or an advert that has missed the mark with its intended audience.
To achieve this goal, you’ll need to tap into any other sources of business intelligence that you may have – such as customer surveys, feedback from customers, focus groups, changing sales trends, and so on – and then combine this information with a careful analysis of your social media activity in order to identify what is actively supporting and promoting your sales efforts, and also what is hampering them. Armed with this level of insight, you’ll be in a much better position to find out exactly what’s causing any persistent frustration and/or dissatisfaction amongst your customers, tackle the problem at the source, and then turn any negatives into positive action steps that will help to boost sales.
3) Make the move from ‘listening’ to action
By tapping into social CRM at this level, your business can quickly gain a competitive edge by turning ‘listening’ into action. It’s not enough merely to keep tabs on (or try to control) what is being said on blogs and social networking sites; instead, you’ll need to take this information and transform it into usable, actionable business intelligence that will help you to sell more effectively and also drive real improvements within your organisation.
You can start by using dedicated social CRM technology to track different combinations of topics across any/all of the companies that are relevant to your business. By automating this process, you’ll spend less time searching for this kind of information and will be able to focus on selling and improving internal processes instead. Best of all, this approach will enable you to drive your salespeople towards potential business opportunities by giving them a specific reason to contact the prospect, to offer details of your company’s services, and to explain how you could help.
By tightly linking this relevant, real time information with core business processes, your company can monitor its prospective and existing clients much more effectively, and can also keep an eye on your competitors and their own social media profile at the same time.
However, monitoring is still just the beginning: your company should now be looking to use social CRM to act on these new business opportunities much more quickly, since this ‘inside information’ will give you an enormous advantage in today’s highly competitive market.
Social CRM is an extremely effective way of achieving this goal. People often say that ‘information is power’, and social CRM makes this point very clearly. By listening to what people are saying about your company, gathering information about your key prospects and competitors, and then acting on this information, you’ll be able use the power of social CRM to improve efficiencies within your organisation, forge closer ties with new and prospective clients, and ultimately boost the bottom line.
