How Historical CRM Data Can Help You Sell More?

Maintaining a business is a lot like maintaining a friendship – it’s all about developing trust and keeping a relationship alive. But no business is an island and in order to have a profitable one you need to have new purchases over and over again.

So it is not uncommon to find salespeople spending all their time trying to acquire new customers and forgetting about the old ones that are dwelling in your CRM.
However, just like friends, new customers are so much harder and much more expensive to acquire than trying to keep the old ones. Bain & Company even says 6 to 7 times more expensive.

You don’t know what are the exact needs and habits of your potential customers so you need to invest more to gain their trust, whereas the old customers have already bought from you so they are very likely to return and buy from you again.

Even though it may seem that the profit lies in your new customers’ hands – customer retention is the biggest revenue driver, according to KPMG.

Your old customers will help you achieve better conversion rates because they already bought from you, they will minimize your marketing activities AND give you feedback that you can use to improve your product or service.

According to Kissmetricks, 71% of customers will leave because of unsatisfactory customer service and remaining 29% due to bad price or availability and Gnet Group says that 86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience.

So here is where your chance lies – use your knowledge of existing and past customers to upsell or cross-sell, rather than chase after new ones.

Make sure you regularly check up on them, see how their business is developing, do they need help with anything and ask whether some of your other products or services can help with whatever they are dealing with at the moment.

Use Your CRM To Maintain Relationship With Your Customers

We keep our FRM (Friends Relationship Management) in our heads and our hearts, while CRMs are better for our business relationships and can give us valuable information that we can use to identify those who have the ability to become our long-term customers.

CRM keeps all the data you need about your old, current and potential customers – who they are, how they’ve been marketed to and how they responded. If you carefully analyze your data (or just ask questions), you can see the reasons and elements that influenced their purchase and even predict their future behavior and potential needs.

CRM can help you segment your customers since all of them certainly don’t need equal attention or product/service, and communicate with them accordingly. You can send a different email thread to each and every one of them with special promotions tailored just for that client and keep your business on their minds at all times.

Is your CRM data updated?

Before you start reaching out to your old customers, you need to make sure that your data is fresh and up to date.

Data can get old and musty so often, it got its own term – Data Decay. We’ve all been there – hundreds or thousands  of telephone numbers and email addresses that haven’t been used in a while. Maybe some of your old contacts changed the companies they work for, maybe their job description is not the same anymore, and that email they used does not exist anymore.

This is where you need to think about Data Enrichment. Just because your contact is changed, it doesn’t mean that the company is not ready to buy from you again and that the new decision maker’s are not willing to talk to you.

And those old contacts may have gone to a new firm and they would gladly recommend your product or service to their new boss.

What if in the meantime more decision makers got involved into the purchasing process and you realized you don’t have their contacts as well? What if the size of the company has changed and they don’t need the product or service that they used to buy, but another one.

All of these potential mistakes (aiming at the wrong people at wrong company with wrong products/services at the wrong time) can easily be avoided if you just update your CRM data regularly.

Test What Marketing Efforts Are Bringing Results

One of the most basic and simplest CRM options is that it can show you which marketing efforts are bringing the most results.

By A/B testing your email campaigns you can clearly see which subject lines, CTAs and offers are bringing best results, recycle them for future prospecting, and stop or change the less successful ones so that they have better outcome.

Follow closely to see which emails have best open rates, CTRs, CTAs and replies so that you waste less time in your forthcoming marketing and sales campaigns.

One of the basic features is seeing the history of emails and other conversations that you had with the old, current or potential customers before. Using this information, you or anyone from your team can quickly review the account and always be informed about the previous purchases and agreements. This data also makes the conversation with a client highly personalized and prevents you from asking the unnecessary questions.

CRM can also help you impress your customers (and over-deliver) by anticipating their needs and providing a tailored and timely service. For example, based on the data on their purchasing habits you acquired in your CRM over time you can predict when their next purchase will happen and offer an upgraded one weeks or months before that.

Prevent Customers From Leaving

Once you have  the pattern of your customer’s purchases in your CRM, you can track them and see if there are any changes in their behavior and purchasing habits.

If you notice that they have skipped a cycle (for example, there was no purchase in the last six months) or they are purchasing less than before, it is time for you to contact them and try to understand why this is happening and what you can do to help.

Maybe they don’t need as much of your product or service as before, but they could use a new one that you have in offer.

This is where your communication gets into focus. Communicate irregularly and expect them to leave.

Show Appreciation With Special Offers

CRM data gives you an insight into your customers, so that you can show that their loyalty is valued through special promotions and offers. The more you know about them – the better you can tailor your offer. Sometimes an added value of your product or service is a better option than a discount.

CRM can show you who your best customers are and which ones are spending the most, so you can give away incentives and develop strategies for cross-selling.

Upsell Immediately or After a While

Being that the marketing to current customers is significantly cheaper, the companies are focusing on upselling and cross-selling to the ones that have already bought from them.

CRM can help you discover what are the products services that your existing customers did not buy and that are complementary with the ones they did purchase. Say they are buying men’s rompers from you and you offer them a lighter with that so they can burn it right away.

In case you did not manage to upsell right at the first purchase, you can check in your CRM to see what your customers are buying and once you have improved that product or service you can offer them a new better version. An upgraded male romper.

Use CRM To Save Time

What is most important, CRM saves your and your sales team’s time so that they can focus on selling instead of managing data and manually keeping track of all the details.

CRM provides you with real-time data especially valuable for decision makers and reporting in general.

Overall it can provide you with information about the selling trends within your company so that you can plan and adjust your strategies accordingly.

If you or your sales team have a database that hasn’t been used in a while and needs to be updated or you just need help with your CRM and selling – contact us.