Which type of CRM is good for your business?

Businesses use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for lead management, tracking, and establishing a good relationship with their prospects and clients. It is meant for valuable insights too. A CRM is all you need to improve and enhance the customer experiences effortlessly and gradually take your buyers to close the deal.

What is CRM? 

Before we dive into this, let us understand one thing. 

Have you ever imagined how you would manage your customers and their relationship with them easily to get the best out of it? 

The simple solution to do is to have a CRM automation tool for your business. 

As the name indicates, CRM is Customer Relationship Management, which helps you communicate with your leads and customers easily and maintain long-lasting relationships that yield good business. 

What does this sound like?  

You can very well use CRM for : 

• Monitor and track your customer tractions 
• Lead management 
• Access it from anywhere, anytime 
• Streamline your marketing and sales efforts 
• Enhance your customer service 

The list is endless if you use it well. 

How do you get the leads or prospects into your CRM? 

It depends on how you have defined your workflow for lead generation. But in general cases, you will integrate the CRM into your website, social media, and other lead sources. When someone fills out a registration form on any of these integrated platforms, it will land as a lead in your CRM from where it will travel based on the journey you have predefined in your workflow. 

Why is it important for businesses to rely on a CRM? 

The reasons may differ depending upon the nature of the business, but ultimately, the objective would be the same - to please your customers and boost your sales. 

Businesses who rely on CRM find it useful and crucial for their business because 

• -It stores the lead and its related information in a consolidated place so that it helps you align your strategies in line with it 
• -Keep track of the conversations or communication (via any channel that you have integrated) so that history will be available and helpful for a personalized approach
• -Helps you to align your sales team properly - making them more productive in taking the prospects a step closer to the closing stage 

One important aspect to keep in mind is that every CRM has unique value propositions. Different types of CRM are available, including Operational, Collaborative, and Analytical based.

Which one would you choose for your business is highly reliable on your business goal. So, you must choose the best one which is the right fit for your business. As SmallBusiness HQ notes, businesses also need to keep some of the common CRM challenges in mind before making the final decision.

But not all CRMs deliver the same functionality. They fall into one (or more) of the following types: Operational, analytical, or collaborative CRMs. Here's how they work and what they offer to help you find the best-fit CRM Automation Tool for your business.

Different Types of CRM 

• Operational CRM: This is useful to streamline business processes.
• Collaborative CRM: If you want to combine marketing, sales, and service hub, this is the right choice.
• Analytical CRM: This helps analyze customer data

Now, let us see each one in detail. 

Operational CRM 

We need to streamline all the business processes. So, while doing so, you might have many factors to retain customers, get valuable insights, and more. In such cases, this Operational CRM is the right fit for you as it helps you generate leads, help you convert them into a step higher in your journey, and also helps you take actionable insights to retain them. 

What are the major aspects of Operational CRM? 

There are three main notable features that you would fall in love with. 

Marketing automation: Dejected with plenty of manual tasks that eat out most of your time? Then here is the way to simplify it. Automate your tedious tasks and focus more on critical tasks. Marketing automation includes email campaigns, lead capture and automated sequence emails, content offers, outreach campaigns, etc. 

Some may also help you with ROI tracking if you opt for paid ad campaigns. You may find it useful for Search Engine Optimization best practices and content marketing. 

Sales Automation: As the name implies, it deals with automating sales activities so that the sales representatives get more time to interact with the prospects and approach them personalized. This will gradually help you expand the client list. 

What can be automated in Sales? 

There are a lot of attractive features that you can enjoy with Sales automation. First of all. you can automate the:

• Meeting schedules and appointments. 
• Schedules your email communication with clients or prospects 
• Track your sales calls to ensure you deliver quality deliverables and evaluate if you adhere to company ethics. 
• Workflow automation feature that helps you simplify your delegation process much easier. 

Service Automation: After Marketing and Sales, the next big thing would be to cross and upsell, where Service Automation plays a major role. It helps you seamlessly target your campaigns to your customers to retain them. It helps you deal with support tickets with chatbots and automated features that swiftly help your customers get the solution for their concerns. 

Operational CRM is best suited for: 

Are you running a business with a linear sales process? Small and Medium businesses can take the best out of the operational CRM software. Moreover, if you want to automate human work and workflows to perform certain activities, this operational CRM is the right choice. 

Collaborative CRM 

A collaborative CRM software is meant to bring together marketing, sales, and service to improve the synchronization among the three. It helps you better understand your customer, their needs, and interests so that you can approach them with a personalized approach.

What are the major aspects of Collaborative CRM?

Interaction Management 

It tracks the interaction between the business and its customers through different channels like email, social media, and more. It is also an excellent feature of the CRM tool that helps you share information across different business units. 

Channel Management

It is the advanced level of interaction management, wherein it helps you analyze the information to identify the best channel that suits your clients' preferences. 

Which communication channel would you prefer in the first place - email, chat, or social media? How would you deal with sales pipeline management? That is where you utilize channel management. 

Collaborative CRM is best suited for: 

This type of CRM is meant for businesses with diverse physical locations that would like to sync the information easily. It is meant for companies that do not share customer information throughout.  

Analytical CRM 

It is a CRM tool that is highly reliable in data mining to help you enhance customer preferences, behaviors, and even contact information. The data collected with this automation tool can be used for sales efforts, personalized marketing campaigns, and even customer support. 

What are the major aspects of Analytical CRM?

Data Mining and warehousing: This is particularly used to store the historical information of the data extraction process. It is used for the analytical aspects and is helpful for the customer lifecycle, which refers to identification, retention, and development. 

Online Analytical Processing Tools (OLAP): As the name implies, it stores the data stored in the database. It gives you valuable insights, like if you want to analyze how your website is consumed by the users, which locations are giving you more traffic, time, etc. The major benefit is that you do not have to analyze every field individually; this tool gives you handy. 

Analytical CRM is best suited for: 

If your business is looking to harness the power of data to understand your customers' needs and how they work clearly, this is the right choice. 

Apart from these three types of main CRMs, there are two more that can be classified as : 

• Campaign Management CRM 
• Strategic CRM 

Campaign Management CRM 

Although it falls under Analytical or Operational CRMs, it has a perfect blend of the two types. It helps you collect the data and utilize it to run your email or other marketing campaigns. If your business is focused on generating leads and executing campaigns, this will be the best-suited one. However, you can execute marketing campaigns with proper integrations.  

Some of the best features include : 

• Simple drag and drop user interface 
• Ease of email campaign execution 
• Execute campaigns on multiple channels ( already integrated sources) 
• Lead journey management (change as it moves from one stage to another based on the actions taken) 

Strategic CRM 

This is a subcategory of collaborative CRM, and it focuses on the customers. You can better utilize this for enhancing your customer service and can be used to turn your customers into evangelists, thereby boosting a good relationship with them. However, it is called Strategic CRM because it helps you change your strategies based on customer interactions for long-term success. You can rely on this type of CRM if you look at long-term campaigns, as it takes its own sweet time to get results. 

Strategic CRM helps you collaborate with your entire team to establish a good relationship with your customers. 

What is the Data Lifecycle Management?

Data lifecycle management describes the processes, policies, and procedures of managing data throughout its entire life—from the first entry into your system (data capture) all the way through its retirement (data deletion). All data has a lifecycle, and data lifecycle management ensures that your data function is proactive in managing each step of that journey at intertrust.com.

Which one to choose from - Operational, Collaborative, or Analytical CRM? 

Each CRM has its pros and cons. So, when you select the best one for your business, you must clearly understand the business objective to fit in the best one for your needs. 

• Are you looking to streamline your sales pipeline management? 
• How do you want to manage sales and marketing automation? 
• How would you want to understand your customers well? 
• Are you focusing on synchronizing the information? 

When you look for the perfect CRM for your business, all these questions pop up in your mind. The one you choose will act as the backbone for your business communication and establishing a rapport with your prospects and customers.  

• Operational CRM will be the best fit if you are planning for automation. 
• Analytical CRM will be the best choice if you are keen on analyzing reports and dashboards for performance evaluation. 
• If you have multiple departments or locations to take care of, a collaborative CRM will be the best-suited option. 

So, choose the CRM for your business depending on your overall goal to get the best results.