The power pendulum has swung in favour of the customer in the mobile-first, cloud-first world, in which consumers are always connected to the internet and their spheres of influence.
Customers do their own research and question their peers to make buying decisions before even engaging with vendors and they also possess a higher set of expectations in terms of the quality of the sales engagements when they do make contact. This brings with it an entirely new set of risks and rewards for sellers.
“The old paradigm of understanding your customer and ‘managing’ your customer is no longer enough, since consumers take that as a given in this age. In the world we now find ourselves, the customer wants to almost dictate and manage how a seller should interact and engage with them. Customers have enough knowledge and research at their fingertips to form a precise opinion on what a procurement process of a particular product or service ought to be like. Those thoughts are then used to benchmark the actual process. This means sales teams need to be able to collaborate from anywhere and require access to customer insight through socially enhanced CRM (customer relationship management) solutions. A solution like this allows for real-time communication and customer-relevant information sharing, which helps make every interaction more meaningful and goes a long way in deepening relationships,” says Marc Gower, Dynamics lead at Microsoft South Africa.
A business that is capitalising on the mobility and social trends to drive sales in the digital era is information technology and outsourcing company Syntel. The company’s prior CRM tool was primarily used as an ‘after the fact’ data repository, as opposed to a real-time source of sales information. Furthermore, the adoption of CRM by the sales team was low, as a result of issues with the user interface, flexibility and performance of the system, leading to it being largely used for project approvals towards the end of the sales cycle rather than at the point of opportunity generation.
To transform its business, Syntel evaluated a number of CRM solutions and opted to utilise Microsoft Dynamics CRM to revamp and streamline the entire sales cycle from managing leads and opportunities, through to closure. The company also gained the ability to integrate marketing campaigns to drive impact and growth. In addition, Syntel is now able to track the conversion of leads to opportunities and through to contracts and stay ahead of the competition.
Listen before you sell
An additional area where a socially enhanced CRM solution pays dividends is with strategic marketing. By accurately tracking brand sentiment, a company will know how customers feel about its brand on social networks. A sentiment analysis, which analyses thousands of tweets, likes, posts, updates, product ratings, and reviews, can offer quantifiable metrics revealing how a business’s products, promotions, and messages are resonating with the target audiences. By accurately tracking how various audience segments feel and react to a brand, companies can make adjustments to build deeper and more profitable relationships.
Another company that used Microsoft Dynamics CRM to gain the competitive advantage is leading provider of home heating, cooling, and water heater solutions in Canada, Reliance Home Comfort. The company managed to boosts sales and enhance the customer experience after switching to Dynamics CRM.
Previously, an advisor would have to manually transfer information to a contract, with this process being troublesome and prone to errors. After the business started to use Dynamics CRM, customer information was prepopulated onto tablets that run Microsoft Dynamics CRM, enabling the advisor to pick the service packet, with the system populating the rest of the information. Having customer information in the CRM interface enables faster service across the business since customer inquiries can be addressed faster, with an advisor being able to pull up the contract in real time instead of having to go to a specific branch to retrieve the paper-based contract.
A socially enhanced CRM solution in its true sense is a dual player, it’s got to facilitate bringing new information into the organisation and then socialising that information inside the organisation in context, because that’s where the answers are. When there are answers, there’s value in the relationship.
When digital takes on high relevance it’s no longer SPAM
At Microsoft we deliver an intuitive, process-driven user experience that guides salespeople through the tasks and information they need to stay focused on in order to close business. With these capabilities in place, an organisation’s sales team will be empowered to zero in on prospective deals and clients easier, close deals quicker, and sell more.
“Digital experiences, that’s what people want. Its quicker to the consumer, it’s cheaper for the producer. But while it all sounds fantastic where we are focusing our efforts is ensuring that as we help organisations digitise, we don’t do so at the expense of personalisation, relevance and brand messaging, that can easily get lost in the world of digital. This is what creates positive impact and resonates so well with our clients,” concludes Gower.