Just a few months ago, we were booking flights, hotels, and meetings with our customers and prospects. Most people had held their appointments, sales kickoff meetings, and marketing teams were busy executing their campaigns and planning for events and conferences. And today, COVID-19 has had an unexpected impact on our way of life and how business is (or will be) done.

We would like to talk about how CRM and other sales and marketing intelligence tools have brought about a positive effect on companies and their customers. Let’s start by breaking down the acronym “CRM” and talk about how COVID-10 has affected “Customers”, “Relationships”, and “Management” in general.

CUSTOMERS

CRM helps customers by providing the critical infrastructure that enables collaboration and organizes workflows to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. At a time when people are working remotely, these capabilities are needed now more than ever before. Collaboration and Sales Intelligence tools that are integrated with CRM enable centralizing operations in a way that makes people more productive and efficient.

When your teams are working remotely, CRM can provide access to critical information needed to resolve customer issues. A lot of the popular CRM platforms now provide internal and external bots that can handle a high volume of requests, learn and get better over time, and free up your overworked staff to focus on complicated requests that need human intervention.

RELATIONSHIPS

The pandemic has taught us a lot when it comes to relationships. Many of our clients have been using CRM solutions for many years. However, they have now started realizing that the accuracy and depth of their contact database is highly stale and unreliable. A lot of the contacts are simply missing from the CRM systems. This makes it difficult to gauge relationships.

Companies are now increasingly focusing on digital and virtual events, whose effectiveness is diminished when the accuracy of their contact database is only 50 percent. Marketing departments are now shifting funds allocated for face-to-face events and travel to acquiring accurate contact database using sales intelligence tools that will automate and improve CRM data.

MANAGEMENT

Many employees are working on personal devices without the same resources they used to have access to in the office. CRM systems can be accessed from any location and any device on-the-go giving managers a reliable facility in a remote work scenario. Using contact databases and sales intelligence tools, executives are able to get accurate contact data and analytics on dashboards in real-time.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the way we engage and work with each other is evolving. CRM platforms have now become mission-critical and are making a difference in the ways we discover and delight our customers.

Here are a few ways CRM and sales intelligence platforms can help you win through this difficult period.

Predict Customer Behavior

Gain categorized intelligence on technology adoption behavior of your target accounts and get useful insights that indicate future technology requirements. Get actionable contact database and company database on direct or indirect competitors, partners/alliances, technology landscape of named accounts, and more.  Gather intelligence about what existing customers think about your products and services and what they are likely to buy next. Target and sell to prospects who have a strong intent to buy your product

Make The Most of Existing Demand and Opportunities

While global travel and events are at an all-time low in the face of the current pandemic, there still may exist some demand in certain geographic markets. Your CRM and other sales prospecting tools can give you an accurate B2B contact database that can help you tap into existing demand. Focus on customers you know and make the most of their unique characteristics to uncover new audiences. For instance, create segments of your best or longest standing customers and find lookalike audiences to market to. Source company data and contact data using custom search functionality. Get contact-level insights and refresh your data in real-time to boost your lead generation. Plan effective campaigns and outreach strategies that eventually lead to bigger and better conversions.

Integrate CRM with Sales Intelligence Tools

A CRM is only as good as the data it offers. To boost the efficiency of your CRM, make sure you integrate it with cool contact discovery and data cleansing tools. Sources new companies and contacts using custom search functionality. Focus on your best-fit prospects for ultimate lead generation success. Search by job function, location, industry, tech stack, industry, size, and more. Append all the details of a customer contact database that was earlier missing. Such tools can automatically match and append all the missing details in real-time.

SMARTe Discover

SMARTe Discover empowers sales development, sales operations, account management, marketing teams as well as demand generation and ABM teams to prospect more diligently and identify which leads within Salesforce should they focus on. They can search by levels, functions, titles, and locations from a massive contact database of over 115 million to find the right decision-makers within the target accounts. Contact Data and Company data are available within Salesforce via panels on lead, contact, account pages with the option to add or update records with just a single click. You can fetch Direct Dials or Mobile numbers of your targeted contacts with the highest data coverage of about 10.8 Million companies across 70 countries, refreshed within 90 days.

SMARTe Enrich

SMARTe Enrich provides CRM data health analysis and real-time enrichment of Salesforce data. It enriches company and contact data within CRM in real-time with more than 60 relevant attributes. SMARTe Enrich helps sales and marketing operations better manage their CRM data and prospect more diligently with enriched contacts and accounts. It is powered by a database of more than 115 million contacts with accurate email addresses and direct-dial and mobile phone numbers. SMARTe Enrich’s Always-On-CRM functionality provides refreshed data in real-time without manual intervention and thereby increases CRM data efficiency.

If you found this post useful, click here to learn how to increase CRM adoption among SDRs.

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