Customer Relationship Management Systems

In today's world, Customer Relationship Management systems are simultaneously easier and more difficult than ever before. Instead of intensive persuasion of a few contacts on your phone list, today CRM systems are offered that provide thousands of potential buyers with information about your product & services. But here's the problem: if it's so easy to feed information to thousands of buyers, conversely, they are fed information about a thousand different products and services. We scan our mail and emails in seconds and decide what is relevant to us and what is not. It's more important than ever to know your audience intimately and identify who will and won't pay attention to your products and services.

A key aspect that has grown in importance over the last few years is our digital footprints. Our use of the internet and all related applications has enabled technology to gather a holistic knowledge of our digital activities. This knowledge is used to provide us end users with a tailored experience designed to optimize our usage. For example, you follow some mountaineering groups on your social media profiles and post photos of your last hiking vacation - you're probably more interested in the innovative camping gear than the guy whose profiles revolve around cookbooks.

But how do businesses today find suitable customers whose interests match your product? What difficulties do you face in modern interactions with your customers? In this article, we'll look at how you can overcome these challenges and why it's better to target customers rather than reach the masses.

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Impact of technology on customer relationships

Relationships have always been the key to successful sales. In the past, a salesperson's focus was on knowing the customer and building authentic 1:1 relationships. The salesperson understood the buyer's unique needs and focused on maintaining a high level of engagement with the customer throughout the process.
With the introduction of technology, sales organizations experienced significant productivity gains. However, in the pursuit of productivity, salespeople became increasingly distant from customers. Over time, salespeople have moved away from building relationships in favor of executing transactions and achieving as many sales closures as possible - but at a time when customers have more and more choice. Buyers, constantly connected to mobile devices and social media, are better informed and have more power and influence over their decisions. It's no wonder customers today are more demanding, have higher expectations, and are less satisfied with the sales experience.

Sales automation has accelerated sales and is making salespeople more efficient than ever before. But does it make them more effective?

Big Data - Too many sources of information

At the root of the problem are the disparate CRM systems that salespeople must navigate. To get the insights they need to build strong relationships, salespeople might analyze a variety of customer relationship management systems, email systems, or social networks. Here comes the common buzzword: Big Data. This refers to the huge mass of unstructured data created by the use of digital CRM systems. It is almost impossible to derive meaningful and actionable insights from this mass of data without a purpose-built program.

For companies that are able to extract structured insights from the mass of data, this offers a significant competitive advantage and can contribute significantly to building and maintaining your customer base.

The challenge of interaction

The relationship between buyers and sellers is getting more complicated by the day. Any potential partnership requires finding the right buyer contact, fully understanding their business, tracking progress through the buying cycle, and engaging them with the right content - when and how they want it. Most sales professionals have already internalized this to meet increasingly divergent buyer demands, and they know that relationship selling is a complex discipline.

Buyers can sense this complexity. Although 36 percent of salespeople believe they provide an excellent customer experience during the sales process, only 23 percent of buyers believe this is actually the case. With increasingly powerful and widely available technology, the way customers make buying decisions is also changing. Sales teams urgently need to deploy the right tools to keep up. Potential buyers have more information at their fingertips than ever before, and they're taking full advantage of it: research shows that most buyers are already 57 percent of the way through the buying cycle before they even contact a vendor.

When the time is right, customers still want to get the personal attention
of a sales representative. More than two-thirds of all buyers say that interacting with a sales representative is important to them. From this we can infer that buyers only want to interact with salespeople when it makes sense for them to do so. The increase in complexity means that buyers are also using technology that is both increasingly simple and complex networked. As a result, they have high expectations for every buying experience. Accordingly, a seller must overcome two challenges: He must provide useful interactions and seamless transactions.