Do you know the secret to success in today’s highly competitive digital age? Relationships.

That’s right.

There has never been a time when establishing a long-term connection with clients has been so important. The good news is, using a CRM can help make this goal much more achievable. By measuring the right metrics and how those aspects affect the customer lifecycle, you’ll be able to more accurately evaluate your efforts and optimize their effectiveness. Here’s what to focus on.

Marketing

The primary goal of your marketing team is to raise awareness of your product or service. Your marketing efforts mark the beginning of the buyer journey and will hopefully set the stage for a long-term client relationship. As such, using your CRM to track the effectiveness of your campaigns throughout the various stages of the marketing funnel can help improve your team’s efforts.

The most basic and obvious metric to measure is ROI. Regardless of the type of campaign, a CRM can help by tracking such things as leads generated, conversion rates, and resulting sales. These can then be compared to the cost of those campaigns to determine their return.

Keep in mind, also, that marketing doesn’t just end when a customer makes a sale. Down the road, your marketing team is also responsible for keeping existing clientele engaged. Using a CRM can help by enabling you to track and measure customer retention rates so you can identify which areas of your marketing strategy might be missing the mark.

Lastly, a CRM can help you measure and track the lifetime value of your customers. By understanding this, you can better determine when, where, and how to offer deals and discounts to existing customers. Knowing when to make a deal can mean the difference between a lifelong customer and revenue lost.

Sales

Your sales team plays a pivotal role in customer relationships. There are a number of important sales-related metrics that you can measure using your CRM that will enable you to improve on your sales efforts.

The first thing to track is the length of your sales cycle. In other words, how long does it take to go from identifying a lead to converting that lead and closing the deal? Breaking this process down will make it easier for your sales team to identify areas of improvement. From a management perspective, tracking sales closing rates can help evaluate staff as well as the channels and strategies you’re currently using.

Lastly, a CRM can help you track critical sales activities, such as inbound passive inquiries and outbound sales calls. For instance, you may discover that sales are lacking because your team is focusing more on the number of calls made rather than optimizing the time spent on each of those calls. Identifying and analyzing these trends can help you pinpoint effective and ineffective policies and procedures.

Operations

Finally, once you’ve established a relationship with your customers, you’ll need to track how effectively your team is managing projects and workflows. In order to maintain lifelong relationships with your clientele, you must continuously deliver on your promises and provide a consistently positive experience along the way. If you are failing to do so, your CRM should make it abundantly clear.

For instance, if your customer has an issue, how well is your team at handling those situations? Your customer service and/or help desk representatives have the ability to transform even the most mediocre product or service into something extraordinary. Conversely, they also have the ability to undo all of the hard work your marketing and sales teams put into converting customers in the first place.

The way your employees handle service and support can make or break the future success of your business. A CRM can help you identify and address problem areas so that you can more effectively achieve high customer retention rates.

In today’s digital world, the most valuable asset your business can have is relationships. Your CRM can become your ace in the hole, helping you to optimize your sales and marketing processes and improve internal operations to retain more customers and solidify your bottom line.