The Birth Of Your Business Goals In Developing A CRM Strategy

Businesses need to create a solid Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy if they want their customer interactions and operations to be more efficient, ensuring growth in long run. Yet — before you go into the nitty-gritty on how to implement CRM, its important to state what business goals you want to achieve.

These goals influence everything in your CRM strategy. Thus, in this post I am going to explain why defining business goals is the first stage of CRM strategy development and how well you need to define it.

Why Define Business Goals?

There are a number of benefits to defining your business goals before implementing your CRM strategy;

Clarity and Focus: Having clear goals gives direction to your CRM efforts. They help you know what you want to get out of your resources and enable your limited resources focus effectively on where they are absolutely needed.
Measurable Goals: Defining discrete, measurable goals allows you to measure results and see how well your CRM efforts are actually working. With accountability, you get better.
Alignment Across Teams: If goals are clearly defined, everyone from sales to marketing to customer support and IT will understand the importance of their contributions. This kind of unity boosts teamwork and gets the most out of your CRM strategy.

You can allocate your resources correctly, thoughtfully use time and so make sure the CRM investment provides a good return on investment.

How to Set Up Your Business Goals

There is a series of steps to follow when it comes to defining the business goals for your CRM strategy. A systematic approach to make sure you are creating strong SMART goals:

1. Conduct a Business Analysis

Analyze your current business workflows, before goal setting SWOT Analysis based on customer/CRM interactions StrengthsWeaknesses •Identify customer touchpoint• Qualify high-value customers OpportunitiesThreats

What are your strengths? Do they have proven processes or some technical tools that can improve the satisfaction of your customer?

What problems do you have? Often times gaps in customer data or lack of communication between teams leads to disjointed experiences.

Trends: What trends can you tap into? Could you add new, more lucrative customers or services?

3) Threats: What opportunities could your business face? How well do competitors adopt sophisticated CRM practices

This observation gives you important data that must be considered when goal setting.

2. Finding Your Key Performance Indicators

Understand your business landscapeWhen you know every nook and corner of your enterprise, define the critical key performance indicators (KPIs) which are in sync with your goals. They are quantifiable indicators which indicate how effectively your company is achieving its key business objectives.

We regularly track these KPIs when it comes to CRM strategies.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Measured how satisfied are customers in youre products or services.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): Gauge customer loyalty and the number of people who would recommend your business to others.

We would love to hear your thoughts on these kinds of business metrics: Customer Retention Rate – % of customers that continue to do business with you over a given period

Sales Conversion Rate: The demo to a sale ratio percentage. 17

By defining KPIs, it gives you a basis of measurement for success.

3. Set SMART Goals

Once you have your KPIs, work towards setting SMART goals—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

Measurable: Define exactly what you want to accomplish. E.g. “Improve support response times to increase customer satisfaction”
Measurable: You need to be able to measure results. Example “Improve CSAT from 75% to 85%”
Realistic: Establish goals that can realistically be accomplished based upon available resources and capabilities. Reflect on past performance and industry standards
Related: Make Sure Goals Are in Line with the Larger Organization Prospective investors will need to align with your bigger picture.

Time: Clearly assign a date to the goals as a measure of hound long (or longer) until you have to follow it religiously. Eg: “One of our goals is to see a 10% lift in sales conversion rates by the end of Q4”

4. Engage Stakeholders

Make it a team activity by incorporating all major shareholders in setting the objectives so that they are band together coordinated. Which may include Sales team leaders, Marketing Department team leaders, Customer Support Team leaders and IT department supports etc. Input from all angles helps with reasonable and complete goal setting.

Furthermore, engagement produces a sense of ownership among team members increasing motivation to achieve the desired goals.

5. Create an Action Plan

After you have a good idea of what your goals are going to be set out an action plan on how you will go about accomplishing those goals. This plan should include:

Activity Details: Outline what activities you will do to accomplish each goal. One could be starting a loyalty program if you wish to improve customer retention.
ReElapsedTime: Decide on the resources required for each initiative including costs gear people
Timeline: develop a deployment timeline with broad time horizons for each milestone and deadlines.
Expectations: Assign expectations to team members or departments, thus creating accountability.

6. Monitor and Adjust

Goals are just the beginning Always keep an eye on your KPIs that you set up before to track how you do. Monitor your data and analyse this on a regular basis to determine if you are leading to earn the outcome.

If faced with hurdles or if things change logistically in the market, anticipate modifying goals or hurtle strategy. Flexibility to remain current and responsive in a changeable business environment.

Conclusion

Developing a successful CRM strategy starts with defining your business goals. Proper research should be made, KPIs should be identified, SMART goals set, stakeholders engaged an action plan created and progress monitored so that you can ensure your CRM initiatives are aligned with what the business needs. This foundational work not only strengthens your customer relationships, but also sets your business up for continued success in a competitive industry.