Integrating Data Into Your CRM: What Are The Benefits For Your Business?

Do you have information about your customers, but you are not sure of its quality or freshness? Do you feel like you are running out of time and resources, but at the same time, you are being asked to create more and more value?

We explain why it might be time to switch to dynamic data integration on your customers.

Consolidate your Customer Repository

The management of your activity relies more and more on the creation of dashboards resulting from the direct exploitation or enriched with data coming from your exchanges with your customers. Hence the importance of having a frame of reference that is faithful to reality.

The digitization of exchanges by integrating flow data into business software or directly into your ERP makes it possible in theory to standardize this data around an internal identifier and the company’s SIREN number, then integrating:

• The internal information from your direct interaction with your customer’s emails, addresses, purchase orders, invoicing, contracts, notes.
• The information collected indirectly: web browsing, data provided by the partners, satisfaction surveys.

The last type of information is essential because it allows:

• To consolidate your database with a repository valid throughout the existence of the company
• To ensure the quality of the information available.

For example, it is indeed essential to ensure that you have the right address at all stages of your customer’s life cycle or any information allowing you to adapt the commercial approach to the customer. company such as for example the group to which a company belongs, a merger/takeover or a depreciation or improvement of its solvency.

Federate your Services around Customer Data

Your data is not uniform and is dispersed in different tools (business software, CRM, data management platform, customer service, etc.)? It is likely that this will generate some frustration within your departments.

Also Read: Sales Productivity Hacks: Tips And Tricks To Boost Your Sales Reps’ Performance

Having a customer data repository helps reduce this dissatisfaction

By optimizing actions

• By eliminating (or reducing) the time spent collecting information
• By avoiding duplicating, deleting, or moving data
• By promoting data standardization
• By facilitating the automation of procedures without added value and by reducing manual tasks: creation of opportunities, creation of purchase orders, invoicing, follow-up emails

By benefiting from a uniform vision of the client and the prospect

• By identifying parent companies and subsidiaries
• By making it possible to consolidate your territory management: segment portfolios according to discriminating criteria (geographic or turnover), manage the sales force, etc.

By allowing all departments to collaborate

• By aligning all departments with data: information is disseminated to all employees, inter-department communication is facilitated
• By facilitating the customization of actions according to the needs of each service without having to extract data

By creating value around the data

• By allowing the synchronization of all the tools around the data
• By making possible a 360-degree customer relationship analysis: from pre-sales to the end of the business relationship
• By facilitating sales and marketing actions: automation, optimization of the conversion funnel, data analysis, etc.
• Enriching your database with predictive information allowing you to anticipate solvency or compliance risks
• By having access to information that we are aware of having in our CRM but which remains inaccessible or difficult to extract

Streamline your Customer Risk Management

If the various departments of a company are used to working together, the fact remains that they sometimes have objectives that may conflict with each other.

The most convincing example in this area is the special relationship forging the sales force, whose objective is, as its name suggests, to achieve turnover, and the credit department, which must work to reduce the risk of non-payment.

The sustainability of the company is largely based on the efficiency of its sales teams because before thinking of improving the collection of your unpaid invoices, it is a question of conquering new markets.

Control of customer credit is combined with long-term optimization of the sales cycle by playing on levers as diverse as:

• Analyzing the solvency of prospects: anticipating risks to avoid unpaid debts
• Management of sales conditions and payment terms: payment terms, payment terms, and financial guarantees
• Optimal processing of invoicing and collection: account opening, invoices, reminders, collection

This implies that he must have a good relationship with his sales force. However, the customer’s life cycle depends on their necessary collaboration.

However, it often happens that the sales force does not understand the decisions made by the credit department, which is understandable because they generally do not have the same information as the credit manager.

Also Read: CRM And Customer Relations At The Heart Of Industrial Performance