Media organizations often focus on sales teams when thinking about the benefits of their CRM solution. But there’s much more to a CRM than simply meeting your company’s sales needs. In fact, a CRM solution like Lineup’s Adpoint CRM can have a significant, company-wide impact.
“The true power of CRM reveals itself when previously disconnected business functions and customer interactions come together,” says Nita Watkins, Product Manager (CRM) at Lineup. “That’s when you really begin generating insights that result in real business efficiencies and revenue growth.”
It’s time to ask yourself, Is your media organization making full use of everything your CRM has to offer? In this article, we’ll explore three common benefits of a CRM and how it can impact your non-sales teams when you share your CRM solution across your business.
Increased customer satisfaction
As a CRM user, you know your CRM tool enhances your customers’ experiences, providing an increased level of customer satisfaction. For example, your CRM solution improves customer satisfaction by:
- helping your sales team respond more quickly to customer queries
- generating in-depth reports to help your team customize its interactions with individual customers
- providing access to the data necessary to fine-tune offers that meet your customers’ specific needs
These satisfied customers have an effect not just on sales, but also on other departments within your media company.
The impact a CRM has on your other teams also shows your customers you’re paying attention to them across all of your organization. This improves the overall quality of your customer relationships.
Here are some ways the benefits of your CRM—more satisfied customers and improved customer relationships—can help your non-sales departments:
Finance
When it comes to your collections team, happy customers mean improved cash flow and more timely payments.
Your CRM tool also reduces the likelihood of mistakes stemming from incorrect information, so there’s less chance of customer disputes. And even when disputes arise, they’re easier to manage and resolve because all the relevant data is accessible in one place.
Happier customers mean you’ll also experience less customer churn. This can have a significant impact on your credit control team, as it reduces the overhead needed to make the average sale.
Marketing
With access to more customer data, your marketing team is better able to create the case studies and referrals necessary to help generate new customers.
Having better customer data also makes it easier for your marketing team to target:
- your existing customer base with offers and information they actually want (this improves their overall customer experience)
- customers who are more likely to churn, reducing your churn rate (this also generates opportunities for your sales team to reach out)
AdOps
Less churn means production teams can more easily create copy. With established customer relationships, there’s no need to chase important information when up against a deadline. This reduces deadline pressure for your team.
Product management
Happier customers signify better customer relationships. This, combined with access to more accurate and comprehensive customer data that’s all in one place, makes it easier for your product team to:
- do customer research
- perform A/B testing
- explore new product development
360° view of the customer
The ideal CRM solution can combine data about your customers across a wide range of categories—for example, behavioral data and demographic data. This provides you with a 360° view of your customers that offers benefits across your media organization.
Here are some ways a broader view of your customers—another great CRM benefit—can impact your non-sales teams:
Marketing
A CRM gives you the ability to capture all of your company’s interactions with your customers. Using the comprehensive data collected, your marketing team can build better marketing campaigns to obtain the outcomes they want. Another benefit? Your team can prove the ROI generated by your investment into these campaigns. It can also track the factors directly contributing to increased revenue.
Business intelligence
The additional data generated by your CRM gives your business intelligence team the tools it needs to:
- perform a deeper analysis of trends
- think outside the box when designing campaigns
- generate insights with an increased likelihood of conversion to revenue
Product management
Comprehensive customer data also has significance for your product management team. With access to more customer data, your team can better perform the analysis necessary for:
- supporting product decision making
- designing new products targeting existing or potential demographics
- assembling product bundles to meet specific customer needs
Enhanced cross-team collaboration
Shared access to a single CRM solution across your media organization provides invaluable support for cross-team collaboration. And enhanced collaboration can have a significant impact on your company’s bottom line.
This CRM benefit of enhanced cross-team collaboration can affect your non-sales departments in the following ways:
Finance
With cross-team collaboration, your sales people can become part of an extended collections team. Knowing when future sales deals are at risk because of overdue collections empowers your sales team to take action and employ their established rapport with customers to help your company get paid sooner.
Product management
A CRM makes it easier for cross-team collaboration to take place, and this can have a powerful impact on new product launches. Your product management team can easily share information and set up guidelines in the system to help your sales team push new products. And cross-team collaboration makes it easier to create opportunities to contact and prime the right customers for your launch.
Marketing
Enhancing cross-team collaboration means your marketing team can work with your sales and product teams to generate sales support and marketing collateral in a timely manner. Cross-team collaboration also makes it easier for marketing to demonstrate the ROI from marketing campaigns through consolidated reporting.
Stop leaving money on the table: take your CRM beyond sales
Haven’t thought much about how each team in your media organization—not just your sales team—can use and enjoy the benefits of a CRM solution? It’s time to take a closer look. You’ll be leaving money on the table otherwise. Already an Adpoint CRM customer? Contact us to learn more about how Adpoint CRM benefits teams across your organization.
