How productive is your business?

In most cases, the answer is “not as productive as we’d like”.

However, if you work in marketing, sales, or service, the right CRM can dramatically improve your productivity.

This is because 95% of customer service leaders believe that a CRM platform effectively increases their team’s productivity.

Meanwhile, 60% of businesses say that their productivity has been improved by using a CRM platform.

When business leaders were asked to identify some of the biggest benefits that a CRM brings to their organization, only 29% mentioned the boost to sales compared to. 34% who had witnessed improved productivity when using a CRM.

Not all CRMs are made equally, though.

Especially when it comes to how they can enhance productivity.

This is because CRMs - like SuperOffice - that offer mobile access to their CRM software are the catalyst for a 30% increase in productivity (versus. CRMs that don’t offer mobile access).

This is further compounded by the fact that companies that can take advantage of mobile CRM access regularly hit at least 43% more of their sales quota than those that don’t.

But outside of making your CRM available on mobile, how else can a CRM platform help to improve the productivity of your company?

We’ve put together a guide that showcases 5 ways you can improve productivity using a CRM - starting off with automation. 

1. Automate Workflows & Processes 

One of the key things that the most productive organizations do using their CRM software is automating workflows, tasks, and processes.

In fact, 82% of organizations that use a CRM claim to use it for some level of process automation.

Meanwhile, McKinsey research shows that while 31% of businesses have fully automated at least one business function, a further 66% said they were planning to automate at least one business process.

Automating mundane or routine tasks that your teams face across marketing, sales, and service offers you a number of key productivity advantages, including:

• Freeing up time for your team to work on more strategic initiatives
• Saving money on work that can be done more effectively through automation
• Preventing burnout in your support team by automating low-value ‘busy work’
• Making your marketing, sales, and services teams more scalable

So, if you were to get started today with using your CRM platform as a catalyst for automation - what are some of the workflows, tasks, and processes that you could automate?

Here’s a list of some common automation options you might want to consider across marketing, sales, and service:

2. Let AI Take the Strain 

One of the big ways to make automation even more effective is to combine it with AI.

While automation works to replicate the specific steps a human would take to complete a process, AI works differently.

AI uses software to replicate the ‘thinking’ required to do a specific task within a process - for example, performing sentiment analysis to understand a support ticket.

However, AI isn’t just an interesting technology - it’s already saving organizations time and money - and making them way more productive as a result.

If we take the customer service space as an example, AI is providing those teams with a 30% reduction in costs and an incredible 38% increase in profitability - all while helping to transform the overall experience for customers.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can leverage AI directly within SuperOffice in order to make your teams more productive.

• Sentiment analysis - quickly understand the context of support tickets or customer feedback at scale.
• Ticket triage - combine AI with automation to review tickets, prioritize, and then assign them to the right team member to help streamline your helpdesk.
• Lead prioritization - again taking the best of AI and automation to help your sales teams focus on the most important leads as they land in your CRM.
• Language translation - quickly understand support tickets or leads written in different languages
• Lead categorization - use AI to suggest category details for inbound leads

By allowing AI to take some of the strain from your teams’ workloads and then combining it with automation directly inside your CRM platform, you stand to make a significant impact on productivity across marketing, sales, and service.

3. Easy Segmentation, Lead & Data Management

Depending on which part of the customer journey you’re working in, there are 3 closely related areas where a CRM platform can make you incredibly productive:

• Segmentation for marketers
• Lead management for sales
• Customer data management for service and support

So let’s dive into how handling these processes with your CRM platform can help to make you and your team more productive.

Segmentation

With 63% of customers ‘highly annoyed’ by receiving generic mailshot messaging that isn’t relevant to them, it's no surprise that B2B brands are focusing now more than ever on personalized marketing experiences.

Plus, the fact that 77% of return on investment in email marketing comes from segmented, targeted, and automated campaigns, it’s clear that segmentation is key to marketing success.

The trouble is, without the right tools in place, segmenting your customer list in order to create relevant marketing campaigns for targeted groups becomes a hugely time-consuming task inside an Excel sheet.

SuperOffice’s advanced segmentation tools feature granular levels of control that make it almost effortless to pinpoint the ideal group of customers for your latest promotion in a matter of moments.

Not only do dedicated segmentation options in your CRM platform save you significant time, but the results you’ll get from a more personalized campaign will speak for themselves as a true signal of productivity.

Lead management

Managing your sales leads effectively is one of the most critical activities in your business - so it’s important you get it right.

If you don’t have a CRM to help you manage your leads, it will quickly become a painstaking process.

However, using a CRM to handle your lead management obligations won’t just save you hours, it will also enable you to convert 40% more leads than companies who aren’t using a CRM.

This 40% increase means that when it comes to helping you manage your leads more effectively, a CRM can literally help you convert more leads in less time - the very definition of productivity.

A CRM can help you and your sales teams take care of a number of different lead management tasks, including:

• Lead prioritization
• Lead scoring
• Pipeline analysis
• Lead tracking
• Lead communication

Data management

Managing the data produced by your customers during marketing, sales, and service engagements with your company is no easy task - but it doesn’t have to be impossible.

One of the best ways to manage this data is to centralize it in your CRM platform.

However, companies who choose not to centralize data in a CRM are paying the price for it.

In a recent survey, 23% of respondents cited ‘more manual data entry’ as a key drawback of not using a CRM, while 17% focused on ‘invalid or incorrect data’, and a further 9% shared how difficult it was to track their sales funnel.

One of the biggest issues when collecting customer-related data is the fact that it can easily end up in data silos that make it impossible to use your data effectively to improve your sales and marketing.

By using integrations, your CRM can then act as a centralized hub for all your customer-related data, enabling you to build a 360° view of your customers.

This centralized data view then gives your marketing, sales, and service teams easy access to customer insights without running complex reports or stitching together multiple data sources.

Meanwhile, the benefit for your customers is an enhanced experience with your brand - leading to improved customer satisfaction levels.

The resulting increases in retention and expansion revenue are the output that will make your company more productive using a CRM.

4. Quickly Analyze & Forecast Performance

Analyzing results and looking ahead to future sales performance, despite being mission-critical, can be some of the most time-consuming tasks around.

Luckily, you can make use of in-built CRM tools to do the heavy lifting for you in 2 key types of analysis:

• Performance analysis
• Sales forecasting

Read on to discover exactly how you can dramatically streamline these processes and become more productive using your CRM software.

Performance Analysis

Once you’ve managed your data, the next step you’re going to want to take is to look at the results your actions have produced and what that means for productivity.

With 79% of businesses using a CRM to track their sales data - there are potentially a lot of results to review.

Before you get started with looking at your own company’s performance - one of the biggest outcomes you can expect from using a CRM system is a 15% uplift in productivity per employee.

On top of this, 50% of business owners believe a CRM increases productivity, with 65% of companies exceeding their sales quotas.

Combine this with the fact that using a CRM offers a 40% labor cost reduction and a 74% increase in customer relationships - and it’s clear that a CRM will make your team incredibly productive.

The easiest way to analyze performance is to use built-in reporting tools within your CRM system.

Sales Forecasting

Forecasting is a significant pain point within every business.

Get it right, and it’s an accurate barometer of revenue growth and resource needs that can help with strategic planning.

In fact, companies who use CRM software to manage their sales forecasting processes see, on average, a 42% improvement in sales forecasting accuracy.

But get it wrong, and you’re left with difficult decisions to make, and tough questions to answer - either with too many team members in place for the work available or not enough resources to complete the work promised to customers.

Considering it’s such an important driving force behind the success of a business, you’ll be surprised to learn that 52% of companies are yet to implement forecasting automation - technology that will make their sales forecasts more accurate than ever and far quicker to produce.

SuperOffice has inbuilt data analytics tools to help make sales forecasting quick and easy

Using a centralized CRM platform - like SuperOffice - can help you to automate time-consuming tasks like opportunity scoring and sales forecasting - to dramatically improve the accuracy of your results and the productivity of your team.

5. Supercharge Your Customer Communication

When customer communication is done well, you’ll see an increase in customer satisfaction scores, sales, retention, and even referrals.

But, if you let your standards slip, it can be hugely detrimental to the success of your business.

With 47% of users reporting that CRM technology has a massive impact on their customer satisfaction scores, it’s clear that a CRM platform can help you to become more productive through excellent customer communication.

Not only will it help to improve the way you speak with customers, but adopting a CRM platform in your organization will also lead to a 57% increase in the quality of communication between your sales reps and executives - contributing to overall productivity as a result.

But how can a CRM platform help you to supercharge your customer communication? We’ve put together a table to give you some inspiration:

If you want to make your marketing communication more productive, then a CRM platform can offer you the opportunity to set up email sequences for anything from lead nurturing to newsletter signups.

You’ll also get total freedom as a marketer to introduce personalized campaigns, marketing automation, AI content suggestions, and even live chat into your marketing communications mix - enabling you to do more than ever before.

Meanwhile, a CRM has always been an invaluable tool for salespeople, but advances in technology mean that your CRM can also power cold outbound email, personalized content, automated follow-ups and much more, saving your sales team considerable amounts of time and energy.

Finally, leading CRM technology - like SuperOffice - doesn’t just help make sales and marketing more productive - it opens up a world of possibilities for customer service too.

Your customer service reps can now focus on spending time helping their customers and allow CRM technology to do a lot of the ‘busy work’ thanks to self-serve support and ticket automation options.

Conclusion

Now more than ever, B2B software is under the spotlight in terms of both overall productivity and revenue per employee - particularly across marketing, sales, and service.

Luckily, there is a solution out there that is designed to make your entire customer-facing team more productive, whilst offering a ‘best in class’ experience for your customers.

That solution is CRM software.

95% of customer service leaders believe that CRM software is an effective way to increase productivity.

Meanwhile, 60% of businesses believe that a CRM system has made them more productive.

On top of this, 34% of businesses cite productivity as a key benefit of a CRM, compared to 29% who believe that boosting sales is the biggest benefit.

We’ve covered 5 ways you can improve productivity using a CRM, looking at automated workflows, AI, segmentation, lead management, and data management, as well as streamlining analysis and forecasting and supercharging customer communication.

So, if your team is in need of a productivity boost, then now is the time to take action and consider how a unified CRM and service platform - like SuperOffice - can improve your productivity.

Improve Your Productivity with SuperOffice

SuperOffice is an award-winning CRM and customer service platform that gives you all the tools you need to not only close more new business deals and reduce churn rates for existing customers - but we’ve designed everything to put productivity at the heart of the product, with features including:

• Smart data integration options to quickly give you a 360° view of your customers
• Granular data filters for rapid segmentation and lead management
• Enhanced communication options to help reduce response times
• Automated messaging and workflows to instantly reduce ‘busy work’ for your team
• Robust data analysis functionality to understand your sales data at a glance

Using SuperOffice as a unified CRM and Service platform helps you to manage your entire customer journey centrally - making it easier for your team to perform at their best across marketing, sales, and service.