At a glance
By introducing a clear strategy in the area of customer relationship management , the focus shifts to customer orientation throughout the entire company.
A CRM strategy is to be understood as part of the overall corporate strategy and serves as the basis for the introduction of a CRM system.
The CRM strategy must fit your company and its requirements and goals.
It is essential for the successful implementation of the strategy to convince all employees concerned and to create their willingness to cooperate across departments.
A smart CRM strategy helps to focus not only on efficient new customer acquisition but also on the particularly profitable existing customers.
CRM Strategy: Introduction
Good customer relationships are more important today than ever before. It is essential to plan interactions with customers comprehensively and over the long term, not only because of the fierce competition in the markets, but also due to the ever-increasing demands and expectations of customers, in order to achieve close customer loyalty and the highest possible level of customer satisfaction.
A successful Customer Relationship Management (CRM for short) helps you to keep track of all contacts and measures and to manage them in a targeted manner throughout the entire customer journey.
It is of central importance that all employees from marketing, sales and service pull together and consciously integrate CRM as a strategy and mindset. There are now a large number of intelligent CRM systems.
But the mere introduction is not enough: you need a well-planned Strategy that suits your company and its needs so that you can benefit from the long-term success of an efficient CRM system.
What is a CRM strategy?
A CRM strategy should always be seen as a central part of the overall business strategy, helping to achieve key business objectives such as growth or quality. It serves as a roadmap for organising all interactions with existing or new customers, and is the foundation of your customer relationship management.
Customer centricity becomes a cross-functional focus as the CRM strategy is applied in many different parts of your organisation.
This makes it all the more important to plan the strategy well from the outset and tailor it to the specific needs of your business. This is the only way to ensure that the actual implementation is as efficient as possible.
By precisely defining the objectives and planned processes, the CRM strategy creates a theoretical basis for the implementation of a CRM system, which is then used by the relevant departments, such as marketing, sales and service, to put it into practice.
How to develop a CRM strategy in 3 steps
In order to benefit from concrete market advantages and a significant increase in sales with your customer relationship management, it is important to choose the right strategy for your company.
You use this to define the specific measures and solutions with which you want to collect customer data and subsequently structure and further utilize the contacts. Maintaining your existing customer contacts is just as important as acquiring new ones - and even cheaper.
In order to decide on the right strategy, it is important to clarify all the W questions with regard to customer data:
When, where and why is customer data collected?
How do you want to use the data?
What is necessary for this?
The following three steps will help you to find and successfully implement the optimal CRM strategy for your company:
1. Determine goals and benefits.
In order to decide which information is collected and how it is processed, you should first consider what exactly you want to achieve with the optimized customer relationships. Which data is generated for which purpose? Which channels are available for interaction?
It can also be helpful to obtain direct customer feedback: Where can marketing or sales serve the needs even better? What requirements should the service fulfill?
It is also important that the CRM strategy fits your company, the company philosophy and your offer.
2. Define the measures.
Based on the goals set, the next step is to coordinate the measures to achieve them. To do this, you should determine the customer touchpoints and check their benefits, among other things, in order to then determine which data should be collected via which channels in the further planning of your CRM strategy.
At this point, you can obtain specialized advice to support and Consulting to make the strategy as professional as possible.
For more in-depth insights, it can be helpful to analyze the purchasing behavior of existing customers. To do this, they need a customer account and must agree to the collection of data for improved service.
Select the specific measures and processes so that they suit the target group and achieve the greatest possible effect.
3. Encourage cooperation.
As soon as the measures for the CRM strategy have been determined, the optimum conditions for the introduction should be created in the relevant departments - usually marketing, sales and customer service.
Good and efficient cooperation, mutual trust and transparency and, above all, successful communication are essential for this. Promote a structural change in your company that focuses on successful cooperation between the various departments so that it is supported by all employees.
All affected employees should already be behind the introduction of the strategy in the planning phase and pull together to successfully implement it in day-to-day work.
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Why is a CRM strategy so important?
In the meantime, most entrepreneurs have realized how important customer orientation is nowadays. If you want to survive in the market, you have to respond to the ever-growing needs of your customers and be prepared to invest in a well-structured CRM system.
The customers of your products and services have long been accustomed to obtaining comprehensive information in advance, making use of comparisons or ratings, and receiving personalized service. Accordingly, the successful management of customer relationships cannot receive enough attention in order to retain even the most demanding customers.
Be aware of the great importance of customer relationship management and understand the CRM strategy as part of your corporate philosophy. Once the right conditions have been created, you can benefit from the many advantages and strengthen your company in the long term.
What should you keep in mind during implementation?
Because customer relationship management can only develop its full potential with a clear strategy behind it, there are a few factors to consider when implementing it.
This requires not only that the basic conditions are in place in your company, but also that employees are willing to cooperate, which can often be a challenge.
For this reason, the planned strategy should always be checked for feasibility and adapted to changes if necessary.
You should also pay attention to this when implementing your CRM strategy:
The CRM strategy you choose must suit your company and its requirements and objectives.
It is important that your employees pull together when introducing a new CRM strategy and are willing to fully integrate it into their everyday work.
As a long-term concept, the CRM strategy must also guarantee a certain degree of flexibility, despite the fact that it can be planned.
The technical requirements and IT infrastructure must be suitable for the introduction of a CRM system.
Find a CRM system that best suits your company and your offering and focus on the most promising tools. Would you like to compare market leaders? Here you have the overview .
Train your employees sufficiently to make the integration of CRM software as easy as possible for them.
Concentrate on concrete measures and processes within the scope of your possibilities and manpower instead of trying to exhaust all options.
Set yourself clear goals that can also be checked after implementation.
Know your target group and adapt the measures to them as precisely as possible.
The introduction and implementation of a CRM strategy should always be considered holistically and not just for a specific measure or an individual department, for example.
