For so long, customer relationship management (CRM) systems functioned as the digital Rolodex, doing little more than just managing contacts. But CRM solutions have evolved far beyond that in recent years to more strategic assets that businesses can use to achieve their goals, such as building customer loyalty. 

But building customer loyalty doesn’t just happen because your customers decide they like you. Building loyalty starts with building an effective CRM strategy.

What Is A CRM Strategy?

A CRM strategy is a company-wide plan that businesses use to manage interactions with current and potential customers in order to improve business relationships, enhance customer service, and ultimately increase sales through the use of specific actions and technology. A good CRM strategy will use the CRM software and practices in the plan for managing interactions.

As technology advances, 81% of customers expect faster service. Which means that to remain successful, businesses need to create CRM strategies that focus on organizing, automation, and synchronizing sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support. A CRM strategy should aim to understand customer needs and behaviors, then tailor interactions to build stronger relationships. 

In short, a CRM strategy isn’t just about using the CRM system (although that’s certainly part of it). It’s about creating a customer-centric culture that drives growth. 

When building a CRM strategy, keep these key objectives in mind. Your CRM strategy should:

• Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Understand your customers’ needs and deliver personalized experiences.
• Boost sales and revenue. This can be achieved through better lead management, sales automation, and upsell / cross-sell opportunities.
• Improve marketing efficiency. Use CRM data to segment audiences and personalize marketing campaigns.
• Enhance customer support. Better data means faster response times and better case management.
• Data-driven decision making. CRM analytics and reporting can guide business strategies. 

The most effective CRM strategies include touchpoints that target customers in unique ways and lead potential prospects down the sales pipeline. This could include online purchases, email sign-ups, social media platforms, and customer service chat portals. Each of these touchpoints has the opportunity to lead customers through the business’ website and ultimately direct them to making a purchase. These touchpoints combined with CRM data can help organizations analyze customer behavior, then create any necessary additional touchpoints to better serve buyer needs. 

Six Steps to Building Your CRM Strategy

For those of you building a CRM strategy from the ground up, you won’t have data from past funnels to look at. That’s okay—you can still lean on market research and critical thinking to help build your customer base. 

STEP ONE: Define business goals and KPIs
Clear business goals make it easier to build a CRM strategy. Without them, the strategy will be shooting in the dark and struggle to point customers in the right direction. 

Say one business goal is to double sales in the next quarter. The CRM strategy should help you answer questions such as: What will doubling sales require? What do we need to do to increase the customer base? What do we need to do to create return customers?

STEP TWO: Outline the customer journey and define the target customer
You can’t ensure customer satisfaction without understanding who your target market—or buyer persona—is. Uncovering the different buyer personas you want to target will help customize the sales funnel. This is where market research will come in, especially for orgs just starting out on this journey who don’t have historical data to pull from. Market research can tell you the type of customers who have purchased your products or products like yours in the past. Things like age, location, level of technology use, even socioeconomic status can help you understand the framework of what makes your ideal customer(s).

STEP THREE: Map sales pipeline and plan the customer experience
Now that the target market is identified, it’s easier to create the initial touchpoints. Aligning the sales pipeline with the CRM strategy will also help you figure out where things might go sideways in the process. For instance, if you have a high number of website visitors but also a high bounce rate, you’re getting people to your website, but they’re leaving without buying anything. This tells you there’s a disconnect between initial contact and closing the deal. CRM data can improve the sales funnel by considering a customer’s specific needs and interests to help you build a 360-degree customer experience. 

STEP FOUR: Organize the internal process
You can’t run a CRM strategy if your team doesn’t understand how to manage the CRM software. The benefits of a successful CRM system include a comprehensive view of the customer base, cross-functional collaboration, consolidated data across various departments, and real-time data that improves productivity. But it all starts with ensuring adequate employee education on the CRM, training on how to keep data up-to-date and error-free, and the ability to integrate disparate data. 

Your internal process will also benefit from a clear definition of CRM components. What is a contact versus a lead? What makes someone a prospect versus an opportunity? Depending on your business and CRM of choice, you may also choose to use more specific contact categories, such as nurtured leads or marketing- and sales-qualified leads (MQLs and SQLs). 

STEP FIVE: Save time and money with automation
There’s no rule that says you can’t make things easier for your team. In fact, businesses are constantly on the lookout for ways to streamline workflows and improve processes. Automation is one way to achieve this. Consider automating repetitive administrative tasks—like setting up lead capture forms to automatically sync with your pipeline, or making it easy to drop contact information from emails straight into your CRM. 

STEP SIX: Track CRM performance and engage stakeholders
How do you know if you’re meeting your CRM strategy goals without looking at team and individual performance? Most CRMs come with built-in reporting and analytics dashboards with the metrics you need to track performance and ensure your CRM strategy continues to align with overall business strategy and needs. Involving your key stakeholders in this review can help refine the approach. 

Streamlining the Process with Integrated Data

Multiple factors will play into the successful implementation of your CRM strategy, including buy-in from leadership and stakeholders, having the right CRM software, and training your team. But another way to maximize the effectiveness of your CRM strategy is to integrate your CRM with other systems. Having solutions that “talk” to each other can only streamline the process further. 

Take keeping contact records up to date. In the rush of day-to-day activities, it can feel like an unnecessary interruption to have to stop what you’re doing when responding to a customer or lead via email to click over to your NetSuite CRM and create, edit, or delete a contact record to ensure information is up to date. But what’s worse, taking the time to update? Or circling back around a few weeks later only to find out the contact information you have in the CRM is out of date and either wasting time to hunt it down in email, or worse: losing the opportunity altogether? 

At CloudExtend, we believe in better solutions. Like integrating your Outlook or Gmail inbox with NetSuite CRM so you can create, edit, or delete a contact record right in your inbox without ever clicking out to NetSuite. 

And that’s not all we can do with your integrated NetSuite CRM. But don’t take our word for it. Check out this incredible story of how ExtendSync email integration has revolutionized processes and outcomes for Trinity Displays. 

Ready to try NetSuite CRM and email integration for yourself? See how it works with a FREE 14-day no obligation trial.