B2B CRM Strategy — Top 5 Benefits Of Using A CRM For B2B Sales

Considering the CRM industry is surrounded by several myths, there is no wonder that people are often bombarded with many questions about a CRM system. Let me highlight one of the most searched queries. You can be a part of a B2B or B2C company, however, the most common question that you come across while choosing a CRM is, “Is CRM different for B2B and B2C companies?” When you analyze like from a broader perspective, the answer is “Not really!”. As you began to break down and narrow down your analysis, you will realize that “Yes, there is a difference!”.

In general, B2B services refers to a business that sells its products or services to another business. For instance, hospitals require management equipment that is brought from vendors who do business by selling this equipment. Here, a hospital is a business purchasing products from another business. This is a typical example of B2B services. B2C (Business-To-Customer), on the other hand, is a business selling its products or services to individuals. A classic example is individuals buying ice-creams from an Ice-cream parlor. The individuals are the customers who are buying the ice cream.

Irrespective of running a B2B and B2C business, customers are the main pillar. Hence, it is crucial for businesses to leverage an effective Customer Relationship Management strategy that captures more leads, improves the conversion rate, and increases the customer retention rate. But, one should look into the technicalities before purchasing a CRM for their business as the requirements for B2B are different from B2C services. Wondering what are the technicalities? Check out the common characteristic difference between B2B and B2C services to obtain a wider perspective on the choice of your CRM.

What is a B2B CRM?

A B2B CRM Software is a cloud platform that manages your customer relationship process from a single system. The main purpose of a B2B sales CRM is handling your sales cycle right from capturing the leads, discovery calls, follow-ups, customer conversion, and finally improving the overall customer retention rate. A top CRM like Apptivo has everything your business needs to handle your customer relations.

As the B2B sales cycle involves a complicated process with multiple touchpoints, a detailed CRM strategy necessitates better productivity and greater brand visibility. The B2B CRM strategy is a plan that lists down the methods that should be implemented to oversee an increase in sales and profits of the business. It is a powerful tool that detects the loopholes in your current B2B sales CRM process and provides advanced solutions to boost your business management.

Assume: You are running an automobile business that manufactures two-wheelers and four-wheelers. However, to build a complete vehicle, your team of engineers requires several tools and parts. These tools and parts are purchased from vendors who manufacture them. This is a type of B2B business. By implementing a B2B CRM, the automobile owner can track the supplier information and track the purchase orders. Simultaneously, the vendor can use a CRM system to manage all their customer information and deliver the products on time. Furthermore, the sales and marketing team of the vendor can use the B2B sales CRM to capture the incoming leads, send campaigns, move the leads through the sales funnel, and convert them into loyal customers.

Benefits of CRM for B2B Business

In this blog, we have broken down the B2B CRM strategy while laying emphasis on the top 5 benefits of using a B2B sales CRM.

Sales Management

B2B sales is not a simple process like B2C sales, where a single sales process is viable for the entire lead pool. B2B sales is a complex process where businesses have to look for an advantage from a smaller lead pool. Hence, the competition is higher and the competitors have to think out of the box to win a lead and convert them to customers.

Understanding that the B2B client is also a company, the selling company has to be very cautious while devising a sales strategy right from that first discovery call. The sales process involves wider research and better awareness of the clients.

By utilizing the best B2B CRM, the B2B company can effortlessly manage its entire sales cycle. At Apptivo, the sales process provided is completely customizable built with advanced tools that certainly make your sales management process easier and more efficient. The sales cycle of Apptivo has definite applications with interrelated workflow to move your leads smoothly through the sales cycle and increase the conversion rate. Furthermore, the lead generation process helps sales teams to qualify the leads, move them through the sales funnel, and analyze the probability of the leads becoming loyal customers.

Improved Efficiency

One factor that B2B companies should pay significant attention to is brand visibility. As we have previously mentioned, the lead pool is very small and every second counts. Companies must be consistent and stay cautious while implementing their sales strategy and analyzing the outcomes. One of the key advantages of a B2B CRM is it improves the productivity of businesses.

Wondering how? A CRM software has a robust database management system that documents all the information related to the leads, prospects, contacts, and customers. Furthermore, it helps teams to record every communication without causing any disruption in the communication process.

Apptivo has dedicated applications to manage the customers, contacts, prospects, and leads information exclusively. This assists sales and marketing teams to effortlessly retrieve the previous interaction, get a hold of the current status and provide instant solutions. Another advantage of a CRM is it avoids the hassle of managing multiple spreadsheets.

Instead, it establishes connections with multiple third-party applications and collects all the information in a single system that is easy to use and quick to operate. Your business might use several applications to handle different sections of your workflow. However, Apptivo collects all the information, creates a correlation, and provides optimized data to improve the productivity of sales teams who are often burdened with irrelevant tasks.

Stronger Communication

Normally in B2B services, there are two principal means of communication. They are internal collaboration and external communication. Both are vital parts of any business. Be it B2C or B2B, communication is the foundation for better business management. The fact is, one of the ingredients for successful customer service is both types of communication.

While internal communication helps to avoid confusion while delivering service, external communication assists in delivering timely service to the B2B customers. To achieve stability and bridge the gaps between these two channels, a robust CRM solution must be integrated to offer enhanced services to customers.

Apptivo’s CRM suite of applications has dedicated collaboration tools that help salespeople to document every interaction associated with a lead, prospect, or customer. The collaboration tools of Apptivo includes tasks, notes, call logs, calendar, documents, and news feed. These tools offer a unified platform where the sales teams can view the previous interactions and provide a timely response.

The customer portal of Apptivo helps the existing customers to log their tickets, communicate with the support teams, and track the status of their tickets on their own without any external help. With self-service gaining a wider scope in 2021, Apptivo has powerful capabilities to boost the self-service facility.

Advanced Automation

We are in an era where automation has attained dominance over our everyday life. Take our mobile phone as an example, it has several applications that take charge of our repetitive tasks.

For example, the schedule billing feature in Banking apps reduces the pressure of tracking the upcoming payments and pending payments. The schedule billing feature automatically makes the payment on the due date and sends notifications whenever there is an insufficient balance. It also generates receipts and notifies the end-user once the transaction is complete. This saves the time of end-users who have to keep track of multiple payments and end up paying late fees.

These days, we are incapable of separating a CRM solution from automation. Automation has become a vital component of a CRM system. With that said, Apptivo has state-of-the-art automation tools that reduce the burden of sales teams. All the redundant tasks of sales and marketing teams are handled effectively with B2B customer relationship management software.

One of the popular automation features from Apptivo is triggers that perform certain activities automatically whenever the condition satisfies a record. Likewise, we have other automation tools that improve the productivity of businesses and enable the sales teams to focus more on selling while the system will supervise the repetitive tasks.

Detailed Analysis

Data-driven marketing has taken a front seat in most industries. Companies have stopped using the conventional methods of marketing and started focusing more on the metrics to optimize the results.

B2B service providers rely heavily on data-driven marketing to capture more leads and retain the existing customers. This strategy helps them to analyze the existing customer base based on predefined KPIs and enables them to segment their potential customers through the effectiveness of the current marketing strategy. This also provides data on the key factors that a salesperson should focus on before qualifying leads and passing them into the sales funnel.

Apptivo CRM solution has definite dashboards and reports features that businesses can use to boost their sales strategy. These dashboards can be customized to represent the specific metrics according to pre-defined criteria. The advanced filter narrows down the metrics to the point with zero focus on irrelevant information.

The dashboards support several charts that are the principal tools of analysts who monitor the current performance of teams and provide recommendations to boost the overall performance of teams. The reports feature provides up-to-date data on the leads, prospects, and customers and sums up the team performance. This can be effortlessly shared with all the stakeholders and averts the hassle of using conventional spreadsheets.

Conclusion

B2B service providers across the globe have started leveraging CRM systems to manage their business workflow. It has become an indispensable part with managers assigning the prime tasks to employees while configuring the system to handle the redundant tasks. This reduces the pressure on employees, encourages them to concentrate more on conversion, and averts the need for additional resources.

Frequently Asked Questions

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