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It is true: The customer is king. But are you winning over enough customers? So, the question is, how can organisations find prospects, turn them into customers, and keep them coming back—especially amidst the backdrop of constantly changing customer preferences and buying behaviours?

Getting In Touch With Customers in the Right Channel Is Critical . . .

Everything starts with reaching your customers.

“Businesses need to be targeted and precise in their approach to ensure they are reaching customers on the channels they are engaging on. You have to embrace digital, so make sure your website is optimised, that you are actively engaging in social media and that you’re using digital marketing channels effectively to reach your buyers at their research stage,” explained Jason du Preez, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific, at SugarCRM, in an exclusive interview with Disruptive Tech News.

“Businesses need to position themselves as thought leaders and industry experts by crafting insightful and valuable content that differentiates them from any other business.”

. . . But Knowing Whom to Reach Is Just as Important

Of course, it is equally important that organisations know who they are trying to reach specifically to ensure that the right message reaches the right audience. This, according to du Preez, starts with a clear strategy around understanding and defining the ideal customer profile, which will in turn serve as a guide in making tailor-made content for these specific customers. “Having a clear definition of the ideal customer profile or ICP is a cornerstone to targeted and efficient prospecting efforts,” du Preez pointed out.

“Once you understand who your ICP is, you can overlay this with intent-based data.  The application of intent-based data unveils valuable insights into the ongoing research activities of the ideal customers.  By aligning these insights, campaigns can be strategically directed toward an audience actively engaged in the research phase, thus optimising outreach initiatives.”

Next, according to du Preez, is guiding these prospects through the sales funnel by implementing and automating a lead nurturing process—that is, nurture campaigns and activities that will “help you stay top of mind of those prospects.”

All the processes leading up to this point yield a substantial amount of data. It is imperative that organisations harness this data to iteratively optimise the process.

“We must be leveraging the data at hand, analysing the insights from the marketing campaigns and activities and then look for opportunities to optimise to drive better returns and maximise returns,” du Preez explained.

Data Plays a Vital Role in Identifying Prospects

He added that analysing customer data is key towards understanding the customers’ journey and how they are engaging with the organisations and brands. This understanding, in turn, ensures that organisations create consistency, along with engaging touchpoints for both customers and prospects. Segmenting this same data can also enable organisations to tailor their communication strategy towards their specific customers and prospects—until such a point where Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation can be leveraged to deliver personalised and dynamic content based on the intent and behaviour of individuals.

“Data plays a crucial role towards optimising your customer experience. Optimising the customer experience will contribute significantly towards improving business results,” du Preez emphasised. It gives us insight into the buyer’s behaviour and their preferences and allows us to really optimise customer engagement and deliver deeply personalised messages and experiences. This improves conversion rates and gives us better retention rates.”

Using a Modern CRM Helps Increase ROI

Central to optimising these processes and making the most out of them is the utilisation of the right digital tools—such as a sales and marketing automation platform provided by SugarCRM, a cloud-based, fully customisable Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that helps marketing, sales and service teams see a clear, complete vision of all their customers.

“SugarCRM supports digital transformation by providing a comprehensive AI-driven platform to manage customer relationships across marketing, sales and service and giving you a holistic 360-degree view of the customer. It allows you to really understand the customers’ needs, their preferences and their behaviour,” said du Preez.

Walking the talk, SugarCRM, according to du Preez, also leverages automation capabilities within its own platform, ensuring that “things don’t fall through the gaps.” Such automation also ensures the streamlining of processes and the reduction of unnecessary manual tasks. In fact, one of the things SugarCRM has taken into consideration as far as developing its CRM revolves around “no-touch CRM”—something the automation processes support to ensure that marketing, sales, and service teams can let the platform do all the heavy lifting.

So, now the question becomes, what’s in it for organisations that choose SugarCRM?

For du Preez, it is really simple. Organisations that leverage SugarCRM stand to gain these key benefits:

• Improved sales productivity.
• Enhanced customer engagement.
• Streamlined sales and service processes.
• Better decision-making through advanced analytics.

Together, these benefits can result in an increased return on the initial investment of adopting SugarCRM.

Out With the Old, In With the New

According to du Preez, many organisations are still using Excel spreadsheets and other manual methods to track opportunities.  Embracing a modern CRM platform will not just help drive operation efficiencies and insight into sales opportunities, your pipeline, and customer behaviour, but will also allow companies to take advantage of AI and advanced analytics.  This will allow them to “make sense of data to predict outcomes and identify patterns and trends for more accurate forecasting.”

“Real-time data analytics empower employees and ensure they are making informed decisions and are responding promptly to customer needs,” du Preez said. “Real-time data can help them in solving problems in real-time, ensuring they are giving a positive customer experience and customer outcome, and potentially preventing a churn risk.”

“Advanced data analytics also allows a business to optimise sales activities, marketing campaigns, up-sell and cross-sell more effectively and improve customer retention.”

These, ultimately, are the end goals of marketing, sales, and service teams, but they can only be achieved in the best, most efficient ways possible through the use of a modern CRM.

That modern CRM is SugarCRM.

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