Contact Management and Digital Marketing for MSPs and VARs: Why a CRM is a Must

Your ability to nurture relationships by keeping in touch and delivering a personalized experience to your prospects is the key to generating more sales.

For example, by delivering the most helpful content at each stage of the buyer’s journey or recommending the most relevant product based on a customer’s profile and preferences.

To do so, many successful firms use a customer relationship management (CRM) system that helps you stay top of mind and deliver targeted communications at the right moment during the sales process.

Let’s take a look at how a CRM can help you better manage lead generation and sales:

The Benefits of Using a CRM

With a central contact database, your sales and marketing teams can work closely together to capture, share, and analyze customer data effectively. Here are just a few ways a CRM can help grow your MSP or VAR business:

Support Customer-Centric Omnichannel Marketing

Three out of four customers are willing to spend more money with a company because of a positive customer experience, according to Salesforce.

Today’s customers expect to interact with their service providers when and where they prefer so you need the ability to deliver a seamless and coherent user experience across all channels, such as email, social media, website, live chat, and call center.

A CRM allows you to pull contact information and history of interactions across all customer touch points into a centralized location so you can effectively implement customer-centric marketing strategies that are essential for success in today’s marketplace.

Increase Conversion With a Seamless Customer Experience

Your sales and customer success team can easily search and access customer data to reference clients’ past interactions with your company and pick up where they left off.

Not only will this help eliminate unnecessary repetitions and frustrations but also move the prospects down the sales funnel more effectively.

In addition, a cloud-based CRM platform means your sales reps can have access to the latest customer information even when they’re on the go so they can effectively communicate with prospects or customers and make more sales.

Use Analytics To Increase Sale

A CRM allows you to collect and analyze customer data as contacts interact with your marketing communications.

Based on their behaviors, you can learn about their preferences, understand the topics they’re most interested in, and even preemptively address objections or concerns.

Not only can the insights inform sales conversations, but they can also make it easy for you to further segment the contact list and refine your marketing message.

Generate Customer Insights Through Social Listening

You can use a CRM to pull all the interactions of every contact from major social media platforms and have the information available to inform your team’s interactions with the prospects. If you haven’t been using social media to connect with your customers, you’re missing out on an important channel.

In particular, 94 percent of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to connect with prospects while 66 percent consider it their most effective social media platform.

These social media conversations can provide deep insights into how your customers talk about their challenges and what they think about your products or services.

A robust CRM is the key to delivering the most relevant content and offers to your prospects and customers so you can increase your conversion and improve loyalty.

Choosing the Right CRM for Your Business

Although there are many platforms available on the market, few are designed specifically for MSPs or VARs. That makes finding the right CRM application can be quite daunting.

When looking for a platform to meet your needs, consider Hubspot CRM. It’s a no-cost tool that supports marketing, lead management, and sales to help you track communications with prospects and clients through the entire customer lifecycle.

If you’re already using other software applications to manage your customer interactions, make sure the CRM you choose can be integrated with them seamlessly to avoid errors and inefficiencies.

Last but not least, make sure the software offers the analytics and reporting capabilities you need (e.g., measuring new leads generated and conversion rate) to help you understand user behaviors so you can fine-tune your messaging and strategies.

Having a robust CRM is just one part of the inbound marketing methodology that will help you generate and close more leads. Click here to see how we can help you implement a holistic marketing solution for your business.