Improve Sales with Social CRM

Social CRM (the practice of connecting social network and mobile applications to your Customer Relationship Management software) is an increasingly hot topic amongst businesses that want to effectively connect with their customers.  Salesforce.com notes in their aptly named e-Book How Social CRM Connects you to Customers: 

“With social media, customers share their experiences with millions of people online. This includes feedback about various companies, both positive and negative. It’s a powerful tool that creates transparency for both business and consumer alike. Social CRM capitalizes on this by adapting social media platforms into customer service vehicles.”

Nucleus Research agrees, saying in this article that social CRM makes salespeople 11.8 percent more effective. Traditionally, CRM communication to customers was one-way, similar to old school advertising where the company controlled the message and hoped that the targeted marketing efforts were successful. This resulted in campaigns with interactions that were often highly impersonal. The new way of looking at CRM changes the business landscape by placing the customer at the center of interactions.

But where is the value of connecting social insights to business practices?

In their publication “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technology,” The McKinsey Global Institute found that, of the 70 percent of companies using social technologies, 90 percent report some business benefit from it. However, up to $1.3 trillion worth of value remains untapped by companies; value that can be unlocked through the use of social initiatives.

 Social CRM leverages:

• • Trending topics from social channels
  • Google Plus posts
  • Facebook posts
  • Linked In comments and posts
  • Twitter Posts (“Tweets”)
  • Connections to existing customers
  • Engagement with a multitude of potential customers

Let’s face it- your customers use social media (last year, Facebook found that 27 percent of time spent online was on a social network). You can connect with them on platforms where they are already spending time. This results in being able to learn about their real issues and needs. Furthermore, you are able to enhance customer engagement without sounding scripted or stilted.

Learn more about how social CRM can make an impact in your sales activity by contacting us.