CRM Strategies:
6 Steps to Master a CRM

How the CRM Process can help generate more revenue.

Chances are, you’ve been thinking about using a CRM lately, and likely have a shortlist of candidates already.

While finding the right platform is one of many customer relationship management strategies, it’s only one piece of the puzzle.

In this article, we’ll share some tips with you on how to get started that'll set you up for success so you can reach your goals. You’ll learn six simple steps you can take with your CRM to optimize your sales operations, improve performance, and get more time back in the day.

What is a CRM?

A CRM is a tool you can use to manage all of your company’s relationships and communication with your target audience.

Customer relationship management platforms can help you stay in touch with leads, generate sales, and increase revenue. Every year, more business owners are adopting CRMs into their organizations since they’re one of the most valuable communication and sales tools available. By 2025, CRM sales are expected to reach $80 billion worldwide — up from $36 billion in 2017.

A powerful CRM, like TigerLRM, can help sales, marketing, and customer service teams stay connected with leads and customers, optimize productivity, and improve profitability.

Benefits of implementing CRM strategies

In order to grow your business, whether you’re an owner or an employee, you need to understand how to optimize your CRM. The best way is by implementing the right CRM strategies. Here are a few benefits of executing customer relationship management strategies:

• Identify and categorize leads
• Tighten up your sales process
• Save you and your team time
• Identify new sales opportunities
• Optimize team collaboration
• Track your sales leads better
• Design more targeted marketing campaigns
• Improve your bottom line

6 steps to build an effective CRM strategy

Now that you know why a CRM strategy can benefit your business growth, it’s time to learn the step-by-step process to build a successful CRM strategy.

Here are six steps you need to take to launch a CRM strategy so you can grow your business.

1. Run a complete audit on your business

The first step to building a successful customer relationship management strategy is to audit your entire business.

Before you get started on a CRM system, it’s important to step back and conduct both a sales audit and a business audit to analyze how you and your team are currently performing.

A sales audit is a detailed breakdown of a business’s sales process. This type of audit includes reviewing everything from strategy, staff, and software you use to run your sales operations. A sales audit can help you find gaps and opportunities for you and your sales team to optimize your sales operations.

This also means assessing and reviewing all of your current workflows, business processes, your sales playbook, and studying your target audience.

Once you’ve audited your sales process, you should also run a SWOT analysis. This is an audit of your entire business that includes assessing your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Investopedia has a great free resource you can check out on how to run a SWOT analysis on your business.

The key to auditing your business and sales process is to be honest with where you’re really at. Even if you’ve been in the game for years or you’ve done an audit in the past, it’s important to assess where your business and sales operations are at so you can understand how to get where you want to go — which leads us to our next step.

2. Map out the customer journey

Now that you’ve done a deep dive with a business and sales process audit, it’s time to map out your customer journey.

In this step, you’ll outline different stages in your sales pipeline. This means looking at the different steps your audience takes as they turn from stranger to prospect to lead to customer and even returning customer.

This customer relationship management strategy isn’t just about the path your customers take. It’s also about your sales team. You’ll want to map out the different stages of the customer journey as well as who is responsible for what tasks at each stage.

You should analyze what team members will take action at each stage. This will help you to both reduce friction for the customer as they journey through each stage as well as optimize your sales team’s performance as they interact with them.

3. Come up with clearly defined goals

Once you’ve audited your business and your sales process, and you’ve mapped out your customer journey, it’s time to cast vision. This is your chance to set goals for your business.

Your goals are important targets, endpoints, or accomplishments your business seeks to achieve. Try to get more specific than just writing down “Grow revenue” or “Generate more sales.” Remember, it doesn't just have to be goals directly revolving around revenue. You can think about financial goals, customer goals, growth goals, or even employee development goals.

Are you wanting to maximize your revenue? Looking to grow your sales team so you can step back a bit and let others sell while you manage a team? Maybe you’re not just looking to generate more sales, but also improve your profit margins?

The true power of setting business goals lies in their potential to grant you greater focus, to help set achievable targets to improve your business, and even motivate employees.

When goal setting, always reference your business audit, your organization’s mission, and your long-term vision for your company. And, always set SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound).

You should ask yourself the following questions:

• What do I want to achieve from my CRM strategy?
• What data will you track to know if your CRM strategy is a success?
• Am I looking to reduce customer churn?
• Am I looking to increase my NPS scores?
• Am I looking to shorten my sales cycle?

The goals you set will impact the specific CRM strategies you use, so make sure each goal has a clear purpose in your organization.

Once you’ve clearly defined your goals, you should take some time to figure out whether you and your team can realistically achieve them in the time frame you’ve set up.

Do you have enough resources? Do you have enough team members and expertise? Do you have a powerful CRM tool to get the job done?

Once your goals are set in stone, it’s time to communicate them to your team so they’re on board with your vision.

4. Create an ideal customer profile (ICP) for your target customer

Now that you’ve set your goals, it’s time to focus on your audience by creating an ideal customer profile, or ICP.

An ICP is your ideal target customer. It’s a description of the customer you’re wanting to attract. Typically used in a B2B business, an ICP can help you understand who you’re focused on so you can optimize your sales tactics to reach them more effectively.

An ideal customer profile usually includes a wide range of characteristics like:

• Demographics
• Industry
• Pain points
• Company size
• Annual revenue
• Goals
• Common objections

You may be thinking an ICP sounds like the same thing as a buyer persona, but they have their differences. The main difference is that buyer personas typically target an individual while ICPs describe an ideal organization or business you want to target.

With an ICP, your organization can:

• Get the most out of your budget
• Improve and shorten your sales cycle
• Align your sales and marketing teams
• Increase your customer lifetime value (CLV)

For a step-by-step guide on creating an ideal customer profile, check out our article, How to Create an ICP Your Sales Team Will Actually Use.

5. Define how your offer stacks up against the competition

Now that you understand who you’re targeting in your sales efforts, it’s time to look at your product or service and how it compares to your competitors.

If you want to gain an upper hand in your market, then you need to know how to set yourself apart from other businesses. While there are dozens of tactics you can implement to make minor improvements, the best way to do this is by creating your own niche.

You should look at your offer and its strengths. But, also analyze your weaknesses compared to competitors. Here are a few questions you should consider:

• How does your product or service solve your customer’s problems?
• How can you optimize your overall offer to better serve your customers?
• What is your unique selling proposition (USP)?
• How do your competitors differentiate themselves?
• What are your competitors' strengths and weaknesses?
• What can you learn from your competitors?
• How can you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
• What are the current market opportunities and trends?

Oftentimes, to carve out your own unique niche, you don’t need to create a brand new product. You just need to create a better offer. This doesn’t always mean offering a better price or steeper discount than your competitors. It means looking at every aspect of your business — your product, customer service, technology, communication, pricing, your audience, and looking at how you can better position yourself in the marketplace to stand out.

6. Set up key performance indicators (KPIs)

One of the most important CRM strategies you can implement is setting up KPIs, or key performance indicators.

You can set up all other CRM strategies and get a good start. But, if you don’t determine your KPIs, you will limit your potential to go above and beyond. Look back at the CRM strategy goals you set at step three. It isn’t enough to set goals. You need to establish metrics that show you that you’re on track to achieve those goals.

You can think of KPIs as checkpoints along the way to where you want to go. They’re like signs on the road showing you that you’re getting closer to your destination.

The KPIs you set up will be different from the next company, as they’re determined by the goals you set. Here are a few starting points:

• Revenue (overall revenue, average revenue per account)
• Sales (overall sales, sales by sales rep, conversion %)
• Customer satisfaction (% of positive reviews or testimonials)
• Customer retention or customer churn
• Profits (overall profit, profit per account)

By tracking specific metrics, you’ll be able to quickly identify if your CRM strategy is working or not so you can pivot or optimize where needed.

A winning CRM strategy begins with the right tool

There are several CRM strategies you can use to improve your sales, optimize performance, and grow your business. But, if you don’t have the right technology or you’re relying on outdated tools, you’ll be facing an uphill battle.

Investing in CRM software like TigerLRM can help you keep your sales pipeline full, allowing new customers to come in and loyal customers to keep coming back. Our CRM and Sales Enablement platform makes it easy for sales professionals to optimize their workflows, team leads to create sales reports, and customer service teams to streamline communication with customers.