CRM Database: What Is It & How to Use It for Your Business Growth

What is CRM Database?

A CRM (customer relationship management) database is a digital resource that contains automatically collected data-oriented information about the clients and different activities across an organization including metrics-driven information management, sharing, usage, etc. CRM database empowers businesses to build and strengthen relationships with customers and stakeholders with a centralized database. It simplifies organizing contacts’ data, tracking processes, and creating customized reports. CRM database sorts out data into different categories by analyzing the information for different objectives.

Three Types of CRM Database

Based on data sorting type, we can classify CRM databases into three categories-

1. Analytical CRM Database: Mostly used by team leaders and key decision makers to have insights to plan better and improve service support quality    
2. Collaborative CRM or Strategic CRM Database: Mostly used to share customer information across organization business to faster different processes by eliminating the gaps in communication workflow
3. Operational CRM Database: Mostly used to streamline marketing, sales, and service support

Some CRM software can be customized to manage all three types of data, while others specialize in a specific pipeline. The increasing number of small and mid-size businesses having a constrained budget prefer to hire a bespoke CRM company offering cheap bespoke CRM database solutions.

Benefits of Bespoke CRM Database Solution

When you hire a reputed bespoke CRM database solution company, you can be sure for getting the much-needed competitive excellence in getting the right information from the right source for the right customer at the right time. The bespoke CRM database solution company provides comprehensive support to help you use collected data to improve your organizational and team-level performances. The key benefits of bespoke CRM database software solutions that help you improve your business growth are-       

• It Helps You Keep Your Contacts Better Organized: You filter the contacts by applying different contact properties like first name, last name, email address, company name, etc. How it helps you: By filtering the collected data, your teams spend less time to get the particular information about a particular customer to faster the processes.
• It Helps You Manage Deals Easily: CRM database provides a custom-to-need layout informing you about deals in pipelines, stage of particular deal, and deal closing dates that simplifies deal management. Salespeople and service-support team people can have an overview of their deals with the latest status on the go. How it helps you: By understanding the source and effective ways of deals generation, results of sales efforts, effective practices for lead conversions, etc you can create more effective and cost-saving strategies to improve the performance of marketing and sales teams. 
• It Helps You Generate Tailored-To-Need Reports Quickly: The quick generation of objective-oriented reports helps you create revenue forecasts based on insights about previous and in-pipeline deals. How it helps you: The context of current operations helps managers and team leaders to understand what is working well, performance/process silos, scope for change for improvement, etc.
• It Helps You Deliver Personalized Customer Experience: The complete detailed information about a customer and deal helps marketing, sales, and support teams to improve customer experience up to their expectations. How it helps you: Delivering personalized experience is an important driving force for increasing sales and strengthening brand’s reputation.
• It Helps You For Customer Segmentation: Each customer has unique needs and expectations. The availability of complete information about a customer segment in one place helps different team members to get insights about the particular strategy for this specific segment, previous interactions, and decide right about the next step. How it helps you: It helps you narrow down marketing and sales strategies to be more cost-effective and results-delivering.   

Uses of Custom CRM Database: Streamline & Improve Different Processes  

The custom CRM database solution makes a great difference when it comes to developing task-specific context and consistency across the organization. Everyone has access to the same data; therefore, team members save a lot of time and effort in sharing information, managing deals, tracking goals, gathering insights, etc. The availability of data-driven information about key trends and pain points helps you optimize operations and teams for saving unnecessary efforts and costs. The key applications of custom CRM database solutions are-  

• Workflow customization
• Efficiency improvement of sales teams
• Effective monitoring of processes
• Assigning work while balancing workload
• Gaining visibility into process progress
• Effective customer service management by allowing support agents to access the required information
• Reducing load of common customer queries by providing proactive support

CRM software vs. CRM database

CRM software is a set of tools designed to streamline, manage, monitor, and analyze sales, service support, and marketing activities to improve the collective performance of an organization. More details about CRM software solutions are available at- ‘Enhancing Customer Relationship Management with a Customised Solution’. CRM database is an essential component of CRM software that helps an organization to store and share customer-specific information through a single window. CRM database works with many CRM components like process automation tools, chatbots, email marketing tools, etc.

Key CRM Database Attributes You Should Essentially Have 

Data attributes decide the usability and benefits of bespoke CRM database integration. When you hire a custom CRM database integration company, focus on having all the essential CRM database attributes-

• Sharable from various geographical locations
• Relevant to the particular purpose
• Accurate and complete without error
• Transportable from one location to another
• Up-to-date to show the latest information
• Secured against threats
• Data Mining to get the relevant information from the huge volume of data

Key Features of CRM Database Development That Contribute to Your Business Growth

The ideal CRM database solution depends on your unique needs but a few important CRM database features are essential to have for any business type:

• Customizable pipelines
• Automated customizable workflows
• Simple view of sales processes and opportunities in the pipeline
• Automate scoring of segregated contacts and leads
• Data-driven sales forecasts
• Trends-driven probability predictions
• Real-time reports
• Customizable dashboards
• Integrations with different applications
• Team management to track and improve sales rep performance
• Lead management to track and follow up on opportunities
• Contact management to identify and contact the customers in a particular segment
• Customer service with support tickets management, Customer retention/ feedback data
• Sales dashboards giving access to KPIs driven by descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, and customer analytics

How to Choose the Best Bespoke CRM Database Software Solution

A study conducted by Infosys reveals that almost 86% of consumers accept that personalization influences their purchasing decisions. According to the 80-20 rule (Pareto Principle), 80% of business revenue comes from 20% of your customers. Therefore, you need to focus on particular 20% of customers essential for your business growth. The following tips may help you have the best CRM database solution integration- 

• The selection of a CRM database solution depends on the unique needs of your marketing plan and business processes like team sizes, monitoring, improvement plans, etc. 
• Define the custom sales pipeline referring the steps and attributes your marketing and sales teams take and use to convert a lead into sales and satisfied customer; key attributes of a sales pipeline are industry, customer type, target market, etc.
• Decide which customer data you want to include like Contact and personal information, interaction history, descriptive data, survey data, etc
• Check the suitability of the existing tech stack to assess the needs for available skills, system & environment, training, implementation, usage, etc.
• List the essential CRM metrics like Close rate, Upsell & cross-sell rate, Net-new revenue, Length of sales pipeline stage, sales cycle, Customer acquisition cost (CAC), Customer lifetime value (CLV), Email list growth; Churn rate, etc

Having automatically real-time, well-managed, and updated accessible data of every customer and sales prospect helps your marketing, sales, and service teams for lead generation, lead conversion, strategic marketing, improving customer retention, and improving customer satisfaction. If you need more details about using a low-cost CRM database solution to boost your business growth, you can call or message to Web Alliance, Northampton (United Kingdom).