A crisis is the time to acquire new skills and optimize your business. Therefore, we decided to talk about how to digitize your business and increase sales.
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| How to digitize your business and increase sales |
- How do I digitize my business?
- What does it mean to digitize your business?
- Why digitalization is important for companies nowadays?
- What can be digitized?
We discussed these issues together with an expert on live broadcasts as part of the Business in Crisis project . For those who do not have time to watch live recordings, we retell the most important thing.
- What are CRM systems and why are they needed?
- CRM is generally a loose concept. In a broad sense, it is a customer relationship system. And there is a pool of tools for customer relationship management - these are the so-called CRM systems. CRM actually has quite a few solutions - some paid, some free.
What do these systems allow you to do
? Now, in general, especially during the quarantine period, the time for making decisions by the client has increased, behavior patterns and purchasing power are changing. It is important to always stay in touch with the client. The CRM system just allows you to link all the sources and channels through which you somehow communicate with the client into one system... For example, you have social networks, they can write to you in messengers, applications can come to the site, calls can come. And in order not to collect all this bit by bit, this system is used. This is necessary in order to further effectively interact with the client. The entire history of correspondence, all call records is saved, we see the history of the client's previous purchases. This allows you to work most effectively with each customer. That is, now it is more relevant when there are fewer customers on the market, average receipts are falling, CRM systems allow you to increase the period of relationship with each client. As they say (and it really is), attracting a new customer is always more expensive than retaining an old one. The CRM system allows you to save all customer data. You can automate these connections and periodically remind the client about yourself.
In addition, CRM tools are a good opportunity for the management team to control the quality of employees' work . This is exactly the same digitalization of sales. CRM systems allow you to estimate in numbers the effectiveness of each manager. They report how many calls they make, how long they spend with each customer.
In addition, CRM systems allow you to measure conversion at each stage of sales (in the so-called "sales funnel" these are several stages - from the client's request to closing the application as successfully implemented). And we see, let's say that out of the total volume of site visitors (conditionally, one hundred people), two people left an application, one eventually closed his order. Knowing our conversion, if we suddenly see any changes, we can quickly react. We see at what specific stage our work is "failing" now.
- Who needs CRM systems?
- First of all, of course, this is relevant for online and those who are now moving online. But in fact, not all sales are exclusively online. Yes, you can have social networks and a website, you can attract buyers through online channels, but you can have sales offline. It can be any shop (for example, flower shop), fitness industry. These tools are suitable for almost any niche. These tools have been on the market for a long time and are quite flexible. If you understand that you are missing something, you need your own functionality, you can adjust the CRM system for a specific business. It's even difficult to give an example of an industry for which a CRM system would not be suitable.
- How are CRM systems better than an ordinary manager?
- There are simply problems when the client base is kept somewhere on pieces of paper. Leaves can get lost, there can be several of them, a person can have several tables, you can change managers. And the CRM system always remains . Even if your business is closed and a new one is opened, you always have saved customer data. Databases will not only tell me that I had a client Ivan Ivanov who made a purchase for a thousand rubles, but also suggest what to do with him next.
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A digitized client is already some kind of data array
If you look at how giant companies or small tech firms work, they try to draw conclusions about sales and performance based on data sets. When we know as much as possible about a customer, we are more likely to predict when they will re-purchase, if they will make it at all. Based on the base, we can understand which customers come to us in general, we can build a portrait of the buyer.
We can upload the database to the mailing list or the retargeting database in the advertising accounts of social networks and select the most similar audience for these customers. How do online tools generally determine how similar a client is to another? Let's say Yandex has an algorithm, artificial intelligence, which evaluates each Internet user based on about four hundred parameters. It's not just search queries that go there - it's one of the factors.
What is a person looking for, what sites did he visit, what purchases did he make?From this, we can find out if the user has children, pets. By what geolocations he comes from or what device he uses, we can understand how much money a person has. For example, if a person goes online or logs into Yandex a couple of times a year from another country, we can understand that he is probably traveling. If travelers are suitable for us, then this is the very factor that interests us. We can target a specific device, operating system, depending on the needs. This will only work if you know who you really need. And you can find out by digitizing your clients.
At the second stage - when you have digitized your customers and they are not stored in separate tables and on sheets of paper - you can send an e-mail to a specific segment in one button, send an SMS message, and turn on auto-dialing.
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You have a client at arm's length. With a couple of buttons you can make a contact and it will be effective
Now, during the quarantine period, the client's decision-making period has increased . We at Tsifrograd can see it by ourselves. This means that the client can compare a lot, look for better deals.
It is important here to always stay in touch with the client .
For example, if a customer visits a website, there are at least three ways to communicate with them.
Firstly, there are "pixels" that "pick up" all site visitors to then show them ads in search engines.
Secondly, we can offer to subscribe to browser notifications .
Then you can offer some kind of "bun" for the fact that the user leaves an e-mail or phone number .
- How can the customer base of CRM systems help to increase sales?
- What to do next with the client base? When you have the opportunity to contact a client more often, if your business involves repeated sales (and this is the majority of businesses - with the exception, perhaps, of the sale of real estate), then you can have quite frequent contacts with the client. And here it is worth talking about LTV.
For several years, experts have been talking about such a concept as LTV (life-time value) - customer lifetime value. If we look at most of the companies that are on the market now, they are check-driven. Companies are not as interested in the customer as they are in the sale. Customer Lifetime Value is such an interesting thing. You once spent money on attracting him and now you only do what you keep him.
Let's say the subscription model is now popular: services for music, audiobooks, and so on. Even Ozone now has a subscription that allows you to buy goods cheaper and provides cheap delivery.
How do subscriptions work? Usually the first month goes into negative territory. That is, attracting a customer to a subscription is more expensive than he pays for the first month of use. But such models benefit from the fact that they retain the client for a very long time and, accordingly, come out in a plus.
It's the same with the digitized customer base. In addition to the fact that you can work more effectively with those clients that you already have, you can, based on the available data, expand the pool of clients, understanding which channels you work with more effectively.When we have multiple advertising channels, we understand where the highest quality audience comes from, and we can reallocate the budget and spend it more efficiently. Managers spend less time processing low-quality applications.
At the same time, it is very important to maintain the period of relationship with the client as long as possible. If you have half of your customers dropping off every month, you need to spend a certain budget every month to fill that half in order to stay in plan. If you reduce the bounce rate, you have more customers with you, and you can spend less money replacing those who left.
- How does a CRM system understand the difference between high-quality and low-quality audiences?
- There are different metrics in any analytics system, but they do not exclude the manual factor. Yes, there is artificial intelligence. For example, Instagram and Facebook have a very strong advertising account, in which AI can better than humans select an audience that is more likely to make a purchase. But first of all, all tools provide data for analysis. For the head of the sales department, for the marketer, who must draw conclusions based on this data. We can rely on the machine, but the machine won't do the job for us. We can automate the receipt of data as much as possible, display it in tables and graphs, but based on this data, make further decisions.
- How to predict changes in financial indicators?
- This topic is not entirely based on a CRM system - it serves as tools for collecting data. How does financial accounting generally work in many companies? At the end of the month, we are looking at how much we sold. Let's say we sold less than we wanted and now we ask ourselves: why did this happen? All financial indicators are called "lagging". That is, these indicators tell us something only when the sale has already happened. And there are leading indicators in marketing that help us analyze changes in financial indicators.
How to predict these changes in general? Here it is worth returning to LTV - customer lifetime value. Its calculation is based on several indicators. One of them is the level of loyalty and customer satisfaction in general. When we understand that the client has begun to evaluate our company worse (and we learn this by communicating with him, asking him to put a rating, to answer questions), we realize that this will affect our financial performance in the future.
That is, we can say that satisfaction and financial indicators are related. I repeat: the loss of old customers increases the cost of attracting new ones, and this all affects the company's profit.
- What tools and CRM systems do you recommend to use?
- I'll tell you about the example of "Tsifrograd" . We actively began to implement everything that I am talking about now in January (we used it before, but to a lesser extent). So, we have an online store, we use three analytics systems: Yandex. Metrica, Google Analytics, and Roistat. The more interesting the last tool is - it allows you to show the entire chain of customer interaction with your advertising messages. Why is this needed? In general, all over the world it is now believed that a client needs to make several "touches" with a brand: see an advertisement, hear a review from a friend, see a sign on the street. Then he will develop an understanding of the brand. And Roistat allows you to track how a client, for example, first saw an advertisement in Yandex, came in, wrote a question in the chat, left, returned a week later through a search engine and bought a product. And we understand that it was not the search that brought the client, but he originally came from advertising.
Metrics data can differ among themselves, especially by channels - by clicks, transitions.And there is no universal solution here. Usually, the main system that keeps records is simply selected. It is not fully known which data is actually more accurate, because different search engines transmit data about customers and referrals differently.
We upload all analytics to the Bitrix CRM system . We have an online store on this platform, where we solve the company's problems. We are trying to get away from many tools and work in one system.
A CRM system is not only about sales management. It allows you to manage not only sales, but also tasks (like Bitrix). We do this so as not to collect tasks for chats and mails: all the data about the project is in one place .
I can also recommend amoCRM. This system is well suited for sales. It does not have functionality for working on tasks in a broad sense, but the funnel is well developed, there are integrations with all social networks, with all platforms, and landing constructors.
They do not have a free solution, but the simplest version will cost around 500 rubles for six months per user, the most premium - about 1700 rubles for 6 months. There is a small life hack for those who are limited in resources: several people can easily use one user account. Yes, this way you will not be able to analyze the effectiveness of a particular manager, but you can use the tool for the whole company.
Tags
- how to digitize your workplace
- digitization in business examples
- how to digitize organization
- digitizing your business
- digitization of business processes
- digitize your small business
- how to digitize your office
- digital transformation
- - How to organize remote work using CRM?
- - The question is also relevant. Now many companies have switched to "remote" for obvious reasons. What is very important in general when working with remote teams? Don't lose communication. When we communicate now, some share of emotions disappears, because we do not have personal contact. When communication goes completely to "remote" in chats, 80% of emotions are lost at all. The opportunity to correctly set a task for an employee is lost.
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As it often happens now: you can record a voice message, throw it off, and then a week later ask, well, how are you. And no one is interested in how the task was understood, whether it was understood correctly, whether the work algorithm was built, whether the employee has all the resources to work
And CRM-systems (as well as a pool of tools - "problem books") allow you to collect all information about tasks in one place. What kind of information could it be? Who set the task, who should complete it, what materials are needed (you can attach them here). Here you can also track the performance history by task.
In addition, there are communication tools within CRM systems. There is no need to separately download Skype or Zoom - there is functionality for video communication. You can discuss work in one place, seeing the tasks that are on the board, both by video link and in chats. In short, when working remotely, it is very important to preserve effective communication as much as possible.
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