Acquiring new customers and satisfying your current ones has never been more complex. As industries become more competitive and the marketplace continues to saturate, reaching customers quickly and efficiently with valuable and relevant information is more important now than ever. So how can you stay ahead? A CRM is designed to help your clients manage and conquer challenges such as these. Not sold on it? Below are four reasons why your agency clients need one now.

1. Provide more value to your customer.

A CRM system allows you to tailor communication, products and services to the specific needs of your customers. It captures detailed information about your customer and their habits and behaviors to help you target them more specifically. And you can target them through your content strategy. A CRM allows you to see how the customer found out about your product/service, if they’ve purchased one of your products or services recently, and based on their current behavior if they are looking to purchase again…or for the first time.

For example, let’s say one of your agency clients is a software company. Perhaps they had a customer purchase their software a few months ago. Are they looking to purchase the same software again? Probably not. Based on their previous history and current behaviors, your client can see that they’re looking for an upgrade to their current subscription.

Having this information allows your client to send communications, offers, messaging, etc. relevant to upgrades that would be best for the package they purchased. This will educate the customer, make them feel like your client knows what they want and need, thus giving them more of a reason to purchase from your client.

2. Consistent best practices.

CRM systems can also be used to implement the best sales or customer service processes. This will help salespeople provide consistent, high-quality services through every customer interaction. Using a CRM is also a great opportunity to create templates that will help guide your salespeople through more complex processes or sticky situations. Onboarding and training become a lot easier when you have one centralized place to house documents and information.

A CRM system also houses all of your customer’s history of purchases and preference. If your customer experiences a challenge, it can be taken care of more quickly by a customer service agent through these best practices because they’re armed with that information.

A larger benefit to keeping processes and teams consistent is brand consistency. Your client’s brand is not just the website and logo, it’s about the people and customers’ experiences, too. Having a consistent experience across the board will reinforce the brand you’re marketing and ensure that your customer journey is top notch from start to finish.

3. Executing more in less time.

The most efficiently-designed CRM systems take the burden of many tasks off of salespeople — such as filling out forms, reporting, legal issues and other smaller tasks that are vital to completing sales. The software will automate workflow, allowing salespeople to focus on what they do best — selling!

4. Growing your business.

Perhaps one of the most important values of a CRM is its ability to help grow a business. Salespeople no longer need to spend the majority of their time prospecting because a CRM system can help automate communication and activities across multiple channels.

You can use a CRM to capture leads from website forms, downloads, and traffic from your clients’ websites or email campaigns, webinars, tradeshows, etc. Leads can be immediately assigned to their salespeople, giving them the opportunity to contact prospective customers while everything is still top-of-mind. With the purchase of high-quality CRM software, you can step back and watch your clients’ sales revenues grow. If they’re making money, you’re making money.

5. Discover new insights.

Centralizing all of your customer data into one system presents a new way to analyze and gain insights on all of your accounts simultaneously. And having these data available in one single interface will allow for timely, informed decisions for teams to operate at greater efficiency and with increased agility.

Data also helps distinguish your company from your competitors. It helps support your messaging that’s out in front of your customers, and lets you know how your product/services are performing. Not only are you provided this valuable information, but it will also help you understand the volume of sales per week, which salesperson sold the most/least, what types of issues are coming in more frequently, etc.? As you can see, this provides you ample opportunity to grow, learn and adapt.

A CRM system helps organizations achieve greater scale and grow more efficiently. It will also help you create repeatable processes for continued success and consistency throughout the organization. The sheer amount of data you can receive from this software will give you that edge to set you ahead of the competition. Without a CRM, it would be very challenging to achieve success and continue to grow your business.