Knowledge
A CRM system is probably the heart of your business, or at least hugely important to its smooth running. No matter how comprehensive, complex or simple, a good CRM helps you keep up to date, capture leads, identify potential leads and manage your activities.
One challenge here is to always keep the CRM up to date. Changes and new information and data are constantly being added to the company in many different places. Keeping your CRM system up to date is essential to protect or grow your business, whether it's doing particularly well or there is uncertainty.
We show why a modern CRM system is so important and why its automation is indispensable.
In order for a CRM to offer exactly what it is supposed to, namely overview and organisation, it is of particular importance to maintain it. However, this is a task that tends to be neglected even in the best of times. In the course of the current economic changes and uncertainties, it is more important than ever to keep your CRM system up to date.
The current crisis is hitting different sectors and companies differently. Especially if you have clients from different industries, it quickly becomes confusing who is having problems and who will get back on their feet faster. The hard-hit arts, culture and entertainment industry in particular could take up to five years to recover from the Corona crisis, according to McKinsey . Other sectors, such as online retail, have actually benefited from the crisis. Accordingly, your customers will react very differently to the pandemic.
Understanding which client companies will recover or have already recovered, and who is not a secure prospect, is critical to protecting and advancing your business.
In addition to the industry, McKinsey says the country and its economy are also important for recovery from the Corona crisis. Some countries were hit hard initially but have resilient, advanced economies. The level of digitalisation and medical care can also be crucial. Against this backdrop, knowing the situation of your client companies can create completely new opportunities.
However, knowing about efficient companies and potential customers requires a huge amount of data. To manually and manually optimise and update your CRM system would require a lot of time: every business activity of all potential customers, their subsidiaries, the situation of their industry, changes in management and current efforts.
Updating your CRMs approach through automation not only allows you to catch up on missed research and updating of customer data, but also gives you an edge over the competition. By staying ahead of the curve, knowing and understanding the situations of your (potential) customers, you can better tailor your offer to them, identify potential risks to your own business early on and create an optimised customer journey.
This proactive approach helps you to identify valuable business leads, cross-selling opportunities and loyal customers.
Automation can help to aggregate data from a wide range of channels and then make it available in a structured and just-in-time manner. Not only can data be acquired from the company's own communication with customers, but data from publicly accessible media can also be included in the analysis. The automation collects all this data autonomously and a linked, automated reporting ejects the relevant data. In this way, you recognise potentials and dangers without having to spend a lot of time manually collecting all this information.
Do's
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What's more, this process is seamlessly integrated and updated: so you have more time for everything that really counts in these turbulent times: Sales, personalised targeting and growth.
Automation in general and of your CRM in particular will help you to secure and advance your business, also and especially in the current crisis. Together we find individual solutions that are flexible and scalable.
Cloud Integration, iPaaS, SaaS, BPA… Ough, hard to keep track of all these terms. They are currently used frequently (and increasingly) in the context of automation, and it is sometimes difficult to make a clear distinction and distinction. We have already written blog posts on the terms iPaaS, SaaS and BPA, but we’ll take them up again here to make the difference.
But let’s start with cloud integration, because that’s the central umbrella term in which we embed all the other technologies in this blog post.
Arrange a free cloud integration consultation now
Arrange a free cloud integration consultation now
To illustrate these advantages, an example is suitable that we know well from our everyday work as an automation agency:
The central data to be used here is the data of a major customer. This can be the simplest information, such as the address. This address is required in numerous but completely different processes in the company: on the one hand, for correct invoicing in accounting. On the other hand, in the CRM system, where all the data of the large customer is also stored. But the address is also important in sales, for example, when employees go to the sales meeting on site.
Now the customer announces that the address of the company has changed after a move. This information will reach you by e-mail. There are now two options:
01. The e-mail is forwarded to all affected departments, accounting, sales, customer service, marketing… All persons open their corresponding program, CRM, accounting software, marketing tools (such as newsletter marketing) and change the data already stored there of the customer. This means that in multiple applications, different people do exactly the same thing: change one address.
02. But there is also an alternative: By connecting your applications, thus by integrizing them, the customer’s e-mail, or rather the information it contains about the address change, is automatically passed on to all affected applications: CRM, accounting, marketing, ERP. This does not require any clicks, because the cloud integration detects a trigger, i.e. address change, and thus automatically starts the process.
What sounds unimpressive in a single process becomes more effective when such a process occurs several times a day or weekly. Because there is a lot of data that is available in different applications and should always be correct. If these applications are cloud applications they are suitable for cloud integration.
But cloud integration doesn’t just happen. There are now a variety of applications that enable and implement this. Such tools usually allow us to link the relevant cloud applications on a central platform and define clear rules on when, how, where, how much data should be passed on and what happens to them.
To realize cloud integration, there are various applications and technologies that are sometimes used interchangeably.
We have made a first distinction between iPaaS and BPA here.
We explain the term SaaS in more detail here.
Cloud integration is rather an umbrella term that includes numerous technologies, such as SaaS, iPaaS and BPA, and this is also absolutely necessary. Cloud integration is a concept that is made possible by appropriate technologies.
However, all terms share the commonality that they are cloud-based and thus offer enormous potential for growth and scaling. In addition, they are often cheaper to implement and maintain because changed requirements are easy to implement.
As an independent automation agency, we implement cloud integration according to your requirements. We use a variety of SaaS tools and iPaas (strictly speaking BPA) software. Together we find individual solutions that are flexible and scalable.
