B2B CRM: A magic wand to stay competitive

CRM platform for B2B has many useful features for administration, personalization of the customer, to boost progress and define roles for contacts. Below, you can explore it more detailed.

According to Grand View Research , CRM software revenue is expected to achieve $80 billion by 2025. Moreover, 74% of its users are satisfied with results and say that CRM software has refined their access to client data. According to LinkedIn , 64.2% of companies think that CRM tools are very impactful.

GetApp’s survey found out that the most popular CRM integrations are:

• Google apps – 62,3%
• Office 365 – 35,3%
• general email – 28,3%
• project management apps – 33,7%
• time tracking apps – 36,1%.

B2B CRM strategies

Building customer journeys

The secret of successful cooperating with the customers is looking at the sales process from your client’s perspective. Identify the best ways for brand promotion, whether it is easy or not to get to know about your services. Recognize whether your approaches appeal to the customers’ interests and help to improve their motivation. These insights will help to design customers’ journey much better.

B2B companies keep interacting with clients in different ways post-sale. Such touchpoints involve email newsletters, call center interactions and social media. Track and measure the user engagement and customer satisfaction at each touchpoint and change as needed to improve their experience.

Proactive position

Start from the customer acquisition, loyalty and advocacy.  Create a step-by-step approach that helps to develop long-term relationships.

B2B CRMs may help sales reps handle long sales cycles and deep cooperation, and they often mix with other business tools to nurture leads and improve the entire sales process.

Win-win cooperation

The best cooperation with your customers may be when you have a value exchange. For example, when you learn more about your existing clients, you may gain a clear vision of your target audience and what people you can engage in cooperation. Keep in mind to offer them some goods in exchange in order to improve their motivation.

Modern solutions

More flexible commerce platforms will boost sales. Nowadays, many companies offer their clients personalized self-service technology. So, work on updating the system in order to deliver the best experience for your customers.

3D view of the customer

A third perspective may be a deep understanding of the approaches towards your brand and user motivations. The knowledge of your customers’ needs will strengthen your strategy.

Moreover, transactional data will recognize which clients are the most valuable, demographics will help to see the most valuable, and the behavioral data will help to position the brand and engage the users.

B2B CRM strategies help to improve customer experience with unique and innovative solutions. They allow cooperating with them better and know their key expectations.

Companies using CRM successfully

Companies using CRM successfully know that it helps to build a long-term relationship and improve customer loyalty and acquisition. Nowadays, CRM is a management strategy that brings increased revenues. Besides, a CRM tool develops an easy user interface for a gathering of data that helps companies be aware and communicate with the customers in a more meaningful way.

KFC CRM

They decided to offer their customers free Wi-Fi in order to gather data. It helps to contact these users to suggest special promotions and deals.

Moreover, they launched a loyalty app to keep using a CRM system.

KFC Colonel’s Club:

• Clients download the application and save their personal information.
• Customers get stamps that bring them free rewards.
• The app identifies customer location to offer specific geographic deals and promote their nearest store.
• As the app captures the data about customer purchasing habits, they can suggest targeted marketing and deals.

British Airways CRM

CRM system is very important for the British Airways to bring positive customer experience despite many existing challenges. Fluctuating fuel prices, competition, and carbon emission regulation are the key problems that they need to handle. The pressure is significant because of the huge popularity of this airways: 200 destinations and more than 36 million people.

Their CRM solution has helped them to automate cooperation with the customers and their campaigns. This CRM is part of their loyalty scheme:

• Entirely free for the users.
• Involves all of the advantages of standard registration for simple buying on future flights.
• There is a user engagement program when customers earn the points which can be applied to book flights and hotels and pay for the renting a car.

• Helps members to retain their preferences.
• Customers get targeted and personalized communication.

Nokia CRM

Their CRM is made suitable for geo-specific locations and has multiple language options according to the user needs. But they have many challenges that require special treatment because this is a multinational company with the very diverse audience. Integrating CRM helped Nokia to achieve these goals:

• Structure the process.
• De-duplicate, sort and clean the data.
• Embed data into one format for all locations.
• Refinement of marketing campaigns and segmenting data into specific groups which cause more effective lead generation.
• Entire control over all external and internal factors.

A private jet company

JetHub is a global charter service with private flights to over 7,000 airports in the USA and abroad. The company offers the best aircraft operators with the ability for the customers to choose the plane on their own.

Zoho CRM helps them to reach better visibility and track the results of marketing and sales efforts. Proteomics Consult uses Zoho CRM as well to gain a better view of the current processes and to help them run smoothly.

A roofing company

London-based Flat Roofing integrates entire roofing systems for the internal and external customers. The company moved all their data to CRM and saw a growth rate 20-25% annually and this CRM helps to handle and grow the business.

A non-profit dance company

CityDance that is based in Washington D.C. teaches young ballet dancers looked for the software to free up themselves. It helps to spend more time on their key activities without a need to hire an IT team to create advanced software systems.

Our successful use case

We’ve described earlier different cases from various companies all over the world. Now, it’s time to explore our winning solution.

This case is called InsuBiz . We are proud of this case because it has so much to bring to the table and make a difference. Let’s consider the main features.

• Advanced CRM system to refine cooperation with the clients through role-based security management and unlimited teams.
• Risk management. It helps to promote risk awareness and exclude all possible dangers.
• Needed document management that helps to store information and develop document templates.
• Finance administration to manage budgets that helps to report and track the data, develop reports.

In general, our solution allows simplifying the management and usage of different insurance systems.

Artificial intelligence and CRM software

Let’s consider what artificial intelligence can bring to the table.

1. Capture and analyze sales calls.

Sales reps may use artificial intelligence like Chorus to record calls and meetings, gather time-stamped notes, get transcripts, and emphasize references to required topics. Customers may add trackers to find specific moments in conversations. Sales professionals may recognize topical trends, recognize best practices and mix it with CRM data.

2. Find out person’s emotional state to boost user experience.

Sales CRM combined with artificial intelligence provides in-call voice analysis. For example, Cogito analyzes word choice, speaking patterns, and other conversational dynamics. It helps to bring employees real-time guidance and rate customer experience.

3. Engage and retain with leads through email.

Some organizations use AI assistants like Conversica to cross-sell and follow-up, engage and retain customers. This tool integrates with different CRM and may recognize possibilities from leads created by Marketo , Pardot , and Eloqua .

4. Recognize support ticket trends and find out best responses.

Customer support departments get a lot of repetitive and routine support requests. AI applications like Wise.io can match customer tickets with the certain professional. Then, it may recommend specific canned responses based on the client’s needs and develop a template to speed up further responses. DigitalGenius may predict even metadata to decrease data entry, and automate responses to reduce average resolution time, improve user experience and customer satisfaction. DigitalGenius and Wise.io both integrate with CRM software.

5. Decrease ticket volume with smart customer self-service.

An AI app explores your knowledge base to bring easily understandable and relevant solutions to classic cases. It learns from past successful situations to recognize similarities with current tickets and automatically identify steps to solve a problem. It knows and understands the language, redirects too complex tickets to employees. It integrates with Service Cloud, Zendesk, and Desk.com .

6. Capture industry and social media data for account-based sales and marketing.

If you want to find intelligence solutions, you need to take into account these factors: business activity, firmographics, technology profiles. You can choose sales CRM with customized alerts to provide customers with social content and news. InsideView is a good example of b2b CRM that may help you to capture needed data.

7. Automate service desk processes.

Ipsoft’s Amelia may imitate natural language and manage key operations such as registering new clients, processing claims, opening accounts, etc. This assistant grows from the observation and can work 24/7 in order to free up human staff.

8. Use past data for predictive marketing and accurate lead scoring.

An intelligent customer engagement platform like Mintigo uses your marketing automation data and current CRM mixed with demographic and behavioral information to improve data completion and integrity. It adds marketing indicators from various databases, provides real-time scores in order to save time and efforts.

9. Predict and decrease load with speech analytics.

Call centers that deal with customer support apply IVR. Nowadays, there is an advanced option, an AI virtual assistant Akeira that may interpret language and respond accordingly. It knows 25 languages and 150 dialects and may work all day round.

10. Speed up content creation.

Natural language generation platform Wordsmith may develop original content based on templates and supplement with data for landing pages, product descriptions, personalized emails, news articles, etc. It is able to create content in over 15 languages and syncs with Zapier for automated workflows.

11. Analyze patterns for daily predictive lead scores.

CRMs save sales data and lead activity to launch significant analytical models. InsideSales suggests predictive analytics solutions to create accurate lead scores with deep understanding of when and how to interact with different customers. This data is based on their demographic, industry and company data.

12. Hire new sales professionals.

AI-powered helpers provide analysis and timing and may lead human reps to make meaningful decisions. TopOPPS tracks the state of opportunities and leads based on customer profiles and activity, recognizes successful sales behavior. Then, it helps new employees to grow and develop their skills. TopOPPS syncs with Salesforce and other CRMs.

13. Advanced business intelligence for useful insights.

Bottlenose’s Nerve Center uses analytics, data mining, and machine learning from public data sources for historical analysis, business intelligence and sentiment analysis, monitoring and alerts.

14. Account-based marketing ROI.

Predictive solution 6sense looks for companies in active buying cycles for specific services and products. This helps a B2B company to pay attention to advertising and engagement spending. It offers an additional app that identifies which accounts look for prioritized keywords. Besides, it has partnered with Marketo, marketing automation provider and suggests sync with different CRM systems.

15. Machine learning design environments.

Microsoft and Amazon have created their Amazon and Azure machine learning design environments for programmers to develop, integrate, and share their own predictive analytics systems. Along with marketplace opportunities, developers are motivated to create unique CRM solutions.

Artificial intelligence is not a buzzword, this is real technology that can make a difference in your whole sales and marketing strategy. It can automate and simplify tasks, free up your staff and improve the level of services. Most AI assistants easily integrate with CRM systems.

You may consider cases of successful using CRM that show that this is a great opportunity to improve revenues. It helps to engage and retain customers, gather their data to offer relevant deals.

If you want to achieve greater sales results, explore our tips for CRM implementation and usage. With this knowledge, you will be able to deeply understand your customers and cooperate with them better.