What is CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is defined by Investopedia as the principles and practices behind interacting with customers.  CRM software is, at its simplest, a database of customers and potential customers.   At its most, it is advanced software to help your sales team with everything from lead generation to marketing campaign distribution and a large part of your sales enablement strategy.  

To manage customer relationships and to ensure you have the best CRM tool available to your sales team, we’ve compiled a list of the CRM trends in 2020.

CRM trends in 2020

Customer Experience

If you want to stand out in a crowd of products or services similar to the one you offer, you’ll want to focus more on customer experience.  Focusing on the interaction between your brand and your customers and ensuring that you are leaving them with a good impression will go a long way.

With effective CRM software that houses all of your customer interactions, you’ll be able to start where you left off each and every time you communicate with a customer.

Automation

Automating sales processes can help sales representatives do their job faster, more accurately, and more effectively.  Enhanced CRM tools can offer ways in which to automate processes and shorten the sales cycle and is definitely one of the CRM trends in 2020.

Automation can help with tasks such as data entry, customer interaction logging, personalized email sequences, and more.  Some CRMs offer marketing automation features as well, allowing for more to get done by fewer resources in less time.

Artificial Intelligence 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to play a key role in many aspects of sales and marketing, including within CRM software.  Forbes explored five ways AI is transforming CRMs.  Their assertion is that AI is playing more of a vital role in sales by offering the following:

1. Easier data ingestion and retrieval
2. Sentiment analysis capabilities
3. Better data integrity
4. Predictive lead scoring
5. Personalized solutions/recommendations

Mobile 

If your sales team is sitting in front of their computers at the office, they’re not out there selling.  In 2020, mobile CRMs are no longer an option.  It’s a requirement if you want your sales reps to use your CRM even when they are out in the field.

Social Media

Social media has become an important part of the marketing mix in the last several years.  In order for your sales team to connect with their prospects where they spend their time online.  With the ability to run social campaigns and capture leads straight from your CRM, you’ll be able to expand your reach even further.

User-friendly

If your sales team doesn’t use your CRM, it isn’t effective.  To ensure they adopt and use the software quickly and easily, make sure you are choosing a user-friendly software solution.   For your teams to be able to access information in a timely fashion, even when on-the-go, you’ll see that your reps are much more likely to adopt it.

Omnichannel

Omnichannel marketing is definitely one of the CRM trends in 2020.   It is a much more effective and widely used method to gain new customers and includes continuing the customer lifecycle in each channel instead of starting over with each.  For instance, if your customer abandons a cart on one channel, it’ll offer an incentive in the next to purchase the same product.  In 2020, in order to make this work, ensure your CRM helps achieve this goal.  The customer data you collect should help you create a seamless experience from one channel to the next in order to do so successfully.

Immersive

You can put your customers right in your showroom with virtual reality.  Or you can put your product right in your customer’s living room with augmented reality.  Virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri can also provide a whole new level of communication with customers.  This can change how sales teams do their job substantially in 2020. SearchCutomerExperience aptly stated that the once game system accessory is changing communication between businesses and their customers.

Making it Happen

Finding a robust and capable CRM for your business is going to make all the difference in 2020.  Introhive compared implementing a CRM to setting your sales team up on a blind date.  That might appropriately explain how awkward it is for your sales reps at first.  Making sure you have a user-friendly, intuitive tool will help.  Giving your sales team extra incentive as their sales increase should be the icing on the cake.

Agile CRM is one such option to help your team succeed.  It will allow you to automate your sales, marketing, and service all in one platform and offers enhanced features for your sales and marketing teams.

CRM trends in 2020 are greatly focused on technologies and interactions.  Make sure your chosen CRM includes ways in which to incorporate these and increase your sales.

If you would like to see if Agile CRM is right for your sales team, try it for free for 10 users.