By now, you should know the advantages of inbound marketing in getting more traffic to your site. After employing the engagement and nurturing tactics discussed in this guide, you are now happy to report high-quality leads. These leads seem interested in your products and services.
You now have to close the deal and fully convert these leads into customers. To ensure accuracy and speed, many marketers use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. In the last part of our inbound marketing guide, we are going to tell you how to close deals with CRM.
We briefly touched on the definition of a CRM software throughout this guide, but now we’ll go in more in-depth.
CRM software is often categorized as a system involving you and your entire team, from customer service to sales and marketing, will work together to achieve company goals. These goals include finding and organizing leads (often through lead scoring), engaging and nurturing leads, and converting them. You can also use CRM software to track sales and the success of a marketing campaign.
Most CRM software is automated, either fully or partially. You are allowed and encouraged to add inputs as well as make changes to the software. No technology is perfect, after all. At its best, CRM software simplifies complicated processes and saves time.
Companies are beginning to favor this software, even over traditional database management systems.
You can use CRM software for all stages of inbound marketing we’ve covered in this guide. Once you have your engaged and nurtured leads, you will rely on the CRM to close the deal. This closing part of the process is known as the Deal Stage.
The Deal stage is often organized as a sales funnel, rather than a marketing funnel. Leads should have been scored and segmented into buckets by now. Each bucket refers to a lead’s stage in the funnel.
Think of a sales funnel like a board game. Some players are at the beginning, others are in the middle of the board, and some are about to finish the game. As your lead moves down the board or sales funnel, the goal is for them to become a buying customer (i.e. finish the game).
While it differs from software to software, here are the general steps you can expect as your lead navigates that sales funnel:
With your lead relationships built and tended to, you now have to close the deal. CRM software is integral in helping you do so without much manual input. Do remember that not every lead will convert, and that’s okay. With a steady stream of incoming, highly-qualified leads, you can always recover from lead loss.