Businesses belonging to the manufacturing industry need to stick to what they are good at it. There is more need to focus on things like production, distribution, and supply chain. Normally, marketing businesses think that marketing automation and customer relationship management are just for software firms and they need to focus on their particular industry alone.
Just because manufacturing companies focus on their industry doesn’t mean that they can’t benefit from using a CRM. As the manufacturing industry is as large as it is, CRM offers tailored solutions which provide the capabilities you never had before. If you are not into using manufacturing CRM, first consider what a CRM can do for you.
Better customer service
One of the major reasons CRM solutions exist in the first place is to definitely improve customer experience. No matter what industry you are, a good CRM can help with improving your customer service. Retaining customers, in particular when your business is big, starts with ensuring consistent customer satisfaction. When your customers aren’t happy with your services, you need to be proactive to address their concern to make them happy again.
One crucial area of customer service that requires attention is the data organization. When a customer calls in for help, you don’t want to keep them in wait for 10 minutes as your customer service team searches high to low for what should be a simple answer. By providing your customer service team with a CRM, it helps them to look up all required information within no time and relay it to the customer.
Accurate sales projections
Accurately predicting what will happen in your business in a given time is the hardest part of it. Luckily, a manufacturing CRM can do such kind of work for you. A CRM tool tracks all orders your prospectus place and you have the complete record of what people order, how much it costs and when the order was placed and so on. By using these records, CRM creates better sales projects.
Planning for the future
Speaking about future planning for your business growth, sales projections involve more than just your sales team to plan for the year ahead. Production planning is interconnected with selling, if you don’t know how much you sell, product planning becomes quite vague. But by using an innovative CRM software, for example, second CRM gives data including the amount of products ordered and when the order was placed, so you can effectively create a well-detailed production plan. With smart product plan for the year, you can set a clear budget based on the forecasted production costs. And with a proper budget, you can better plan for future, equipment upgrades, hires, and more.
More sales
When you have your customer’s buying patterns clear front, that data can be leveraged to improve your sales. This is a trickle-down effect CRM offers. Later, this information can be used by your sales team to figure out the peak order times and downtimes and use this info for up-selling and cross-selling. During some customer’s peak ordering time, your team can contact them to cross-sell extra products and services to utilize those patterns. Likewise, during slow sales times, you can try up-selling to increase the order frequency of your regular customers.
Reasons why manufacturers need CRM
Using a CRM is a no-brainer but great results can be achieved by manufacturing businesses with an integrated CRM system. There are several features and modules in a CRM that can be implemented to take of the specific challenges that arise within a manufacturing company.
- A CRM solution makes it easy to track the profitability history of each customer. With the info, the sales and marketing team can easily find top customers to target and managers can view where efficiencies need to be made.
- Centralized lead management by extracting lead info from website forms, email and social media profiles and automatically feed your distributors with interested prospectus without any delay.
- Easily integrate online warranty registration form in the website so that customers can fill on their own and CRM captures the full info in your backend system. This allows manufacturers to build close relationships with end customers.
- Track warranty expiry dates for your customers with automated notifications for extended support.
- Manage contract and renewals with suppliers easily and all in a centralized location. CRM’s customer service module is all that you need to offer consistent and timely customer support to avoid any knock-off effects. Additionally, keep all e-documents in a single place and easily retrieve all whenever required.
Manufacturing and distribution businesses are quite diverse and the challenges they face are also big. For today’s manufacturers, they need a great customer relationship management solution to master the new way of doing things. CRM solutions for manufacturers are to help them have a detailed understanding of the needs and expectations of their prospectus. At the same time, a CRM such as Second CRM enables them to improve customer relations which turn out to be a benefit for both.