As an insurance agent, customer relations play a major role in your business’s success. While a robust customer relationship management software (CRM) is essential, the software will only do so much. In order to effectively boost your customer relations, you need to have a clear CRM strategy in place. But what exactly is a CRM strategy? How can you implement a CRM strategy that is successful for your business?
What is a CRM strategy?
Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms are a technology designed to help you manage all of your company’s lead and customer relationships and interactions. The goal of a quality CRM is to help you nurture and manage all these interactions in a centralized location. But the software platform is only part of the process. A CRM strategy is a company-wide plan utilizing the CRM with the goal of enhancing customer relationships, reducing company costs, and increasing revenues and profit.
Benefits of a CRM tool for your business
A quality, industry-specific CRM can be a valuable tool for your business. From boosting your productivity and allowing for better contact organization to helping to gain a better understanding of your target audience and comprehensive company analysis, a CRM offers a wide array of quality tools to help boost customer relationships and increase your bottom line.
Here are just a few of the powerful benefits the right CRM can offer your business.
- Increased productivity and efficiency: Through tools like automation and targeted data, CRM allows your team the time to focus more on the customer and meeting their direct needs.
- Lead management: Nurturing leads is essential and lead management ensures that no lead slips through the cracks.
- Improved customer relationships: CRM software helps to ensure that you have all the customer information you need at the touch of a button, helping to ensure they get the quality customer service they deserve.
- Segment contacts: A large contact list is great for any business but searching through a large list for a specific audience can be time-consuming and counterproductive. Segmentation allows you to organize contacts and automate many tasks based on specific segments.
- Organize and centralize client data: Enables you and all your team members to have access to up-to-date customer information with the touch of a button.
Gain a better understanding of your clients: With powerful data analysis, a CRM can provide insight into who your customers and target audience really are. It can show you what campaigns work and what you should be doing to meet your client’s needs. - Boost current and future sales: By simplifying and streamlining many aspects of the sales process, a CRM can help boost current and future sales.
- Promote client retention: Letting contacts fall through the cracks is an easy way to lose clients. Your CRM helps to ensure that no client feels forgotten.
- Simplified collaboration: Team coordination can often be difficult, especially when agents are not always in the office. CRM helps facilitate team collaboration.
For a more in-depth look at the many benefits a CRM can offer your business, read “Benefits of CRM Software for Your Insurance Agency.”
Ways to improve your CRM strategy
Once you have a CRM in place, it is time to create your strategy. Here we look at some of the top ways you can create and improve your CRM strategy.
1. Establish your goals
When creating your CRM strategy, it is essential, to begin with establishing your business goals and exactly what you want to achieve with your CRM. When establishing your goals, you want to keep the acronym SMART in mind: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. An example could be something like improving your email click-through rate by 15% before the end of the year. Here you have a specific goal that is measurable, achievable with the right tools in place, is relevant to your bottom line, and has an established time frame.
2. Run an audit
Once your goals are set, you want to perform a complete audit of your business. This includes taking a closer look at your market, analyzing your competition, evaluating all your current internal and external processes, and looking closely at your company’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities available.
3. Outline your sales process
The next step is to take a comprehensive look at your sales pipeline and the different stages that a lead goes through before conversion. Here you can make sure that specific team members are assigned to different stages, helping to ensure that the client is taken care of through every stage of the process.
4. Specify target audience
Through CRM analytics, you will quickly learn which contacts are more likely to convert. Once you see a clearer picture of this, you are better able to specify your target audience. Once identified, you can segment your leads based on these target audiences.
5. Prioritize prospects and customers
Through your CRM, you can segment leads and customers into different groups based on specific traits. As you learn more about your target audience, you can segment these groups based on how valuable they are as a potential or returning customer and focus your attention on those segments that are more likely to convert.
6. Leverage data
With all of your customer data centralized within your CRM, it is much easier to consolidate all the information from various departments and see a clearer picture. Because every team member has access to a customer’s entire customer interaction history, it allows the team members to quickly access information, increasing productivity and efficiency all while providing a better experience for the client.
7. Automation
Data entry can be a time-consuming process for you and your team members. Automation within the CRM allows you to automate many aspects of your sales pipeline. Instead of entering new lead data, for example, you can have your website lead capture forms automatically sync with the CRM and populate the new data. In addition, email marketing campaigns can be automatically scheduled to specific client segments, leaving more time for your team to focus on nurturing client relationships and closing deals.
8. Effectively train your team
A quality CRM and CRM strategy work best when all team members understand how it works and the important role it plays in their success and that of the business. All team members, from agents to front desk staff and anyone who deals directly with clients must have a thorough understanding of how the CRM works and what the goals are. To get the most out of your CRM and your CRM strategy, every member of your team must have the knowledge they need to make the system successful and effective.
9. Track campaign performance
With the CRM’s reporting and analytics features, you are able to closely track the performance of team members and marketing campaigns to see what is working, what may need some adjustments, and if you are on track to meet your company goals.
Boost your business with an Insurance CRM and strategy
A quality, industry-specific CRM with a strong CRM strategy in place can make the world of difference when it comes to customer relationships and business success. For those in the insurance industry, Better Agency’s Insurance CRM was created by insurance agents with the insurance industry in mind. We offer the tools you need in a CRM to achieve your business goals and find the success you strive for. To learn more about Better Agency’s CRM, schedule a call with us today.
