Effective customer relationship management (CRM) is essential to any successful business. A CRM system enables your company to efficiently manage interactions with current and prospective customers through standardized and streamlined processes. 

Use these 10 best practices to boost your sales and manage your relationships as you scale your business. 

What are the best CRM practices?

Productivity systems can help your employees work smarter, not harder. Likewise, a quality CRM can improve the customer journey at multiple touchpoints by keeping your sales team informed and supported. 

Use the following best practices to your advantage and foster customer loyalty with every interaction:

1. Tailor your CRM strategies

Regardless of the system you choose, remember that a CRM is a tool that best serves your business and customers when it's tailored to your industry. 

When researching available CRMs, evaluate your goals and how specific systems can help you achieve them. Optimize your workflows and leverage intuitive designs to maximize your return on investment. 

2. Optimize your CRM integration 

Speaking of optimization, you should also maximize CRM integrations with your existing business tools. Working together in a single ecosystem reduces errors, ensures consistency, and improves the clarity of cross-team communication.

With Superhuman's CRM integrations, you can reduce context switching and stay focused like never before.. With full customer context from Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive, you can spend less time on CRM updates and more time selling.

3. Invest in employee training

Introducing your employees to your chosen CRM is necessary to ensure access and maintain valuable customer relationships. When your team knows the tools that are at their disposal, they can more actively engage with your clients and improve their user experience. 

Additionally, make sure to update your team on the newest features. Continuous education is just as important as onboarding new employees. 

4. Ensure cross-channel brand consistency

Brand consistency starts with establishing your company's language and tone and integrating it into every customer touchpoint. This strategy only grows in value when you employ a multi-channel marketing approach.

Customers should receive a unified impression of your business, whether they interact with you via social media, live chat, email, or phone. This consistency requires a defined brand persona, and although it requires some development, the return on investment is worth it.

5. Standardize customer intake processes

You only have one chance to make a first impression. As you onboard new customers, ensure you gather the data necessary to maximize future interactions. For example, asking every customer for their birth month can support future marketing campaigns designed to drive engagement for birthdays.

6. Implement automation

Automating specific tasks can reduce human errors and enable your sales team to remain flexible and quickly respond to prospect outreach. Automation works well for tasks that require little — if any — oversight and involve repetition.

Sales professionals live in their inboxes. Superhuman for Sales saves time with features like Auto Summarize, which displays a one-line summary above every conversation, and Instant Reply, which provides three pre-drafted replies to every email in your inbox.

7. Leverage the buyer journey

The key to harnessing the buyer journey is studying how customer behavior changes at each touchpoint. Optimize your interactions via segmentation and personalization to improve retention rates, and use these insights to encourage customers to take the next step toward making a purchase.

8. Establish routine data reviews

Customers come and go, but your customer relationship management can only reach its full potential when it incorporates accurate information. 

Establish a routine for reviewing customer data to ensure it's complete, accurate, and viable. When it's time to deploy a new marketing campaign, you can rest assured that your efforts will be directed at customers who truly want to engage with you. 

9. Perform a CRM strategy audit 

Besides cleaning up your customer data, regular reviews of your company's internal processes regarding customer relationship management can be beneficial. 

What strategies continue to work for you, and which require adjustment? Diving into the data related to your CRM can reveal insights and contribute to more informed decision-making.

10. Develop new CRM strategies

Minor adjustments can redirect your existing CRM strategies, but some situations require a new approach. 

Developing a new strategy begins with identifying what issues require attention and what tactics will achieve your goals. Measuring the success of this strategy — especially when demonstrating its value to stakeholders — is critical to how your CRM practices evolve in the future. 

For example, let's say your team decides to re-engage customers who signed up for a subscription but canceled soon after. Your new strategy consists of a three-pronged approach: surveying one-third of these customers, discounting the monthly subscription fee by 10% for another third, and offering one month free to the final group. 

Gathering data regarding all three approaches and comparing the results can help inform your future campaigns. A multi-prong testing strategy is equally applicable at other points in the sales funnel, as it teaches you how to overcome other roadblocks in the buyer journey.

Why is customer relationship management important? 

Companies that struggle to implement effective CRM best practices risk losing valuable customers and the revenue they represent. Additionally, how your company interacts with its customers says a lot about how you do business, especially in contrast to your competitors.

In practice, CRM systems enable you to guide your customers through the buyer journey and toward conversion. Even as you cultivate new leads, you should foster connections with loyal customers already engaged with your brand. Each interaction between your company and your customers deepens the relationship and builds long-term loyalty and trust. 

Reduce context-switching with Superhuman

Deals happen in the inbox — so it's critical that your CRM solution integrates well with email. 

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