Customer relationship management (CRM) has become all but essential for modern businesses. Building solid relationships with key decision-makers within your customer accounts can drive the success of your organization, improve customer retention, and create opportunities for future growth.
Discover how relationship management can help your business succeed and how the right CRM system can help you close more deals faster.
What is relationship management?
Relationship management, also referred to as customer relationship management, is the strategy and process of managing and optimizing a business's interactions with its customers. Customer relationship management can happen in both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) organizations.
Relationship management aims to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention, while ultimately increasing revenue growth by cultivating strong partnerships between a business and its customers.
How does relationship management work?
Maintaining strong relationships with customers is a key component to building a strong business. And that’s the crux of relationship management. When your customers feel your business is responsive to their needs, they're more likely to work with you again and refer their peers to you.
To do this, you need to step away from the traditional sales-first approach to business and adopt a relational approach. Be consistent with your customers—reach out to them regularly to identify ways you can help them with their business.
Learning how to communicate with others effectively is essential if your sales reps want to create good relationships with customers. Even if your interpersonal skills are top-notch, spending some time sharpening those skills and keeping them up-to-date with modern nuances always helps.
There are four primary outcomes to effective relationship management:
- Customer retention: Are your customers repeat customers? Do you re-engage with them for new sales or contracts?
- Customer loyalty: Are your customers champions for your business? Do you get referrals to new customers from them?
- Profitability: How much total profit is earned by a specific customer?
- Customer satisfaction: Are your customers happy with your goods and services?
Building and nurturing a positive relationship with your customers takes time, but you can streamline the process by investing in customer relationship management software.
What's the purpose of customer relationship management (CRM) software?
Organizations use customer relationship management (CRM) software to track, organize, and automate customer-related business functions like lead generation, forecasting, sales, and more. The software also tracks customer interactions and measures the value of business relationships to increase profitability.
A CRM involves a lot of data—every email, every call, every in-person meeting, and every time you interact with a customer is a new data point. Trying to do this manually will cost your business time and money. With a CRM platform like Affinity, Salesforce, or HubSpot, you can automate customer information and data collection and analysis.
Developing good relationships and keeping track of current and potential customers is an integral part of any CRM software. Some of the other functions you should look for in a CRM include:
- Provides you with automated metrics on different aspects of your business. This includes generating reports to help forecast and plan for the future.
- Allows you to store all customer information in one place so the information is easily updated and accessible for the whole team.
- Automatically syncs your email, calendar, and event data with customer accounts to keep records up-to-date with all relevant information.
- Shows you a full history of your company's interactions with a customer, so you can use this data to inform how you approach them.
- Allows your team to understand the nature of communications with each customer.
- Alongside relationship data, documents transactional information so you can understand what customers have purchased, their lifetime value, purchase(s) value, etc.
At the end of the day, a CRM system aims to improve the customer experience so you can close more deals and increase your business's profitability.
What are the benefits of CRMs?
A CRM system offers many benefits to help you better understand and manage your customers. With the right CRM in place, your data will be complete, accurate, and up-to-date, so you can continue to grow your business—and your revenue—through the power of positive customer relationships.
Here are some of the benefits of CRM software.
Improve data organization
The more information you can gather and analyze about your customers, the better you'll be able to support them through the customer journey. Whenever you have an email, phone call, or meeting with a customer, your organization should document and record it. You could do this with spreadsheets, whiteboards, and sticky notes, but to truly harness the power of your data, you need to invest in organizational technology, like a CRM.
A CRM can accurately track, organize, and manage your data, even when your team is handling hundreds or thousands of customer accounts. No more sorting through stacks of file folders—you can search for a customer name and get all the historical data you need. And thanks to the cloud, you can access this data anywhere in the world, and all your team members can have the same access.
With a CRM, you can rest assured that no matter who at your company is working on a customer account, they can easily find the data they need. This saves your company and your customer's time and drives sales productivity.
Automate repetitive tasks
A staggering 90% of employees feel burdened with repetitive tasks that can easily be automated. Hundreds of small tasks go into closing a deal—reports must be compiled, emails must be sent, and legalese must be parsed. These additional tasks may seem unrelated to completing a sale, but they're the time-consuming tasks that are essential to the sales process.
The best CRMs will automate these repetitive tasks so salespeople can become more efficient, focusing on finding new leads and closing revenue-generating deals. With the right CRM integrations, you can take the time-saving power of automation one step further. With Affinity for Salesforce, for example, each user saves 200 hours of manual CRM work per year.
Enhance the customer experience
Every team member can provide the same level of service to your customers because they have easy access to all the customer data and relationship information in your CRM.
Whether they've worked with the customer before or it’s their first time speaking with them, a seller can approach the conversation with all the historical knowledge thanks to your customer account data. Team members will know if they're speaking with a stakeholder or decision-maker; they'll know the last time your company contacted that customer, and even have an idea of the strength of the customer relationship.
They'll have everything they need when speaking with said customer to move a deal forward (or build an account plan).
Become more efficient and productive
With the help of automation and an organized central data hub, it becomes much easier for sales teams to be more efficient and productive in their work. They're no longer scanning endless emails to find the one email where a customer mentioned critical information. Instead, they head to the CRM, search for the customer, and find the data exactly where they left it.
When you use your CRM effectively, you'll always have the data you need in one central location.
How to get the most out of your customer relationship management system
A CRM is an essential tool for all B2B organizations. It becomes your central hub for managing customer relationships, tracking interactions, and finding new and innovative ways to close deals.
But, to unlock the true potential of your CRM, you need to optimize your CRM strategies. These strategies will help you improve the effectiveness of your CRM so you can build strong customer relationships and increase revenue.
Keep your CRM data clean
Clean CRM data is data that is accurate, complete, and up-to-date. When your data is inaccurate or outdated, you risk making poor decisions that seem like sound decisions.
Commit to regularly cleaning your CRM database—remove duplicate or outdated data and ensure your data fields are standardized across your organization to keep records consistent. You can also consider implementing data validation rules to prevent incorrect or inconsistent data from entering your CRM.
Create workflows that work for you
CRM platforms have various customization options to help you create workflows and processes supporting your unique business needs. Depending on your CRM, there are different ways to use workflows.
Consider automating repetitive tasks like follow-up emails using an automated workflow. Or streamline your sales cycle by defining the required processes that should take place at each funnel stage.
By customizing workflows, you'll save time and money and provide your customers with tailored support that meets their business needs.
Train your employees
If you're investing in the cost of a CRM for your organization, it's worthwhile to invest in training for your team members. You want to ensure that all team members understand your CRM's capabilities and best practices. When you train your employees effectively, they can get the most out of CRM, making them more efficient and productive.
Provide onboarding training and one-on-one sessions, and share additional educational resources like webinars and tutorials that team members can explore. When every member of your organization knows how to get the most out of your CRM, you can improve adoption and maximize the power of your data.
Find the right CRM tools to support your team
Finding the right tools to support your CRM can enhance data visibility and organization-wide adoption. Integrations and third-party tools can help with everything from customer support to data enrichment to marketing automation.
To get the best return on your investment, look for tools that integrate seamlessly and add flexibility to how you can use your CRM. The right integrations will make it easier for your team to input data, simplify customer support tracking, and improve collaboration throughout your organization.
Get the most from your CRM with Affinity for Salesforce
If you're looking for the perfect tool to integrate with Salesforce, look no further than Affinity for Salesforce.
A recent Affinity survey revealed that 73% of Sales/Ops employees believe that record creation and making updates in a CRM takes up too much of their team's time.* Affinity for Salesforce saves each of your team members 200 hours per year in manual data entry by automatically parsing your email and calendar data to create and update Salesforce records.
It also provides valuable, automatic insights via relationship intelligence that uncover warm introductions so you go into every customer interaction with all the context and understanding you need to close your deals 25% faster.
Improve CRM adoption and ROI with Affinity for Salesforce.
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Relationship management FAQs
What is the goal of relationship management?
The goal of relationship management is to create a partnership between an organization and the people it works with, whether they’re B2B or B2C. It aims to have the relationship between business and customer seen as more than just transactional. This is achieved through sales, customer service, and data analysis and often requires organizations to maintain up-to-date customer records.
How do you succeed in relationship management?
There are a lot of skills that you can work on to improve your relationship management skills. First and foremost, you want to ensure you are effectively communicating with your customers so that you have the opportunity to build relationships with them. Some additional skills that make for successful relationship management include:
- Active listening skills: Listening to more than just the words a person is saying. This involves observing verbal and non-verbal messages and providing appropriate feedback.
- Emotional intelligence: The ability to be aware of, control, and express emotions and to recognize and respond appropriately to the emotions of others.
- Empathy: The ability to understand and share the feelings of another person.
- Interpersonal skills: Communicating effectively and appropriately with others to develop relationships.
- Networking skills: The qualities that enable you to establish and maintain professional and social relationships.
- Non-verbal communication skills: Communicating without words through things like eye contact, body language, voice, etc.
- Verbal communication skills: Communicating using words.
Why should you use a CRM system to support your sales team?
You should use a CRM to support your sales team because it can help your sales team improve efficiency and increase revenue. It gives you the information you need to understand and organize your sales leads so your team can effectively prioritize opportunities. It also allows you to create richer customer records that give you the information you need to find new revenue opportunities within your existing customer accounts.
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* Data from Affinity’s 2024 survey of 250+ business leaders across investment banking, media and communications, real estate, professional services, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and enterprise technology.
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