How Salesforce CRM Can Help Your Business Grow During Recession?

CRMs like Salesforce account for one of the most versatile cloud CRM platforms that offer multiple products for pushing business growth to new limits. By helping streamline process management and decrease costs, Salesforce helps effectively manage sales, marketing, and service functions. And with the recession in sight, Salesforce can prove to be a vital tool for businesses in reducing costs. Businesses that are well-prepared for what’s happening in the market at the macroeconomic level can leverage these uncertain times to secure market share. 

CRM software can transform operational processes, strategy, and business functions. Their goal is to retain customers and boost customer profitability and loyalty. In tough economic environments, maintaining relationships with existing customers becomes pivotal as these customer relationships prove to be an asset to weather economic downturns. The businesses that are able to overcome these economic challenges have important characteristics that make them customer-centric. 

The attributes that make a  business recession-ready include being adaptive, agile, responsive, customer-focused, and diversified, with a minimal staffing footprint, and a high tolerance for change. The business also needs to have inherent attributes of strong cash flow and stable customer foundations that play a key role in its success during a recession. 

Let’s understand how robust CRM solutions like Salesforce can help a business grow in an economic downturn:

• Increasing Customer Loyalty 

During an economic downturn, it is important that you retain your customers for a sustainable and stable operation. Salesforce CRM equips you with in-depth knowledge about your existing customers, their requirements, and issues from marketing and sales, the accounting department, and customer service touchpoints. The insights from these touchpoints when used in an efficient manner, your CRM will help you with the following:

1. Reducing customer attrition
2. Increasing customer loyalty and retention
3. Ensuring high standards of service quality
4. Meeting client expectations

• Optimizing Business Expenses

During a recession, it becomes challenging to sell your services and products as your prospects and clients spend less than usual due to lower demand in the overall economy. Salesforce CRM helps you with your ability to manage your expenses by: 

1. Boosting the profitability of existing customers
2. Decreasing the cost of acquiring new customers
3. Reducing the cost of sales and marketing
4. Optimizing the expenses of your internal productivity
5. Reducing the cost of customer service or cost-to-serve

• Driving More Revenue 

When you have an in-depth and clear understanding of your customer base, you get to be flexible and proactive in the services and products you offer them that meet their expectations. CRM systems with their integrated information help you with the following: 

1. Reducing loss of future customer revenue with the help of flexible packaged offerings that can include services, products, and after-sales support
2. Decreasing fluctuations in recurring streams of revenue by having in place longer-term contracts
3. Decreasing the chances of customers switching with the help of diversified and comprehensive long-term contracts and offerings
4. Ensuring maximum revenue from each and every customer by identifying all the different opportunities compared to individual ones

Don't forget to check out: How can Salesforce CRM be used for Small Businesses?

Customer retention is of key importance when it comes to keeping a business up and running and making profits in an economic downturn. This is because a customer begets another customer. Almost 40 percent of customers share their experiences with the people they know which helps a business flourish and make more sales. CRM software plays a pivotal role in offering top-notch customer service. Trustworthy CRM solutions like Salesforce provide a dashboard and 360-degree view of customers to the business. It helps with customer retention in the following ways: 

• Personalized Experience 

Customers are quick to part ways with a business if they encounter a negative experience with a brand. The way to avoid this is by offering personalized experiences and prompt services to customers. Personalized experiences become all the more important in the event of an economic downturn when customers are busy seeking out low-cost solutions. By conducting customer surveys with the help of your CRM, you can analyze customer sentiment and offer them services and products that best meet their needs. 

• Seamless Onboarding Program 

When you offer your customers a great experience the first time around, they’re bound to return to do business with you. You need to understand that your job does not get over after acquiring a customer. To ensure a long and successful association, you need to devote time and effort to making your onboarding engaging with the help of CRM software. Salesforce CRM can automate manual customer onboarding processes which reduces the wait times for the customers, leaving them with positive word-of-mouth for your brand. 

• Top-Notch Service

Salesforce CRM offers quality customer service throughout the lifecycle of a customer. With the help of Salesforce Service Cloud, the CRM software aims to offer timely and personalized customer service to boost customer engagement, happiness, and satisfaction. By helping you deploy careful marketing and communication strategies, Salesforce helps you create consistency in your brand voice. It helps you keep customers in the loop, especially for issues that can take more than one step to resolve. All this helps with customer retention and business growth during an economic downturn. 

• Adhering To Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

When you sign an SLA with your customer, you assure them that you’ll offer them a mutually agreed upon service. With Salesforce CRM, the customer is guaranteed high service quality and the service provider works within the defined turnaround time (TAT) and responsibilities to ensure enhanced customer satisfaction. Working according to SLA ensures quick issue resolution, seamless end-user experience, predictable resource spending, and more brand royalty.

• Boosting Sales Efficiency Using Forecasting

When the economic conditions are uncertain, sales forecasting can prove to be an efficient way for developing a plan. Sales forecasting helps decrease uncertainty and acts as a mitigation measure by depicting potential problematic areas. When data is used for discovering issues, it becomes easy to resolve them. By combining relevant data, sales forecasting makes way for better decision-making. Nevertheless, for the accurate generation and interpretation of sales forecasts, it is vital to use the right tools. CRMs like Salesforce use AI technology to improve the accuracy of forecasts, track the performance of the sales team, and predict results. To leverage your CRM for the best results, you need to ensure that the data you utilize for building forecasts are reliable and consistent. 

Check out another amazing blog by Alok here: Checklist to Hire the Best Certified Salesforce Developer for Business

Conclusion 

To help your business grow during a recession, it can be beneficial for you to invest in CRM software like Salesforce. This will help you form deeper customer relationships and boost customer retention. Along with retaining customers, your business will avail the benefits of referrals, increase in business productivity, and growth of high-value customer segments. It’s important to note that consistent quality services and customer engagement play a vital role in attracting new customers for your business and beating your competitors during the recession. All this can be effectively attained with the help of quality CRM software like Salesforce.