Unleash Business Potential with Unified CRM strategy

Unleash Business Potential with Unified CRM

The power of a Unified CRM like automateCRM is not just in eliminating multiple software headaches. In fact, it is a single platform that streamlines lead management, personalizes customer journeys, and empowers collaboration across your entire organization.

A unified CRM strategy might be the missing piece to your business to transform how you connect with and convert customers. This blog post dives into the world of unified CRMs, exploring the pain points they solve, the benefits they offer, and the impressive results they can deliver for your business.

What is a Unified CRM?

A unified CRM, is a customer relationship management software that goes beyond the concept of a Sales CRM. It enables you to streamline and automate the entire customer journey, from Lead to Loyalty. The result are 10x smoother, frictionless customer journeys.

The possibilities of a unified CRM encapsulate all the tasks a business performs throughout the sales cycle and beyond. This, in turn, creates improved customer relationships with CRM, ensuring growth in sales and customer satisfaction.

Existing pain points and solutions

In today’s competitive business landscape, maintaining customer relationships is of paramount importance. Your entire business pivots on your customers’ experience with your marketing, sales, and customer support teams. It also relies on optimizing the backend processes that support the customer journey.

However, managing customer interactions across multiple platforms can be difficult. Talking to prospects on various channels and ensuring a unified customer profile with 100% accurate customer information can be challenging. And for customer-facing teams, establishing a database of the latest and updated customer information can be daunting.

Enter the unified CRM – a platform that streamlines your entire business process and empowers you to deliver outstanding customer experiences. It addresses the following pain points:

Pain point	Solution
Data silos – Scattered customer data across different tools (email, marketing automation, sales software) creates a fragmented view, hindering informed decision-making and positive customer experiences.	A unified CRM becomes the single source of truth, eliminating data silos and providing a complete picture of each customer and their interactions. It acts as a unified data platform, the only thing that needs to be referred to before making a decision.
Inefficient communication – Lack of a central platform forces different teams to switch between tools, leading to wasted time, missed connections, and data duplication.	Teams collaborate seamlessly on shared data within a centralized platform, ensuring everyone can access the same information. This fosters streamlined communication and responsiveness and even prevents confusion.
Disjointed customer experiences – Inconsistent interactions with customers across multiple channels, such as emails, phone calls, etc., lead to incomplete or inaccurate customer updates. This leaves customers feeling frustrated and undervalued.	Customer interactions become consistent across all touchpoints. Furthermore, the data unification enables personalized customer service, leading to stronger relationships and improved satisfaction.
Limited or hindered visibility – Difficulty tracking customer journeys and measuring ROI across various platforms hinders effective marketing and sales strategies.	Powerful analytics on customer behavior and campaign performance resulting from comprehensive and single customer view empower teams to create more powerful marketing and sales strategies. This, in turn, improves ROI by attracting more customers.

Example: With vs. without a unified CRM

Let’s assume Athme Inc. is a brand that sells women’s athletic wear, and its target audience is female athletes and sportswomen of all levels. Here’s what the business would look like with and without a unified CRM.

Without a Unified CRM

Without a unified CRM in place, Athme would be struggling with the challenges of a fragmented customer journey.

Website: Prospect browses the website and adds items to the cart but abandons them without making a purchase. Limited customer information is captured in this case.
Social media: Prospects engage with the brand through comments and likes on social platforms. Their information is siloed on these platforms, offering little to no room for further interaction.
Email marketing: The marketing team blasts generic email campaigns to everyone. No segmentation is done based on the prospects’ preferences or behavior, reducing the performance of the campaigns.
Customer service: Customer interactions are handled by team members individually with no single customer view or centralization of touchpoints.

Limited customer understanding: No centralized view of customer data, interactions, behavior, or preferences hinders personalized marketing and targeted offers. It also creates confusion between team members when it comes to customer service, leading to poor customer experiences.
Inefficient communication: Multiple communication platforms create confusion and delay in responses. No single view of customer engagement hinders the ability to provide personalized responses on time.
Missed sales opportunities: Not leveraging information about the prospects’ behavior on the website creates a gap in understanding their preferences. Therefore, when carts are abandoned, a lack of personalized follow-up leads to lost conversions.

With Unified CRM

If Athme Inc. uses a unified CRM, they could tackle the above mentioned challenges and even those that go beyond marketing and sales. Let’s look at the situation at Athme with a unified CRM in place.

Unified customer profile: All customer data (website interactions, purchase history, social media engagement, email interactions, and support tickets) is integrated into a single platform. This offers a single view of the entire customer journey.
Data-driven marketing efforts: Customer behavior data helps Athme better understand its audience, optimize marketing campaigns based on customer interests, and develop targeted product offerings.
Streamlined sales process: capture leads from web, WhatsApp, email, and calls into a single customer timeline; auto-assign, score, and schedule follow-ups; and move from quote to order to project without losing context. AI flags buying intent, drafts next steps, and summarizes accounts so reps focus on closing. Real-time dashboards and forecasts keep targets on track while automation clears admin work—shorter cycles, higher win rates, and a smoother path from first touch to renewal.
Personalization: Customers receive relevant recommendations, targeted promotions, and prompt support, fostering boosted conversions, loyalty, and repeat business.
Benefits beyond marketing and sales:

- Improved customer service: Single view of customer interactions enables customer service reps at Athme to link queries and complaints from multiple platforms to a single record. This helps them understand the issue in-depth and expedite the resolution.

- Inventory management: Real-time customer purchase data informs inventory management, reducing stockouts and optimizing manufacturing based on consumer demand.
- Customer loyalty programs: Unified CRM facilitates creating and managing loyalty programs, rewarding repeat customers, and encouraging brand advocacy.
- Performance analysis: Data insights from the unified CRM allow Athme to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, sales efforts, and customer service interactions, enabling continuous improvement of the overall business.

To summarize, Athme can get a 360-degree customer view, embrace personalization, and optimize sales and marketing by implementing a unified CRM, eventually helping them unlock the full potential of their business.

What is a unified CRM strategy

A unified CRM strategy goes beyond marketing and sales. It involves employing a unified CRM to holistically compile customer interactions across the entire customer journey, offering a single, unified view of customer information.

Difference between traditional and unified CRM strategy

A traditional CRM strategy focuses on optimizing interactions within specific departments, like marketing automation for lead generation or sales pipeline management. It views the customer journey through departmental lenses.

A unified CRM strategy broadens the perspective, encompassing the entire customer lifecycle. It treats customer interactions as interconnected and aims to provide a seamless, consistent experience across all touchpoints.

Results of traditional vs. unified CRM strategy

It primarily measures success through increased sales figures and marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

While sales and marketing remain crucial, a unified approach measures success holistically. It considers customer satisfaction, loyalty, and lifetime value, fostering long-term relationships.

Benefits of implementing unified CRM strategy

A unified CRM strategy unfolds several benefits for businesses, resulting in positive departmental and overall outcomes.

Ease of learning or adoption

It can be daunting for employees to adapt to using a new system for day-to-day work. However, a unified CRM doesn’t have to be complicated. Instead, it simplifies tasks and is “easier” to learn and use.

Reduced learning curve: Replacing multiple systems with a single platform means a simpler user interface that reduces the learning curve for employees. Even if transitioning from different departments, they don’t have to accustom themselves to new systems because a unified CRM has gathered all the information in a single platform.
Team collaboration: By making all the customer data available under a single umbrella, you can reduce friction between teams, promoting effective collaboration. Thus, inter-team collaboration becomes “easier”.
Streamlined process across departments: By implementing a unified CRM, you foster an environment that prefers a streamlined system that transcends across departments. This unified approach makes it “easier” to achieve ultimate business goals.

Integrated commerce data

One of the most significant benefits of implementing a unified CRM strategy in your business is direct access to commerce data on the CRM platform. This leads to multifold benefits.

Bridging the gap between the front and back end: You can integrate payment solutions directly into the unified CRM, bridging the gap between the front end (website interface) and the back end (billing) of your business. As a result of this integration, there is better operational efficiency across teams, and you can achieve streamlined deal closure.
Sync between sales and finance: The finance team gets enhanced visibility into the incoming revenue, enabling them to simplify budgeting. It also helps them track and recognize revenue based on completed transactions, ensuring efficient financial reporting and compliance. For the sales team, it becomes easier to forecast future sales, enabling informed inventory management and resource allocation.
Revealing deeper insights: With the help of a commerce-powered CRM, you get access to billing data that uncovers deeper insights such as what product is being bought most and least, when the customer last bought from you, etc. These insights help you segment your customers and target them better.
Connecting dots between quotes and revenue: The unified CRM strategy helps you trace a sale down from the first step of raising a quotation to the revenue generated. This level of transparency draws a clear picture for the auditing team.

Cross-functional data access

Collaboration between cross-functional teams is an apparent benefit. However, cross-functional data access brings an even bigger advantage through a unified CRM strategy.

Shared understanding: Accessing the same customer journey data (e.g., purchase history and interactions with other departments) allows teams to see the bigger picture and understand the customer’s experience from different perspectives.
Informed decision-making: With access to relevant data, teams can make informed decisions considering the impact on other departments and the overall customer experience. This eliminates the risk of working in silos and making decisions in isolation.

Easier and effective automation

A unified CRM strategy enforces standardized processes across departments. This standardization creates well-defined workflows that can be readily translated into automated processes. Let’s understand this with the earlier example of Athme Inc.:

Previously, Athme used separate systems for marketing, sales, and customer service. This led to inconsistent lead data from different systems. Also, sales reps had to identify leads and follow up with them manually.

Athme centralizes all the lead/prospect/customer data by implementing a unified CRM strategy, standardizing the lead qualification criteria, which the unified CRM automatically mirrors. Sales reps no longer have to do the manual work of identifying MQLs. Next, pre-defined follow-up emails triggered based on the lead status eliminate the need for manual follow-ups.

Results of having a unified CRM strategy

With the help of a unified, you improve not only the customer experience but also employee productivity. All your teams switch to data-backed decision-making, which is a more effective way of increasing efficiency and sales while reducing costs.

Final word: A unified CRM strategy is the way to transform your business

A unified CRM strategy empowers a more customer-centric, efficient, and data-driven organization, leading to improved business performance and increased profitability, 10x smoother customer journeys.