Perpetually, Sales teams across the world are up against the same common goal: sell, sell, and sell! It is no surprise that a huge majority of salespeople spend most of their time on customer acquisition. After all, it is the fastest method to increase the revenue of a company and we all know that more customers mean more money. Wait a minute! Is this also the best approach for the long term? Well, not exactly. Read on to find more.
To create lasting growth, sales teams must have clearly-defined strategies for not only acquiring customers but also to retain them. After all, Customer retention increases the lifetime value of customers and helps you nurture long-lasting, mutually-beneficial relationships with your customers.
Focusing on customer retention can increase total customers by 1.5x over a period of 18-24 months, minimize customer acquisition costs by a staggering 30 percent, and increase revenue by as much as a whopping 80 percent.
It is also important to remember that keeping customers happy and satisfied for longer can have a huge and meaningful impact on the top line of your business.
A recent report by Forbes that was inspired by a global study of over 300 media and retail executives and CEOs suggested that publishers and retailers that increased their spending on retention in the last one to three years managed to experience 200 percent higher likelihood of increasing their share in the market in the last year over those spending more on acquiring new customers.
This is primarily because loyal customers tend to spend more per order and focusing on retention reduces churn that means you will need fewer new customers to increase the customer base.
Why is Customer Retention important?
When strategies are implemented by sales teams to retain customers, revenue goes up and costs go down. This is an ideal environment in which every business would prefer to operate. Furthermore, it is almost 7x more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain the existing ones. Usually, the likelihood of converting a new lead is 5 to 20 percent as opposed to 60 to 70 percent of converting an existing customer into a repeat customer. In short, it makes financial sense for every business to emphasize strongly on customer retention.
However, customer retention is not a simple task by any standard as businesses have to repeatedly earn the trust of existing customers by prioritizing their experiences and requirements, and eventually their loyalty. Fortunately, Salesforce can help you make this easy and possible.
Ways of Using Salesforce for Customer Retention
Salesforce can be strategically used by Sales teams to dramatically improve customer retention rates, sales, and eventually profits. This can be done by tracking customer interactions, integrating customer service tools, identifying profitable avenues, eliminating the sales roadblocks, centralizing customer data, personalizing customer communication, and engaging with inactive customers.
Centralizing Customer Data
There is no denying the fact that data is the lifeline of every business in today’s tech-savvy world. This is primarily due to the fact that data empowers the decision makers to make critical decisions, helps sales and marketing teams to take corresponding actions, keeps the systems moving like a breeze. Accurate, up-to-date, and relevant data is critical in the world of sales to hit revenue goals and build lasting customer relationships.
You can centralize all customer data sources into a single location by using Salesforce. This may include email inboxes and VoIP systems that can be integrated with a wide array of Salesforce products, services, and solutions to save notes, emails, and other customer records. The primary purpose of creating and maintaining a centralized view of the history of a customer with your business is to help teams make time-bound, critical, and better business decisions.
Identifying the Key Points
Every customer in this world expects and deserves great customer services and personalized content in today’s tech-savvy world. With Salesforce, it is extremely easy to track the buying behavior and every interaction of a customer that in turn assists a business to reconnect with customers. Moreover, timely identification of key points also helps in addressing customer concerns immediately.
Recognize the Loopholes
Two of the biggest reasons why customers leave are bad customer support and delayed services. A business can reap the optimum advantages of Salesforce Wave Analytics to draw deeper and meaningful insights by understanding customer behavior. In real time, Salesforce Field Service Lightning can be used for communicating with the delivery drivers that further translates into stimulating reductions in delayed deliveries.
Appexchange Tools
Timeline manager app: Cloud Analogy’s Notes and Timeline manager app helps keep you a complete track of existing clients, leads, opportunities, timeline conversations in emails, notes, attachments, SMS, Calls/Meetings, etc.
Desk Sync by Cloud Analogy: Syncing Salesforce accounts and cases with Desk.com customers and cases just get easy with Desk Sync by Cloud Analogy. Ideal to migrate a small set of records, this highly effective tool helps you avoid the otherwise-complicated processes of uploading and downloading.
Multi Utility by Cloud Analogy: Get all critical utility tools at your fingertips. Using Multi Utility by Cloud Analogy, you can make the most out of useful tools such as Time zone clocks, Task Manager, Todos, Calculator, etc.
Feedback Forms: Salesforce CRM has several out-of-the-box features along with sites and communities so that it is easy for you to implement feedback, survey forms, etc. This helps you keep track of clients who may have something important to share with you such as feedback and things on which your business can improve.
Conclusion
There is no denying the fact that customers are the biggest assets for every company and they need to be taken care of. A business can easily increase its chances to succeed in today’s competitive business environment to create and nurture customer relations by adopting efficient customer relationship management tools. Trust Salesforce CRM to identify the problem areas, track every customer interaction, and provide feasible solutions for making your business more profitable and retaining your customers for longer.
Nitish Bharadwaj
Salesforce Principal Consultant | Chief Information Officer
An experienced Salesforce.com professional with 5+ years of experience in consulting on and delivering Salesforce projects for mid size, large and very large customers.Hire the best Salesforce Implementation Partner. Choose certified Salesforce Implementation Experts from Cloud Analogy now.
very useful blog.
Hey Raymond, Thanks for your kind words. We’re glad you found our content informative and helpful, and we look forward to sharing more with you.
Keep reading 🙂