Business is usually associated with risks but is there a way to minimize risk-taking while maintaining prosperity? The answer is trust.

But trust goes both ways: Customers have to trust the business and the business needs to learn to trust its clients. Where does CRM stand in this equation?

Trusting Customers

• Quantifying Trust

You have attended a very high profile networking conference where you met clients of all sorts. You updated your contact book and gave yourself a mental high five for all the prospect leads you have gathered. Is it enough?

Not all leads are the same. Old clients with whom you have successfully completed deals before feel more trust-worthy –and they should.  Also, new leads with quick response rates take priority over the cold ones.  Maybe you want to prioritize leads that can potentially yield the highest profit. This is where a CRM can quantify trust and reputation.

“Quantifying trust” might seem like a dubious expression at first, but if the key to trust is indeed consistency, CRMs are the best tools to track, visualize and quantify trust.

Monitoring deals through all phases of the sales pipeline allows you, and the CRM, to gather key information about your leads. Factors like purchase history, lead’s source, contact history and others give the CRM ample information to forecast the likelihood of a lead to convert into a deal.

If you find yourself unable to close certain deals, the visualization of the Sales Pipeline will help you identify precisely where they fell through. In future opportunities, you will be reminded to proceed with extra caution or even drop the deals if they have the reputation of falling through.

• Customized Leads = Personal Leads

A sign that your business has seamlessly implemented the CRM into its workflows is when leads’ profiles reflect all of the information you have gathered about them. In fact, smart systems like CRMs provide more utility the more information you give them.  For example, once your leads are well customized, a quick look at them should help you sort clients according to conversion rates, deal-based reputation, association with other deals and contacts or even overall profitability.

Email and other integrations  are another source of information to customize your leads. Keeping track of emails, social media mentions, LinkedIn connections will alert you when a lead is inching in closer to conversion. It is also an excellent way to keep track of leads’ response rates and online interactivity with the business.

As we discussed in a previous article, having one platform solely dedicated to managing customer relationships will help your staff, and business in general, get accustomed to virtualizing customers’ details.  As a result, consistency of use and integration of CRM into business workflows will make discerning trust and reputation an intuitive procedure.

Related: 4 Traits of a Trustworthy Customer Relationship Management Platform

Earning Customers’ Trust

• Knowing Your Customers

A CRM helps foster clients’ trust in your business. As a customer-centric app, CRMs allow businesses to approach each client separately based on their needs, their purchase history and the nature of previously closed deals.  Likewise, knowing what each customer wants effectively eliminates the need for generic marketing campaigns that have the tendency to alienate clients.

• Closely Monitoring Deals.

Miscommunications over who’s responsible of certain aspects of the deal are unfortunately very common. Small lapses of attention like that are how deals are sometimes left unattended, until they fall through.

Team Collaboration tools, like the one Teamgate offers, allow you to assign deals to individual staff or entire teams. The deal’s primary owner can assign and monitor each aspect of deal to make sure no glare mistakes could affect the customer’s trust in the business.

• Setting Goals and Meeting them

Customer-centric goal setting can help you sustain excellent performance when it comes to meeting deadlines, following up on deals, customer support and overall organization. You can also discern your best performing employees and assign them to your top clients. Alternately, choose staff with a good record of customer-support and assign to them tasks appropriate to their performance.

Clients can tell how organized and dedicated your business is based on the service they receive. With consistent CRM use, you should see a noticeable increase in customer satisfaction and client-retention thanks the trust you have earned.

Most of the images used in our blogs are from Teamgate. As an application dedicated to customer relationship, we understand the importance trust holds in business and we made sure our app embodies this commitment.