7 Reasons Why CRM is Important for Your Growth Strategy in 2024

There are many reasons why CRM is important to businesses of all sizes and from all industries. CRM software acts as a central tools for gathering customer insights, building lasting relationships, and streamlining sales processes.

Without it, your business growth may be hindered by operational inefficiencies, poor customer service, and missed opportunities. With 74% of US businesses using CRM already, there’s a fair chance your competitors could gain an edge by making informed, data-driven decisions thanks to implementing a CRM.

Many companies still rely on outdated or manual processes that hold them back — often because they’re unaware of how a CRM can fuel growth or are wary of additional financial investment. The truth is that adopting a CRM can actually improve your bottom lines as it has such a quick ROI. Below, I’ll cover 7 ways a CRM can help your business thrive in 2024 without costing the earth.

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. 7 Reasons Why CRM is Important for Your Growth Strategy
3. 1. Helps You Generate the Right Leads
4. 2. Enhances Customer Communications and Support
5. 3. Improves Engagement and Decision-Making
6. 4. Generates More Revenue From Existing Customers
7. 5. Benefits Multiple Departments and Promotes Collaboration
8. 6. Saves Time and Resources
9. 7. Sets You Up for Long-Term Growth
10. What is CRM?
11. What Is the ROI of a CRM System?
12. What is a Company's Growth Strategy?
13. Why CRM is Important: The Conclusion
14. FAQs
15. References

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. 7 Reasons Why CRM is Important for Your Growth Strategy
3. 1. Helps You Generate the Right Leads
Show Full Guide
4. 2. Enhances Customer Communications and Support
5. 3. Improves Engagement and Decision-Making
6. 4. Generates More Revenue From Existing Customers
7. 5. Benefits Multiple Departments and Promotes Collaboration
8. 6. Saves Time and Resources
9. 7. Sets You Up for Long-Term Growth
10. What is CRM?
11. What Is the ROI of a CRM System?
12. What is a Company's Growth Strategy?
13. Why CRM is Important: The Conclusion
14. FAQs
15. References

Key Takeaways

• CRM systems provide many powerful features to grow your customer base and revenue. They’ll be an integral part of your wider Customer Relationship Management strategy.
• They help you generate the right leads, create tailored engagement campaigns, improve customer communications, and provide exceptional service.
• Good CRM tools let you build long-term customer relationships and maximize customer value through upselling, cross-selling, and loyalty programs.
• CRM also benefits departments such as product development, finance, legal, and HR. Plus, it saves your business time and money and enables you to grow and scale without disruption.

7 Reasons Why CRM is Important for Your Growth Strategy

Here, I’ll lay out the seven ways that CRM platforms support business growth and enhance customer relationships.

1. Helps You Generate the Right Leads

Lead generation is a process used to identify and attract potential customers—or “leads”—who may be interested in your business’s products or services.

An effective lead generation strategy provides access to customer insights and needs, helping to evoke an initial interest and eventually convert them to valuable, paying clients.

Here’s how CRM software helps you in generating leads.

• Database Management — CRM tools help to create a database of all your potential customers. You can add them in manually or integrate your CRM with website forms, newsletter subscriptions, social media, email, and third-party integrations, pulling data and information for relevant customers.
• Contact Management — This feature helps you store and organize contact information, making it easier to manage and track interactions with potential customers.
• Customer Segmentation — You can categorize your leads into “segments” based on demographics, behaviors, social media activities, or other predefined data that your CRM has pulled through integrations with your website and other platforms—helping you target the right audience.
• Lead Scoring — This assigns a value to contacts based on certain customizable criteria. For example, if you run a local toy shop, leads who live in your area and have children could be given a higher score. You can then, for example, allocate your marketing budget to the right group, enhancing your marketing return on investment (ROI).
• Lead Tracking — You can track leads through the sales pipeline, from initial contact to final sales, enabling you to monitor progress and identify bottlenecks.

2. Enhances Customer Communications and Support

Effective communication and engagement are pivotal to your growth strategy. You need to understand your customers’ communication preferences so you can build trust and keep relationships nurtured.

The following CRM features can help you in growing and retaining your customers through effective communications:

• Contact Management — Maintaining accurate and up-to-date contact information ensures communications are directed to the right individuals.
• Email Integration — Integrate your email platform with your CRM system. This lets you send and track emails directly from the CRM interface, saving time and logging both outgoing and incoming emails.
• Calendar and Task Management — These features allow you to schedule follow-up calls, meetings, and other activities, ensuring consistent and timely communications.
• Integration With Communications Tools — Some systems integrate with VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) or live chat platforms, enabling real-time customer support and communication.
• Communication History Tracking — CRM apps track your customer interactions, including frequency and, in some cases, content across emails, phone calls, social media, and other channels. This allows you to access past interactions with leads so you can tailor communications accordingly.
• Customer Surveys and Feedback — Some CRM systems let you create and roll out customer feedback surveys, helping to track satisfaction levels and identify areas for improvement.
• Mobile Access — Software that offers mobile applications makes it easy to communicate with customers at any time from anywhere, showing your company’s commitment to customer-centricity and support.

3. Improves Engagement and Decision-Making

So far, we’ve learned that CRM tools help to gather data such as customer contact information, interaction histories, demographics, behavioral and purchase patterns, and more.

With your CRM, you can then use this data to create effective and personalized engagement campaigns, address diverse customer needs, and identify further growth opportunities.

Attracting and Engaging Customers

You don’t need to manually track data and take action. CRM platforms enable automated workflows based on demographics and behavioral triggers, for example.

For instance, you can create email templates that are sent automatically to a specific customer segment at predefined time intervals.

Similarly, if a lead downloads your product catalog, you can set your CRM to automatically send a follow-up email with more information about the product’s features and benefits.

You can even go deeper and use CRM data to create and deliver personalized content to customers.

For instance, if you run a travel business, you can send newlyweds emails, digital and social media ads, and promotional offers for their honeymoon.

Finally, CRMs support multi-channel engagement across social media, websites, and mobile apps. This helps you take deliberate steps to engage customers on the right platforms at the right time.

For example, data might show that a customer spends 30 minutes every morning on social media and regularly makes purchases at that time. With this, you can craft a targeted campaign and schedule social media posts to reach the customer effectively.

Fine-Tuning Decisions Through Reporting

Some CRM solutions offer A/B testing, so you can experiment with different elements—for instance, trying out different subject lines in your email campaigns and choosing the one with maximum impact.

Similarly, you can use other campaign engagement analytics to refine your strategies.

For instance, if you find more success with a specific demographic on Snapchat rather than Instagram, you can allocate more resources to running Snapchat campaigns.

Finally, CRM captures data and interactions between customers and your customer support teams. This provides powerful insights into customer needs and how to address them.

4. Generates More Revenue From Existing Customers

In addition to attracting and converting new leads, CRM software offers excellent tools to maximize value from your existing clients. Here are some examples of how you can use these to grow revenue from your current customers:

• Upselling — Use CRM data to identify high-value customers—those who have and continue to purchase your products—and study their product requirements and spending patterns. You can then recommend upgrades, subscriptions, and other premium items that align with their needs.
• Cross-Selling — Analyze customer preferences to recommend complementary products or services. For example, if a customer recently purchased a laptop from your ecommerce store, consider marketing screen-cleaning wipes either at the time of purchase or through a follow-up email or social media campaign.
• Loyalty Programs and Perks — Leverage customer data to offer exclusive discounts, early access to new products, or personalized rewards to repeat customers. This is a great way to show appreciation, build relationships, and retain customers.
• Foster Long-Term Relationships — Set up automated personalized check-ins with customers through emails or social media, ensuring they’re satisfied with the product or service. Alternatively, for a personal touch, create reminders to call them.
• Customer Satisfaction and Feedback — Track customer satisfaction levels through surveys and data from customer support interactions. Address concerns promptly and effectively to minimize customer churn and increase their lifetime value.

5. Benefits Multiple Departments and Promotes Collaboration

In addition to supporting sales, marketing, and customer support teams, CRM software can add numerous benefits to other functions in your company. Including:

• Product development — Customer feedback and interactions provide powerful insights into customers’ needs and pain points, helping your product team refine your product and prioritize the development and enhancement of features effectively.
• Finance — CRMs provide visibility into client billing and payments, accurate revenue forecasting, and help with tracking customer accounts, invoices, and payment histories.
• Human resources — Your HR team can track sales, conversions, customer support queries, feedback scores, and other performance metrics to make decisions on pay, promotion, training, and more.
• Legal — In the event of a dispute with a customer, your legal team can access customers’ data and historical communications to prepare their case.

Finally, a CRM also supports cross-functional collaboration and keeps teams aligned. For instance, sales and marketing can coordinate in growing your customer base, revenue, and market share.

6. Saves Time and Resources

CRM systems streamline numerous processes. For the most part, they automate data entry tasks, reducing the need for manual data entry, which is both time-consuming and highly prone to errors.

Also, you can set up automatic email campaigns and repetitive tasks and use task management features to improve productivity, save time, and ensure consistency.

Further, lead management and scoring tools help to prioritize leads based on how likely they are to convert to paying customers.

Similarly, reporting and analytics tell you which campaigns and strategies work well. Without this, you’d be spending time, effort, and money on leads and strategies that have little chance of success.

Finally, CRM integrations with marketing tools help to automate the transfer of leads from marketing to sales, reducing manual handovers and improving efficiency in the process.

7. Sets You Up for Long-Term Growth

One of the best parts of a CRM is that it allows for growth and adaptability without the need to add significant resources and costs to your budget.

As your customer base grows, CRM software can handle increased data volume and user activity without any issues with system performance.

Additionally, you can customize your workflows and automation to accommodate more customers, new business verticals, a higher number of processes, and more.

CRM systems often integrate with other applications, too, such as enterprise resource planning (ERPs), creating an integrated ecosystem rather than a siloed one where you’d have to manually manage more sales volumes as you scale.

This way, your CRM system grows seamlessly alongside your business. Finally, the best CRM will offer advanced security features and compliance capabilities.

This ensures your business can handle increased data protection requirements and regulatory standards as it grows.

What is CRM?

It aims to centralize customer information and interactions, enabling businesses to understand, engage, and serve their customers more effectively.

Moreover, it offers tools to streamline and automate communications, reporting, and other processes, increasing sales efficiency and supporting better decision-making. You can find out more in my dedicated guide to CRM strategy.

What Is the ROI of a CRM System?

You may be understandably hesitant to subscribe to yet another software platform, especially with the current economic climate. And while it’s true that there are many free CRM platforms available, you may run into limitations that can stop your growth in its tracks. 

The good news is that paid CRM platforms have an extremely high ROI, with 2024 stats showing that for every dollar spent on CRM, you’ll earn approximately $8.71.

This is because using a CRM significantly improves your customer relationships, meaning you’ll see an increase in conversions. Secondly, you can automate repetitive manual tasks within your CRM which can both save you labor costs and free up your time for more high-value, revenue-driving tasks.

Lastly, since CRMs collect a ton of data, you can use this data to better inform your future sales strategies based on what works well, and what hasn’t worked well previously. Data-backed decision-making gets a big thumbs up from me and is the best way to future-proof your business’ profitability.

What is a Company’s Growth Strategy?

By defining a growth strategy, your company can avoid stagnation, missed opportunities, and redundancy in rapidly evolving markets.

Why CRM is Important: The Conclusion

In this day and age, the lack of a clear growth strategy could cost you business opportunities, customers, and revenue—eventually making your company redundant in the market.

Customer relationship management is a strategy and technology solution that plays a pivotal role in growing both—your customer base and revenue streams. It helps to provide insights into new and existing customers, allocate your sales and marketing efforts in a targeted and effective way, maximize customer value, and provide exceptional service.

Finally, unlike traditional sales and customer care efforts, it’s built to grow with your business. This means you can scale without the fear of disrupting workflows, breaching regulations, and adding unnecessary resources that could hamper growth.

FAQs