The CRM system helps manage customer relationships in both B2C and B2B businesses. However, whether you target your services to businesses or individual customers affects the choice of key features and their utilization. In this short guide, I'll provide insights on what to consider when choosing CRM for your company, depending on whether you offer products and services to other businesses or individual consumers.
There's no denying that CRM systems are primarily associated with B2B sales. Complex customer relationship management systems address B2B needs such as managing relationships with multiple stakeholders within a single target company or monitoring a long sales cycle. In B2B activities, there is often direct contact with a sales representative sooner or later. In this context, consistent data generated by both sales and marketing, accessible in one system, is particularly important.
Do you need such a complex system if you serve individual customers? Contrary to the initial impression, in many situations, it can be very helpful.
In summary, a CRM system can optimize your sales in both B2B and B2C activities, where maintaining existing customers, personalizing the buyer's experience, and efficiently utilizing digital channels are increasingly important.
Which CRM features are particularly important for business customers? Must-have features offered by virtually all CRM systems include the ability to assign individual contacts to companies to effectively manage recipients within a single target organization. However, there are more tools to pay attention to.
B2B purchasing committees, according to Gartner, usually consist of 6 to 10 people. Who is part of the committee, and who is the key decision-maker? CRM offers the ability to identify such contacts and link actions, such as assigning stages of the purchasing journey or allocating tasks to salespeople, depending on their behaviors.
Identifying key contacts is also crucial in assessing sales opportunities. Scoring features allow assigning points to individual leads based on various parameters such as the position of interacting recipients, the type of interaction, or enterprise parameters. This helps improve the quality of lead qualification processes forwarded to the sales department.
The high value of B2B sales means that you cannot afford to lose sales opportunities. Workflow features, such as assigning tasks and notifications for salespeople, help in this regard. With a CRM system, you can turn the actions of sales representatives into efficient processes.
In the case of B2B, the ability to create multiple purchase paths depending on market segments or sales models (e.g., direct and through partners) may be particularly important.
B2B sales involve more decision-making stages than for individual customers, so tools to track, visualize, and analyze the buyer's journey are important in this context.
These tools are essential for complex products, such as in manufacturing or software purchasing. They allow efficiently configuring a product for a specific customer, pricing it, and preparing a sales quote.
In the B2C world, a single purchase generates significantly less profit than in the case of B2B contracts. This necessitates mass actions and a focus on repeat purchases, determining key features of CRM systems to consider when choosing a valuable solution.
In B2C operations, you deal with a much larger number of potential customers. Therefore, it's important for the software to handle a sufficiently large number of records and offer tools to effectively manage them, such as segmentation tools.
For large data sets, data analysis becomes crucial. Therefore, examine analysis and reporting features. Check whether they are user-friendly and easily customizable to your needs.
Reaching large audience groups while maintaining individual communication is a real challenge in modern marketing. Find out if your CRM offers marketing automation tools that help automate marketing actions intelligently.
B2C customers often prefer to make a purchase without any contact with your representative. From information about the offer to payment tools and FAQs about issues or automated customer service via a chatbot – it's essential to provide them with such an option. A well-chosen CRM will help customers serve themselves, increasing both their satisfaction and your team's time resources.
Regardless of whether you operate in B2B or B2C, a CRM system should be tailored to your business requirements. Sometimes, selling to individual customers may resemble business-oriented activities, e.g., in significant or renewable investments, such as in real estate or insurance. In other cases, B2B activities may resemble selling to individual customers, especially if your audience consists primarily of freelancers, professionals, or small businesses – where the purchasing decision for the company is often made by one person, similar to an individual customer.
Due to individual considerations, it's a good idea to seek the assistance of experts who can help choose specific software and configure a package tailored to your needs. If you'd like to learn about the possibilities in this regard with HubSpot, visit our website, schedule a demo, or talk to an advisor. We'll be happy to accompany you on your CRM journey!