BtoB CRM: A must for your business

BtoB CRM (or B2B CRM) is an amazing management software for maximizing the efficiency of your sales force. With this tool, your sales and marketing teams can spend more time doing what they do best. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) takes care of the rest—all those routine, repetitive tasks that waste your precious time.

However, BtoB CRM does much more than that! It acts as a true catalyst to improve your relationships with all your prospects, clients and professional partners. Basically, it’s a valuable system for collaborating more effectively with the organizations that help you succeed.

Let’s take a look at how BtoB CRM creates value for your business and its partners.

What is BtoB CRM?

If your business grows in a BtoB model (business to business), you know how different this model is from BtoC (business to customer) in a number of aspects:

• You have fewer clients, but their purchases are more valuable, as a professional client often generates more revenue than an individual.
• Your sales cycles are longer therefore you need to invest more time and money in each client.
• Your decision-making processes involve more stakeholders.

BtoB CRM adapts to this reality by giving your sales teams access to powerful management tools.  These BtoB tools guide you all throughout the in-depth process of acquiring and retaining your professional clientele. In summary, this CRM software is ultimately intended to centralize your client data and help you manage your clients.

With BtoB CRM, you can centralize all your important data on your clientele and partners and get an overview of your administrative, sales, marketing or customer service processes.

This is an important factor for ensuring your organization’s continuity, since you often face long delays between two client purchases, periods during which your sales teams must maintain extremely long-term client relationships. Indeed, this is one of the main challenges that your BtoB CRM must address.

Additionally, as we will discuss below shortly, a BtoB relationship generally requires more highly personalized communications, such as a newsletter. Again, a BtoB CRM for businesses needs to adapt to this reality.

Now that you know more about this type of CRM, let’s take a look at what you can accomplish with it.

Main features of BtoB CRM

• Manage your contacts

Since a BtoB business’ clientele consists of other businesses, and not individuals, you generally need to take a more in‑depth approach to interacting with and managing your contacts. Your BtoB CRM must organize contacts in a more multidimensional manner, based on the businesses and on the roles of each of the individuals within them. Furthermore, business-to-business CRMs offer more advanced lead nurturing and prospect management options (French only), which have more of a long‑term focus.

• Manage your calendar and reminders

A BtoB CRM is first and foremost a tool for your sales teams. Therefore, it implements tools that make scheduling client meetings easier to manage. With these features, it’s easier to juggle client calls, reminders, follow-ups and meetings using an intuitive calendar that sets reminders, so you don’t forget anything. It’s a great way for your sales teams to improve their time management.

• Manage your pipeline and tasks

Any business, whether it’s B2B or B2C, has a sales/conversion funnel, or pipeline. However, as we saw a bit earlier, sales cycles are longer in business-to-business relationships. Hence, BtoB CRM offers advanced features to track the status of every lead in your funnel. Sales teams can then better organize their work by identifying the action required to manage a customer relationship according to every step of your sales cycle. Indeed, a new prospect will not require the same actions as would one who is very close to purchasing.

• Automate repetitive tasks that provide little added value

During the B2B sales process, interactions are not as automated as they are in B2C. Why? Because these interactions generally take the form of phone calls, conferences or in-person meetings. However, that doesn’t mean that BtoB CRM doesn’t involve any automation. Rather, it’s mostly the internal tasks considered to be time‑consuming that are automated, like capturing data, researching information, managing the sales cycle, invoicing or analyzing/reporting.

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and business intelligence (BI)

Thanks to the arrival of artificial intelligence and business intelligence in CRM and ERP software, BtoB CRMs offer more intuitive features to effectively use information. This significantly boosts the efficiency of the analyses, reports, dashboards and performance indicators in your management software. What’s more, since these are BtoB features, these reports give more importance to lead generation than they would in a B2C CRM.

So, what are the benefits of using BtoB CRM?

We can summarize these benefits in 5 main points.

1. Better customer relationship management

BtoB CRM lets you personalize your marketing strategy down to the last detail. And as we know, it’s often the little details that make all the difference in retaining your clients and keeping them satisfied. Of course, you can personalize your emails, but you can also personalize your in-person interactions with your clients.

Let’s take a concrete example: during your regular meetings with one of your clients, you have noticed that they always take their coffee with two sugars and no milk. The first thing that they do when arriving at your office is to ask you for one. As someone who is dedicated, you have made note of this information in your BtoB CRM, which can remind you of this at the right moment. You can therefore offer your client a coffee at every meeting, exactly how they like it—before they even ask you for one. This will make your client feel important and deepen your relationship with them.

Basically, the more information you have stored in the database for each of your clients in your CRM, the better equipped you will be to offer them a personalized experience on every level. It’s exactly this type of personalization that will be your strongest asset in earning the trust of your BtoB clients, who may often seem demanding.

2. Excellent data centralization (and a solid database)

What did you discuss with your client the last time you met with them? What is the history of your activities and interactions with them? Sometimes, everything goes by so quickly that it’s hard to keep track. By centralizing all your information in an intuitive, easily accessible database, it will be much easier for you to refresh your memory. You will find that this really simplifies your work.

3. More efficient collaboration between your sales and marketing teams

Your sales and marketing teams often need to share information to work together more efficiently. And without a BtoB CRM, this information can be easily lost. You then spend time emailing another department to request access to it. Not very efficient, right?

Besides having access to the same information, it will be much easier for your sales and marketing teams to communicate with each other, in particular by integrating chat tools into your BtoB CRM, such as Microsoft Teams. You can also generate easily viewable reports and share them with other departments so they can read them.

4. Increased time savings and productivity

The 3 benefits we have discussed above all have a point in common: they maximize your time savings.

With proper tools for task automation, your best sellers can concentrate on what really matters: maintaining your business relationships, right up until the last step of your sales pipeline. In fact, you will benefit from increased time savings and productivity with any BtoB or BtoC CRM.

5. Increased profitability for your business

With good performance indicators (KPI) and a solid database, BtoB CRM makes it easier to assess the profitability of each of your clients, as well as the performance of your sales teams. You will be able to track performance more efficiently and determine if you are successfully keeping pace with your growth objectives.

By properly implementing your BtoB CRM, you will maximize your return on investment (ROI) and you can quickly change course if you notice that your profitability is not up to snuff.

Benefit from the best BtoB CRM expertise for your needs

To get the most out of the benefits and features we’ve discussed in this article, you need to do business with consultants who are able to customize your BtoB CRM according to your needs. You can also count on our experts to provide customized training and personalized technical support.

A winning solution for your business’ CRM!

Contact us to learn more about our CRM solutions.