Why is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) such an important part of running a successful construction business? Because in a competitive business climate, it pays to make sure that your clients value the relationships they have with you, the best indication that they’ll stay loyal to your company in the long-term. The five reasons below offer a quick overview of how CRM can benefit you.
Table of Contents
In many ways, your clients are your business, the source of projects, revenue, profits and future growth. By mining customer data through CRM, you’ll have a better understanding of your clients’ needs and expectations. Just as important, you’ll gain important new insight into your own company, too—your strengths, your weaknesses, and which projects are most likely to lead to success.
It makes sense that your client relationships grow more valuable over time; the longer you do business together, the more trust, comfort and shared goals you’re likely to have. CRM gives you a platform to help nurture and develop client relationships for the long-term; your awareness of client activities—and the ability to easily connect with people you’ve worked with before—will help you “stay on the radar” of companies you’d like to do business with again.
It can cost as much as three times more to acquire a new client as it does to retain an existing one, reason enough to make sure that the clients you have remain loyal to your company. With CRM in place, not only do you save time and money on new client acquisition, you already have important insight into how your previous clients work, how much they spend, what they value and why. That’s an important foundation for any successful new project.
We’ve already seen that the right CRM tools can give you significantly greater insight into your own company’s past successes, important information that can help you identify new business opportunities that are the best fit for you as a contractor. Knowing what works best for your business—and what doesn’t—will help you eliminate the wrong jobs and pursue the right ones.
Few people these days stay at the same company forever, and construction professionals who leave one organization for another can be a valuable source of new contacts and potential projects. CRM can help you easily maintain contact information on an unlimited number of individuals you’ve worked with before, so you can follow up in a meaningful way on opportunities from contractors you’ve yet to do business with.
