If you’re looking to grow your 3PL company and maximize your sales, you need to have a well-constructed sales strategy that is specifically designed to meet the challenges of sales in the logistics industry.
However, this is easier said than done, as it involves having to stay on top of your existing leads and nurturing them into loyal customers while also attracting new leads.
That’s why a crucial tool in any 3PL sales strategy is customer relationship management (CRM) software. Allowing you to identify key trends and track customers and shipments throughout the customer lifecycle, a CRM will soon allow you to cut overheads and boost sales numbers, leading to improved profitability.
In this practical guide for 3PL companies, we’ll explore the meaning of a logistics CRM and examine its benefits. We’ll also explain how you can use a CRM in your day-to-day operations to improve customer relationships and sales productivity. Keep on reading to find out more!
What is a CRM?
Managing customer relationships is a vital part of increasing sales. After all, you don’t want customers trying to find out how can you block a number after you’ve wrongly called them repeatedly to try to sell a product that they have already purchased.
A CRM – standing for customer relationship management software – is a digital tool that automates and stores many of the details that you need in order to manage these customer relationships.
At its core, a CRM tracks every interaction that your company has with a lead or a customer. This includes everything from sales calls and marketing approaches to customer service interactions.
This will be accessible to everyone in your organization who needs it. This means that all of the relevant customer data is stored in a centralized location through the CRM, allowing customer relationship operations to be streamlined and simplified.
Benefits of Using a CRM in Logistics
Understanding the meaning of a CRM highlights some of its advantages: they are a great way to stay on top of the many interactions that a customer has with your brand across the entire customer lifecycle.
However, using a CRM also has a number of specific benefits for 3PL companies. Here are some of the biggest advantages that you’ll see when you start using a CRM:
Stronger Customer Incident Management
In the world of logistics, customer relationships need to be managed across the terms of a service-level agreement. This means that you need to access correct information about customers quickly, while also swiftly mobilizing the right levels of customer support, if you want to respond to customer incidents.
CRMs allow you to see crucial customer information quickly via a dashboard, which can show you the agreement that they have purchased and any preferred services or other information that might help your agents to resolve the incident. This can quickly link to other data and processes, such as inventory management or shipping rates, as well as provide general ecommerce call center services and support.
As well as this, CRMs can automate and provide templates for communication with customers. If an incident occurs during the shipping process, for instance, customers can receive an automated communication, while a request can be automatically sent to a manager within your organization.
Insights Into Sales and Marketing Data
CRMs focus on the customers themselves, rather than placing their data into sales and marketing siloes. With a CRM, you’ll be able to access and analyze both sales and marketing data about your customers.
The insights that you get from this data can be used to improve your decision-making. You might want to collect sales data from across the last year and divide it into segments, allowing you to identify the characteristics of clients that you’ve been less successful at targeting. This will let you refine both your marketing and sales strategies to deal with this.
More Effective Quoting
When you’re managing a logistics company across multiple schedules, routes, or currencies – all of which can bring different problems with regard to taxes and ensuring fast and effective shipping – it can be time-consuming to produce accurate quotes for prospective customers.
Using a CRM can hugely simplify this process. You can store and easily access relevant data, such as previous transaction history, that you can use to more quickly produce quotes for existing customers. You could also use this to create quotes for new customers who share qualities or needs with some of your existing clients.
You’ll also be able to efficiently store information about customers and projects, such as billing information, vehicle documentation, and shipping regulations, which is vital when making your quoting process as productive as possible.
Links with Logistic Software
In order for any new software to be truly effective, it cannot work in isolation. Fortunately, most CRM systems are able to integrate with your existing tech stack. This means that you can use CRMs alongside your Transport Management Systems, Point of Delivery trackers, and Warehouse Management Software.
Integrating your CRM with existing logistic software systems will mean that information about customer transactions, for instance, will be automatically uploaded to the CRM. It will also allow your agents to see information about delivery schedules on each customer’s CRM dashboard, meaning that customer support will be up-to-date and responsive.
Better Customer Experience
With more information easily available to your customer support agents, it shouldn’t be a surprise that using a CRM often produces a better customer experience. As we highlighted above, your customer support agents will have up-to-date information about any incident and the customer that they are dealing with, allowing them to identify resolutions speedily.
This is crucial in an industry like logistics, where delays or failed shipments can hugely damage the customer experience and negatively impact your brand in the long run.
How to Use a CRM in Logistics
It’s clear that using a CRM can improve your relationships with customers, boost your decision-making and help maximize your sales. But how can you make sure that you’re using a CRM system as well as possible? Here is our key checklist for using a CRM in logistics:
1. Centralize Your Customer Information
As soon as you’ve chosen a specific CRM software, you need to start centralizing your customer information. This will include contact details, purchase history, and any previous interactions with the client.
This means that any agent across the logistics workflow will be able to see crucial information about the customer via an easy-to-use customer profile, meaning that every aspect of the customer lifecycle, from marketing to delivery, can tailor their services to the customer.
2. Integrate with Other Systems
In logistics, it’s crucial that you’re able to easily slot your CRM into a wider tech stack. Make sure to integrate the CRM with your Warehouse Management Systems and Transport Management Systems (TMS), which are widely used in the 3PL sector.
This will allow data from one system – such as notification of delivery on your TMS – to seamlessly flow to your CRM, updating the customer profile and allowing your marketers, for instance, to inform the customer that the shipment has been completed, laying the ground for further sales in future.
3. Set Up Tracking for Sales and Customer Interactions
As well as centralizing existing data about previous interactions and sales, CRMs should be used to actively track sales and customer interactions as they occur. You should be able to visualize the entire pipeline from lead nurturing to the post-sale process on your CRM.
Being able to track all customer interactions is not only valuable for customer support but it can also allow you to analyze sales performance and see opportunities for you to upsell to customers.
4. Automate Routine Tasks
With so much data and information about customers on one platform, CRMs are also able to automatically complete many of the day-to-day tasks that can take time away from your sales, marketing, or customer support specialists. This can include sending follow-up emails, creating a fax cover sheet, scheduling calls, and producing reports about sales data.
Automating these tasks will mean that you can reallocate your employees for more difficult tasks, which is especially important given the complexity involved in logistics management.
5. Analyze Your Data
The final thing to do in order to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your CRM is to analyze your data. Many CRM tools include in-built analytics tools that you can use to develop crucial insights into customer behavior, while the centralized database will mean that it is easier than ever to analyze customer information.
This will allow you to identify any weaknesses in your logistics workflow, targeting your efforts to improve sales. You’ll also be able to reshape your marketing according to demographic data that you find in your CRM.
Final Thoughts on CRMs for 3PLs
If you’re looking to grow your 3PL company, it’s vital that you’re able to use a CRM tool to improve your logistics workflow. By centralizing all of the crucial customer information in one place, a CRM will mean that your sales, marketing, and customer support experts can easily access the information they need to improve the customer experience.
CRM tools also help you produce data-driven strategies to reshape your marketing and sales approaches, while they can easily integrate with your existing logistics software tools. So, what are you waiting for? Start using CRM to grow your 3PL organization today!
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