Why You Need a CRM Analyst on Your Team

There’s a reason why the majority of companies have adopted CRMs. These businesses have seen sales increase by 29 percent, and sales productivity increase by 34 percent. In the future, productivity is forecasted to increase by up to 42 percent. 

Using a CRM can increase sales conversion rates by up to 300 percent, boost customer retention rates, and improve customer satisfaction. 

With this impressive list of benefits, it’s understandable why CRMs have become such a valuable tool throughout the business world. But with the growing use of this software, companies have had to take new measures to ensure that they’re making the most of their new tool. How do they do this? 

By hiring a CRM analyst.  

What Is a CRM Analyst?

Working as either a consultant or a full-time employee, CRM analysts help companies make the most of their CRM. They’re specialists trained on the intricate details of how CRM software works, and how to optimize it for the most effective customer relationship management. 

The amount of data stored in a CRM can be overwhelming. Think about it – if you’re a large company with thousands of customers, all of that data is stored in one place. While the organization factor is amazing, it’s still a lot of information to manage. 

Additionally, as CRMs are the fastest growing software market, the technology is continually being changed and improved. CRM software has become so robust that you often need a specialist who understands the detailed ins and outs of it to help you get the most bang for your buck. 

How CRM Software Impacts Your Business

To fully understand the role a CRM analyst plays and how they can help, you first need to know how your CRM impacts your entire business. Implementing a CRM influences the productivity and workflow for each individual team of your company – marketing, sales, and service – in different ways. 

For Marketing

Your marketing team is likely the first group of people to communicate with leads and potential customers, so they’re largely responsible for creating and organizing initial contacts within your CRM. With this in mind, using a CRM makes a huge difference during this process. 

Segmentation

Using a CRM allows your marketing team to easily break contacts up into categories or groups based on specific qualifying information. Maybe they’re broken up my industry, company size, or their placement within the buyer’s journey. 

No matter how your contacts are segmented, organizing contacts into groups allows your team to create more targeted marketing campaigns for optimum impact. 

Personalization

With a CRM, you can input data and details specific to each contact. With this information, your team can better understand the needs and challenges of each lead, and thus create and deliver more personalized content to them. 

Even including simple, personal information is a useful option, like “Joe has a cute Golden Retriever named Rex.”

With this information, the next time your marketing team sends an email to Joe, they can include a line like “And by the way, how’s Rex doing?” – it adds a note of personalization that begins to nurture that customer relationship. 

Project Management

Having all your contacts in one place allows you to have a bird’s eye view of all your marketing touch points with contacts. Keeping a well rounded view of these touch points will help you keep track of which are making an impact on your prospects and which are falling short. 

Your marketing team can use this data to improve quality content and develop more efficient campaigns. 

Automation

Combined with segmentation, and a bird’s eye view of your contacts, automation becomes simple and painless when using a CRM. 

By knowing exactly where each of your contacts are along their buyer’s journey, you can enroll them into appropriate marketing workflows, whether it’s sending out an email campaign or offering an informational resource. 

Lead Qualification and Hand-Off

By gathering information about each lead and organizing it within the CRM, your marketing team can determine whether that potential prospect would be an ideal customer for your company. 

Using a CRM not only makes this easier, but also streamlines the process of handing those leads over to the sales team, ensuring that all the necessary information gets passed along quickly and efficiently. 

For Sales

Targeting

By streamlining the hand-over process from marketing, your sales team will receive all the information they need to reach out and engage with prospects that are a good fit for your company. 

Using the information within each contact of your CRM, they’re able to target and stay focused on the highest quality leads to optimize conversions and boost sales overall. 

Templates

Some CRMs allow template storage, which makes it easy to develop quick tools like email templates geared toward contacts within each stage of the buyer’s journey and along different points of the sales funnel. 

Salespeople can save time and increase efficiency by simply personalizing a general email template to a specific prospect. 

Time Management

CRMs allow you to set tasks and organize daily schedules to ensure timely outreach. When it comes to sales, responding to prospects in a timely manner is incredibly important to closing a sale. 

A simple calendar reminder from your CRM like, “Hey, it’s time to email Joe about XYZ” keeps your sales team on the ball with these small but important tasks that can sometimes slip through the cracks. 

Reporting

Using a CRM, sales leadership can oversee how to help their reps manage their activity and make the most of their time. 

Additionally, the analytics tools within a CRM provide valuable reports that can reveal where improvements can be made within your sales cycles. This can help you improve your sales process over time for increased efficiency and sustainable growth. 

For Service 

While their roles are very different, service and sales teams benefit from similar advantages of using a CRM.

Automation

While CRMs allow you to automate communication in an efficient way, your service team, like the sales team, can personalize email templates to each client. 

Additionally, communication automation is especially useful if a major error occurs within your company that may affect your customers. 

For example, if you’re an internet provider and you experience a network problem at your headquarters, you can send a mass email to all of your customers to apologize and let them know that they may experience a brief internet outage. 

Keeping your customers in the loop like this improves customer retention and satisfaction rates. 

Reporting

With CRM reporting, service members are able to analyze customer communications and see where they can improve.

They’ll be able to understand what messaging was and wasn’t effective when communicating with customers, and even identify common issues that customers frequently complain about. This will generate awareness for the opportunity to improve your products or services overall. 

Training

When you use a CRM, it’s incredibly easy to bring on and train new team members. New employees will need to be brought up to speed on existing customers, and that process is made quick and painless when all of your customer information is stored within one place in a CRM. 

Workflow

CRMs help your service team streamline their workflow. It allows them to look at information like communication logs and service tickets to improve their process of handling customer inquiries. 

As you can see, each of the primary teams within your company is significantly impacted by using a CRM. But to get the most out of this software, each of your team members have to be well trained on its features, functions, and use. And the best way to do this is by hiring a CRM analyst. 

How a CRM Analyst Helps

CRM analysts are experts in data management and technology. They know how to store, organize, and manage an abundance of data, making them a valuable resource to large companies who have a mass quantity of customers. 

Ultimately, they fit into the role of a master of data management and customer interactions. In reality, they’re equal parts manager and analyst – their job role entails a mass management of not only CRM software, but your team’s use of that software, with the primary goal of ensuring the strength of customer relationships. 

Having a CRM analyst train each of your teams on how they can best use the software will optimize their efficiency and effectiveness of each of the benefits listed above.

Additionally, they can train new hires on your CRM system, bringing them up to speed quickly while your sales, marketing, and service teams can focus their time on their primary roles, rather than training the new guy. 

So what qualifications does a person like this need, and what do the job responsibilities look like?

Qualifications: 

• MBA or BA in business administration, marketing, computer science, business, IT, or a related field. 
• Previous experience in a marketing or business field.
• Expertise with primary CRM software like HubSpot or Salesforce. 
• Strong analytical skills, management skills, and creativity.

Duties & Responsibilities

• Management and analysis of customer information data, including: sales records, purchasing history, types of purchases, service history, product inquiries, complaints, channel preferences, and response to marketing campaigns. 
• Based on analysis of data, develop and deliver CRM strategies for better customer relationship management.
• Put together analysis reports for individual teams (marketing, sales, and service). 
• Customer journey mapping and analysis for segmentation and campaign strategies.
• CRM software training and troubleshooting across all teams.
• Monitor customer lifetime value strategies for targeted business activities. 

Consultant or Full-Time Employee?

As you can see, a CRM analyst can accomplish a lot in their time with your organization. Another important consideration you have to keep in mind is your budget and what you can afford in talent. 

Depending on the size of your company, you may choose to work on and off with a freelance CRM analyst consultant, or you may choose to hire a full-time, in-house employee. 

What best fits your needs and budget?

According to Glassdoor, the average base pay for a CRM analyst is $64,024 annually. Plus, you need to factor in the cost of benefits and resources you will need in your workplace.

On the other hand, freelancers are paid by the hour or project. While the cost per hour will likely be higher than a full-time employee, you are saving on the expenses of employing someone full time and providing benefits. 

CRM Analysts Are a Vital Addition

Regardless of what you choose to do, if you’re one of the thousands of companies using CRM software within your system, you can definitely benefit from bringing a CRM-focused specialist on board. 

Working with a CRM analyst can have a huge ROI for your company. It can not only streamline the efficiency and workflow of your teams, but can also boost sales, improve your customer retention, satisfaction rates, and ultimately help you obtain your business goals for future growth.