It’s a lot easier to sell to existing customers.

They know you, your company and your team.

They’ve already done business with you, and therefore, they trust you.

However, without landing new customers, your business’ growth will be stumped - as existing customers inevitably churn over time.

This is why 44% of companies put their primary commercial focus on acquiring new customers - to ensure the long-term sustainability of their business.

The trouble is that despite only making up 5-20% of total business revenue each year, securing new customers isn’t an easy process.

It takes time, money, and significant effort to achieve.

So how can you acquire new customers to help grow your business?

With the right tools, like a CRM platform, customer acquisition becomes easier.

To help you get started on your next wave of business growth and attract new customers, we’ve prepared a guide to show you exactly how you can use a CRM - like SuperOffice - to improve your customer acquisition process.

First up, we’re going to take a look at the most obvious place to start:

Website contact forms.

CAPTURE INBOUND LEADS WITH WEB FORMS

Inbound leads are prospects that come directly to your website and express their interest in your product or service directly.

These prospects usually find you as a result of marketing campaigns and are 80% less expensive to generate than outbound leads.

But once you’ve attracted the right kind of interest, how do you capture that lead, and how can a CRM help with this?

Typically, online forms are the best way to capture inbound leads - with 84% of marketers citing them as their preferred method.

Using a custom form builder that integrates directly with your CRM - much like SuperOffice’s form builder - means you can accurately capture inbound leads on your website and supply your sales team with exactly the information they need to follow up right inside your CRM.

Connecting your inbound lead forms directly to your CRM also means that you can activate automated follow-up emails or send further information to a prospect - ahead of a sales rep reaching out - helping to enhance the experience for your prospective customers.

NURTURE YOUR LEADS WITH EMAIL AUTOMATION

Regardless of where your leads originate from, they’re going to need nurturing.

Nurtured leads result in 50% more sales than non-nurtured leads, so they’re important to get right.

On top of this, 80% of marketers say lead nurturing is essential for converting leads into customers, as companies who nurture leads see a 25% increase in close rate as a result.

But what is lead nurturing - and how can a CRM help?

Lead nurturing is the process of turning leads that aren’t ready to buy into paying customers. Typically this involves using the information you have about them - often captured via your website forms - in order to help move them closer to buying.

Using CRM filters to communicate only with select groups of prospects at once, you can help to encourage them through timely interventions such as emails with relevant information or invitations to upcoming webinars that are appropriate for their current status.

The benefit of nurturing leads through automation is that they cost 33% less to close than using traditional methods.

Using automated triggers within a CRM tool like SuperOffice means you can automatically send relevant and engaging content to your prospects based on actions they’ve taken.

However - 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales due to a lack of nurturing, so take the time to get this right using your CRM software to help you.

By this point, we’ve covered using CRM software for both inbound lead capture and lead nurturing - which are both great ways to acquire new customers.

Now, let’s take a look at some other ways that your CRM platform can help you acquire new customers, starting with ideal customer profiles.

DEVELOP IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILES (ICP)

One of the best things about growing your business using a CRM is the rich historical data you can collect along the way.

In fact, one of the most beneficial ways you can use existing customer data in your CRM to acquire new customers is utilizing it to form the basis of ideal customer profiles (ICP).

An ideal customer profile is a list of characteristics that describe the companies - not individual people - who are the best fit for your products and services.

This list of ICP characteristics can include anything you think is relevant, but will often include things like:

• Which Industry or vertical are they in? Most products should focus on key sectors
• How many employees/users do they have?
• How much revenue did the company make in recent years? Are they growing?
• What is the estimated budget/spend for your solution?
• Where are they based? Do you comply with local laws/regulations
• What is their current tech stack, and how does your solution fit?
• How many customers do they have? Do you have a sense of churn/satisfaction?
• How established is the company? Are they a new startup or a mature organization?
• Any special overheads to consider - extra support, language specialists, time zones?

You may think you know exactly which types of customers are your ideal customers - but often, by performing some customer profile analysis with your CRM data, you’ll quickly learn who are actually your best-fit customers.

According to Gartner, developing an ICP (or multiple ICPs) is essential for success in sales and marketing. They found that the companies that focus on developing ICPs saw exciting commercial results, including:

• Faster sales cycles
• Higher conversion rates
• Greater average ACV and LTV

Once you’ve used your CRM data to identify who your ideal customers are, you’ll be able to use ideal customer profiles in a number of different ways to help you acquire more new customers who have similar characteristics, including:

• Focus on selling specific products or services by creating targeted ICP(s)
• Segment the leads you’re generating based on their profile
• Target each ICP with their own automated email sequences
• Build sales pipelines for each ICP so you can progress each prospect more quickly

However, ideal customer profiles aren’t the only way you can use your CRM and existing customer data to acquire more new customers.

You can also use CRM data to help you attract more new customers through social media.

EXPORT CRM DATA FOR TARGETED SOCIAL MEDIA ADS

B2B platforms like LinkedIn, as well as influential sites like Twitter/X, make it easier than ever to advertise to your target audience.

LinkedIn alone boasts over 1 billion members worldwide and claims to be the number one platform for B2B lead generation.

The challenge is that advertising can be an expensive way to generate leads - the average CPC (cost per click) on a LinkedIn ad is $5.26. Depending on your conversion rate this could see a lead easily costing you $100’s to generate.

So how can your CRM help with reducing the cost and increasing the success of lead generation through social media advertising?

The answer comes down to smart use of your existing customer data.

By using your CRM to identify and then export out the data you hold on existing customers who fit specific ideal customer profiles, you can use it to create highly targeted campaigns on social media aimed at ‘lookalike audiences’.

Essentially, a lookalike audience is the name given to other users of social media sites like Linkedin or Twitter/X who share the same characteristics as those in your ideal customer profile.

In SuperOffice, you can create a selection of all your ICPs and then save that information, ready to be uploaded to social media.

You can then focus your efforts on lead-generation campaigns for those specific lookalike audiences, which will result in both a higher conversion rate and reduced costs - all thanks to the data held in your CRM.

However, once you’ve driven this ad traffic to your website, you’ll need to make sure that the information the readers see resonates with them - this is where our final tip for using your CRM to acquire new customers comes into play.

IMPROVE YOUR WEB COPY (AND CONVERSION RATE)

There’s no point in spending time, money, and effort on generating interest in your products and services if you can’t turn that interest into leads and sales.

As part of a consistent and high-converting customer experience, you need to make sure that your website accurately reflects the value you can offer your prospective customers.

The best way to do that is to optimize your website copy to make sure it resonates with the people reading it - using what’s known as voice of customer data.

Voice of customer data is the catchall term for the insights on your product or service you’ve gathered directly from your customer.

Often, people gravitate towards online reviews as a quick source of VOC data - but your CRM can be a goldmine for understanding customer sentiment.

By making use of the data stored in your CRM, including sales call notes, customer service data, and live chat, you can highlight specific words and phrases that your customers use consistently.

This wording could pinpoint the pains or problems your solution solves or perhaps the return on investment it offers your customers. There is no right or wrong when it comes to selecting VOC data as long as you believe it’ll resonate with your target audience.

Using a copywriting framework, this wording you’ve identified can then be worked into your web copy across your website, including home page messaging, paid search landing pages and blog post content.

The outcome of this is not only a higher conversion rate for your website, turning more traffic into leads - but because these leads have read web copy that speaks directly to them - you should also see an uplift in lead-to-customer conversion, too! 

CONCLUSION

The best retention rates in the world won’t help your business grow.

So, it’s important to acquire new business each year.

With new customers being so important to the ongoing success of your business, how can you take advantage and acquire more using a CRM like SuperOffice?

To help you get started, we’ve outlined steps you can take now, that include capture and nurturing - as well as techniques you might not have considered before, like ideal customer profile (ICP) development, lookalike audiences, and website copy optimization.

It’s time to stop seeing CRM as a platform that’s only good for retention and start seeing it as it is - a platform for revenue growth.

ACQUIRE NEW CUSTOMERS WITH SUPEROFFICE

SuperOffice is an award-winning CRM and customer service platform that gives you all the tools you need to not only attract new customers - but also offer the highest quality service and experience to retain them, too.

Because attracting new customers is a primary concern for companies everywhere, we’ve made sure SuperOffice is jam-packed full of features to help you put sales front and center so you can close more new business, including:

• Highly customizable web forms to help you capture leads at scale
• Easy to use email automation to help you nurture leads into customers
• Report building and data export to help you maximize the use of CRM data
• Simple to use segmentation options to help you target specific ICPs
• A central platform to store all your VOC and customer data for easy access
• And much more…

Using SuperOffice as a unified CRM and Service platform helps you to deliver against your new business revenue goals - while ensuring a ‘best in class’ experience for your customers across marketing, sales, and service.