10 Need-to-Know Features For CRM Software
Perhaps you can relate to the hassle you’d to go through while tracking prospects and customers on paper. This process is not only time-involving but it’s also subject to a number of avoidable errors. Errors that could affect the overall data and implementation of the data. Luckily, customer relationship management (CRM) system can be very vital to organizing and tracking your prospects. But then, finding the best CRM for your business becomes another challenge. What features to focus on could easily confuse you. But not after learning some of the must-have features your system should contain. Please read on.
Contact Management
Perhaps, CRMs are majorly designed for contact management. This is what will allow you to put all your contact information – pipelines, tasks, notes, events, and files for each lead or existing customers in one place. This feature will also ease your search for a particular contact you are interested in. This means that you should ensure to have a CRM system where all your data can fit into. This will depend on the size of your business and number of employees in the business – which may be proportional to the amount of data you’ll be handling from time to time. Some CRMs are also designed to allow the synchronization of your email account. These can be very essential in a situation where you’re expecting to have several Google contacts in your business. After identifying the type of system to purchase for your business, you can compare HubSpot pricing to help you make an informed decision.
Interaction Tracking
This can be a vital feature when it comes to logging communication with your customers. You may not see its relevance when you’re having a very small team. But when your team is growing, more and more people will be talking to one contact. This means that your contact can be frustrated when everyone approaches them with different information. Interaction tracking ensures your team has the same information about different contacts for convenience. This feature also makes the delegation of duties to the team members far much easier owing to the availability of information in a localized spot. Interdepartmental collaboration is also enhanced with this feature which goes a long way to include collaborative selling depending on your needs.
Integration of Marketing Automation
How can you describe your business growth? Is this growth in line with your invested CRM or it has outgrown it? This is very essential when it comes to ensuring smooth operation of your business operations. When expecting the growth of your business to outgrow the CRM, you need to apply proper actions. You can integrate the CRM with specialty solutions or you may consider purchasing a robust solution. Investing in a marketing automation solution is among the most effective ways of improving your business. This helps you understand how your sales and marketing efforts relate hence you can identify the best markets for your products and how to achieve customer loyalty with your products. The automation will allow you to nurture leads way before sales talks to them, score leads to target sales to potential clients, optimize marketing budget to increase overall sales revenue, and to inform customers which helps increase their likelihood to increase their purchases.
Calendar/Reminders
We’re human beings. This means that we’re prone to forget some things once in a while, especially if we’re to stay with the information for a very long time. Luckily, calendars came to our rescue. Calendars have always helped us remember things that we could’ve easily forgotten. This is no different with the calendar feature in the CRMs – except that the latter is more advanced and reliable. They help us tie different tasks and events to particular contacts in order for us to not forget. But how’s this possible? With this feature, you can set reminders for different events and the system will “Follow Up” for you. You can sync your calendar with the rest of the calendars in the business such as iCal or Google which will ensure all of your events are in one place. This will be more convenient than having different reminders in different calendars. Plus, I doubt if you’ll be too idle to be checking up all calendars every now and then.
Custom Reporting
While reporting can be done with the basic premade standard reports such as the new prospects by x date and close rate, custom reporting can take the functionality of reporting a step further. With this feature, you’ll get to create and choose such metrics as calendars lead type, demographics, sales profits, and sales stage (sales cycle). However, different vendors who provide this feature tend to charge more. Again different solutions exist depending on their ease of use and robustness. Therefore, you’ll need to first understand what your business needs and this will guide you on the perfect solution to go for. This will depend on the size of your business, type of your industry, and sales cycle which will guide you on the required customization.
Customization
Customization tools are a must-have for every CRM you’ll have in your business. Here’s why. The processes and information that you need from different contacts might not be the same as what other businesses are after. Your business needs and aesthetics are also different from those of other companies. Customization tools allow you to include your personal preferences such as the reminder settings and the color scheme to your CRM. The system that you’ll use, therefore, should be ideal for your business and should fit your business needs and aesthetics. This will help go a step further to determine your success in the business.
Pipeline View
If you’re intending to keep a good score, pipeline view is an essential feature. It’s a breakdown of every stage in your sales pipeline that outlines the number of leads contained in each stage. It also gives you the option of drilling down to particular leads. In this feature, there are areas that are significantly weak hence leads tend to drop off. This weakness could be because of factors like organizational errors, loss of leads’ track in the pipeline, poor lead management, and complexities in the process – could deter potential clients. It can be a vital feature that you should consider having to enjoy an amazing CRM experience in your business. Normally, prospects are automatically tracked in each step by the CRM software and the obtained results are used to identify where those hang-ups are in a visual form. As a manager, the pipeline view allows you to identify the weak areas at a high level hence taking a probable action.
Data Security
Data security is a very sensitive aspect in any business regardless of the size. However, there have been cases where some confidential information gets into the wrong hands. Perhaps you’ve been trying to look for different means to prevent this awful act from happening. Did you know that some CRMs can help you with this? Well, yes, they can. These CRMs will allow you to prevent data from being exported by some users. You can also lock out other users who you cannot trust the data or apply some special ownership transfer protocols. This will prevent your unreliable sales person from exporting the data and even running away with it. It’s the best way to enhance the security of your company data.
Email Logging and Integration
In every sales process, email is an essential aspect. In fact, email marketing has been proven to be better and more effective than other marketing strategies such as trade shows, networking, and phone calls. It has a higher ROI. This feature saves you the need of switching between systems when you’re intending to recap on interactions with your prospective customers. You’ll easily access the prospect’s details when writing an email. Plus, you can log the sent emails from within the software or from your email system hence saving you the need to go through the lengthy note-taking – allows you to easily pull up a record of your communications with a specific contact. This feature works to ensure an increased worker and team productivity in the long-run. What’s more? Some systems allow for integration with Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, and Outlook.
Document Storage
Perhaps you can relate to the inconvenience of having to share each person a specific document that needs to be accessed by more than one person. This can be stressful and time-consuming as well, especially where there’s a large number to share with. Again, loss of certain documents is also not a new thing. And it hurts if you lose sensitive information. Well, the document storage feature will save you these hassles. It’ll allow you to keep all sales documents in a specific location where all users will be able to access and easily search to find the document you need. With this feature, you won’t need to have clouds drives, computer drive, and the act of storing some documents on your desks. However, some software allows you to integrate with storage systems like Box, Dropbox, and Google drive. With this feature also, you won’t have to struggle through various folders looking for a specific document since it allows you to save all your files in one localized location for convenience.
So, regardless of whether you’re operating a small or a big business, a CRM system will benefit you in quite a number of ways. However, not just any CRM system can be fit for your business. You need to have a system that fits your business needs and has the potential of taking your business to the next level. By now you’ve known the must-have features in a CRM which should guide you to make informed decisions when acquiring your next system. You can also look out for other relevant themed blogs to learn more about CRM features and their benefits to your business. Good luck!
