What should a good crm provide

Tags: Blog. For most businesses, their most valuable and important asset is their customers. Before all else, a CRM Customer Relationship Management system should be useful to its end users: salespeople, sales managers, marketers, and business leaders. CRM systems have a range of functionalities, but these nine features are must-haves for any business that is aiming to organise their systems and improve their efficiency.

All CRM systems allow salespeople to create contact records and store prospect and customer information in a database. Most CRM systems can be customised ed to operate on a specific sales process. Whether your company has three deal stages or 15, you should be able to program these levels into the software and attach associated values. Sales people need visibility into a number of metrics on a daily basis. Metrics such as their progress to date against quota, how many deals they have in their pipelines at which stages, and what outstanding tasks they need to complete.

Similarly, sales managers and leaders need to be able to view these categories for the aggregated sales team. Cloud CRM solutions exist on remote servers where software updates, security measures, hardware upgrades, backups and more are managed by the CRM service provider. Both come with unique pros and cons to consider before choosing. A CRM functions as an inventory database for your products. Keep up with quotes for the products that you sell individually. Find out which products are doing well with customers and where sales are lost.

Access this information from handheld devices, desktops and more. Control what different users see within your CRM to prevent data leaks and security breaches. Your employees can get used to handling the changes, customers can explore and give feedback and you collect data on every interaction. This helps prevent customer frustration, improve conversion rates and help you make educated decisions and actions.

No CRM processes list would be complete without mentioning integrations. Integrating other programs to your CRM allows for added functionality and streamlined operation. Campaign management features allow you to manage your entire sales campaign from a single UI. This includes campaign ROI, scheduling, analytics and more.

A CRM combines analytics tools with data collection software, then gives you and your employees numerous access points. Customization is one of the more basic CRM features, but it has far-reaching implications. The more customization, the more flexible the CRM. Will the software grow with your organization? Does it have the capability to adapt to and integrate with existing software used by your organization?

Can it incorporate desktop productivity tools? Can it change when you need it to? If you answered no to any of these questions, you may need to find more flexible software. Some businesses will be content with the email marketing features of customer relationship management software, but others may find they need the more robust power of a separate email marketer. If you already utilize an email marketing system like Mailchimp or Constant Contact , you may prefer to integrate it rather than import that information to your CRM.

Integrate management platforms like Oktopost and Hootsuite to streamline your social media management and allow multiple team members to work together from different access points.

As the name states, customer relationship management software is about managing your relationships with your customers. Users can manage each customer case individually and efficiently to improve customer satisfaction levels with CRM. Track, close and reopen existing cases with this useful feature. Online case management also allows you to manage any confidential information in a secure environment.

This is essential because it helps you avoid cybersecurity issues and data leaks. The last thing any business needs is to get in trouble due to data security issues! We wanted to know more about which CRM features and functions users really want, so we asked over companies in the market for a CRM what features they wanted in their CRM platforms. We asked our survey participants what customer relationship management features they want from CRM products, and these were the most frequently requested:.

SelectHub interviewed companies from small businesses to enterprises, from different industries, with different CRM needs. But the same answers came up again and again. Intriguingly, many buyers asked for specific elements of marketing automation without asking for marketing automation specifically. For example, eight percent of respondents asked for campaign management or tracking capabilities. Of that group, 48 percent asked for only campaign management with no mention of marketing automation.

Marketing automation functionality including campaign features was important to 26 percent. Then, 23 percent asked for campaigns and marketing automation as distinctly separate features. This suggests buyers are fundamentally confused about what is typically included within standard sales force and marketing automation functionality and how to communicate about what they need.

Additionally, while 14 percent of respondents requested basic sales force automation, others requested only specific elements of sales force automation functionality, or requested sales force automation and a feature that would be included in any sales force automation package.

They just listed forecasting and other typical sales force automation functions of CRM as areas of interest. Looking at the buyers who requested reporting capabilities reveals a similar dilemma. But there is still some basic education that needs to happen among business owners and operators to accurately determine what they need from a CRM.

Communication makes and breaks relationships in our personal lives, and it should be no surprise that the same is true of business relationships. Buyers want to improve their relationships with their customers, and having better communication both internally and externally is one way to accomplish this. A contact management system gives colleagues access to the same database, promoting collaboration and communication between marketing and sales teams.

Communication and collaboration were cited as significant needs by 36 percent and 38 percent of users, respectively, which helps explain the popularity of the contact management feature. Keeping track of contact information can also help streamline otherwise complex processes. Contact management functionality focuses on storing and organizing customer data like phone numbers, emails, addresses and communications with those contacts.

It helps sales teams contact leads at the right stage of the sales process, and only contact them the appropriate number of times. Buyers want it to be easy for their users to collaborate: 10 percent listed a user-friendly interface as a top requirement. This also ties back into the need for education. Two percent of users reported that their previous CRM was improperly implemented or too confusing to use, which is a pretty significant number.

Users want a tool able to communicate and integrate with other tools they use. Whether those tools were email, an ERP, other CRM systems or a website, interoperability was a big bonus for most respondents. Integration removes steps in the pipeline process, prevents data duplication and consolidates customer data and sales processes. Getting everyone on the same page and fostering collaboration between marketing teams, sales teams and customers was one of the main concerns for most categories.

Remember how buyers were confused about what marketing and sales automation would give them? They still asked for these features and the functions related to them in huge numbers. In fact, the top two through six features — marketing automation, contact management, reporting, pipeline management and sales force automation — were all automation related.

Automation is valuable for more than just convenience, and buyers know it. It saves businesses time and money by taking over repetitive tasks and freeing up employee time. It makes them more efficient by optimizing workflows requested by 12 percent of respondents. And automation promotes brand consistency and outreach standardization. A consistent brand and stable outreach is important to success.

Buyers are realizing that one of the best and easiest ways to ensure streamlined and consistent outreach to leads is to utilize marketing automation. Marketing automation is especially popular with growing businesses because it standardizes elements of the sales process. Standardized email templates requested by two percent of buyers , customizable fields requested by three percent and campaign management requested by four percent are all marketing automation features that focus on standardizing customer interactions.

Most of the companies purchasing their first CRM system mentioned issues with organization, efficiency and communication as the driving factors behind their decision to make the switch. It manages customer profiles, relationships and communication history. Account Management is another primary feature of CRM software. It captures and organizes company or division or household information and manages relationship.

Account records contain information about the companies you do business with. But contact records contain information about the people you work with. When a customer is interested to buy product or service, sales person creates a quote with all details. If customer agrees to buy it with specified price, order will be generated. If not, sales person either cancels the quote or revises it to meet customer requirement. CRM automates and streamlines this process for business.

It improves order processing capability, sales visibility and relationship with customers. An opportunity is potential revenue generating contact or account. If business does not nurture contacts or accounts properly, it will lose selling opportunity. Opportunity Management enables business to manage and monitor sales funnel and provides necessary info to complete the sales process.

Sales process automation is one of the most important CRM features. It automates and streamlines various sales functionalities to standardize business processes. It reduces human error, makes sales cycle shorter and improves lead to customer conversion ratio. Needless to say, campaign management plays an important role in any business.

Marketing campaign is the very first step any business takes to reach potential customers with products and services. So, it must be flawless. CRM leverages the efficiency of marketing campaign by marketing process automation.

It reduces campaign cost, analyzes campaign data and forecasts future marketing strategy. Without proper customer segmentation, marketing campaign will never give you expected result. Suppose, ABC company wants to launch a product for new born babies in Europe.

So marketing campaign must target parents with new born babies or to be parents only.