A good CRM should be able to manage data for a wide variety of client profiles in an effective manner while also giving you the confidence to interact with each customer in a manner that is well-organised and expertly conducted. Consider that it is the most important tool in the sales team's inventory and will make it possible to create and sustain long-term connections with contacts and clients when selecting a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.
Managing clients gives companies a better chance of closing more deals, ensuring a higher creation of leads, and increasing overall sales. Therefore, a company needs to conduct adequate research before investing in a customer relationship management (CRM) system to ensure the system is suitable for the firm's requirements. When selecting a customer relationship management system (CRM), your priority should be to ensure that it is a good fit for the day-to-day operations of your company. In addition, it should provide answers to all of the challenges and difficulties you face daily or are expected to face in the future.
Every product has an inherent requirement for ease of use on the part of the consumer, and the CRM system is not an exception to this rule. The ideal customer relationship management system (CRM) should, in addition to being accessible across various platforms, be compatible with cloud storage, provide access whenever and wherever the user chooses, and have lower overhead expenses than on-premise options.
The most well-known CRM providers offer access to cloud storage whenever required, independent of a user's phone, desktop computer, or another smart device. It improves connectivity, simplicity of use, efficiency, and productivity; as a result, consumers will have the freedom to choose the best platform that meets their needs at any given time. Scalability is something else you should consider; will it be easy for you to add users as your business expands?
Companies that dominate the CRM market, such as Salesforce, Zoho CRM, and Microsoft Dynamics 365, provide the most important and relevant features essential to organisations with accessibility across several platforms. However, SugarCRM, HubSpot CRM, Daylite, and many other programs are viable alternatives.
Eight Things To Consider When Choosing CRM Software
CRM, which stands for "customer relationship management", was initially conceived as a "digital Rolodex" — that is, a method of arranging customer contact information within a single database. Since then, the technology has advanced to the point that it now incorporates sophisticated data analytics and reporting, artificial intelligence-based sales insights, automated data entry, and deep integrations with various other essential business tools.
If you need to centralise the data for your company and ensure that everyone on your staff is on the same page, using customer relationship management software is an obvious choice. However, choosing which CRM software to use is a more difficult choice. There are hundreds of well-known CRM options, and the list quickly expands to include more.
CRMs all have some of the same fundamental features and functions, but they can differ greatly in terms of their capabilities, user interfaces, scalability, prices, and levels of complexity. In addition, some solutions are developed for certain markets and industries, and others are designed to service a wide range of different types of companies.
Consider the following eight aspects when you search for the best CRM software for your company before making a purchase:
- Your aspirations
- User experience
- Mobility
- Integrations
- Your budget
- Flexibility/scalability
- Reporting/analytics
- Vendor reputation
Your aspirations
Every CRM vendor asserts that their products will make it easier for businesses to locate more qualified leads, reduce the length of the sales cycle, boost conversion rates, enhance customer service, and better coordinate efforts across departments. However, because there are a variety of CRM solutions on the market, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the problem(s) you are attempting to solve with CRM, as well as the goals you wish to achieve with it.
To begin, think about the most important difficulties you face in sales: are you getting enough leads? Do you have a large number of leads, but the vast majority of them are not qualified? Do sales reps fail to follow up on leads, causing deals to stall in your pipeline? What are the most problematic areas, and which CRM program is the most effective at resolving these issues? Also, examine whether you have other client-facing departments, such as marketing or customer support, that require CRM access and which solutions cater to their specific requirements the most effectively.
User experience
Every CRM solution assists in collecting customer data and using that information to enhance business connections and boost revenue. However, they all go about it in their unique ways, giving certain features and functionality a higher priority than others, which is reflected in the user experience. Large corporations that employ several customer-facing teams and rely on CRM to handle their data and customer interactions typically require enterprise-grade systems. As a result, this product often comes with many tabs and integrations, some or all of which may be optional for your small business.
The strategies that go into developing solutions for SMEs are frequently unique. Pipedrive and OnePageCRM are two examples of sales software developed by salespeople specifically for other salespeople. Although marketing and customer support can access the data, the user experience primarily focuses on improving sales productivity. OnePageCRM organises all relevant information regarding each contact onto a single page that you can scroll. It uses an Action Stream to prompt you with specific instructions regarding the next steps to convert each prospective client into a paying customer. In addition, Pipedrive helps salespeople maintain focus by displaying sales data in a pipeline view that is tied to your sales workflow. It provides your team with actionable data visualisation.
Mobility
Mobility has long been a significant consideration for the owners of small businesses and the teams they employ. Thanks to mobile CRM, your salespeople can log the status of deals even as they rush from one meeting to the next. They will also be able to search for customer contact information even when they are working remotely. Access to mobile data has become increasingly important, particularly during the pandemic, to preserve open connections with consumers and prospects.
The vast majority of cloud-based systems are accessible from any device that has access to the internet. Nevertheless, the mobile experience provided by some CRMs is superior to that provided by others. Spend time getting familiar with the mobile app before deciding on a CRM program. Is the user experience enhanced for mobile devices, or is it simply a scaled-down version of the web application that is difficult to navigate on a small screen? Is the navigation on the mobile device easy to use? Do you get the whole product suite? Will it function properly on all your staff's mobile devices?
Integrations
The first customer relationship management systems were known as "dead databases". These systems offered a centralised location for storing all your client information, but this data was inaccessible to other programs and databases. However, most customer relationship management systems (CRMs) can now be integrated with your phone system and digital marketing tools, accounting software, productivity apps, collaboration apps, and pretty much any other compatible cloud solution. It is made possible by application programming interfaces (APIs). These integrations help you sync your data and save time with features like automatic call logging and "click to call," which enable you to call a contact directly from within the CRM using your company phone system. Other features include the ability to log calls and view call history automatically.
The ideal customer relationship management software for your company will be able to interface easily with your other important systems. Therefore, before investing in a solution, you should ensure it is compatible with the software you already have and the apps that are most frequently used by your staff. Which integrations are already active within the system, and which integrations can be introduced to the system in the future? Are you restricted to the connectors offered in the CRM provider's app marketplace, or does the CRM provider offer an open API that enables you to integrate any cloud solution of your choosing?
Your budget
CRM is often considered a type of software that is provided on a subscription basis, known as software as a service (SaaS), and requires the user to pay a licensing fee on either a yearly or monthly basis. Depending on the supplier, the monthly fee per user might be anywhere from zero to more than fifty dollars. The monthly subscription is the only cost associated with cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM), whose market size increased by 12.6% to $69 billion worldwide in 2020. With on-premises CRM, you are also responsible for the server and maintenance costs, which is why most small businesses use cloud solutions. The exception to this is companies operating in highly regulated industries, which are required to have complete control over all of their data.
Because enterprise-grade solutions have more bells and whistles than CRM created exclusively for SMBs, enterprise-grade solutions also tend to be more expensive than CRM built specifically for SMBs. However, you can discover a cost-effective CRM solution if you only need some extra capabilities.
Flexibility/Scalability
Even though your company is quite modest at the moment, if you have any aspirations of expanding it in the future, you will require a scalable solution. And if you anticipate that your workforce will both expand and contract over time — for example, if you need to add seasonal employees or want to be prepared for economic fluctuations — you also need a flexible solution. Again, it is because you will need to accommodate both the growth and the contraction of your workforce.
Reporting/Analytics
Effective customer relationship management software makes your sales workflows easier to complete; it also assists you in analysing these workflows to see what aspects are ineffective and which could be improved upon. Similarly, customer relationship management software should assist you in analysing each team member's performance to identify who is succeeding, who could benefit from extra training, and who should receive a promotion or a bigger commission.
It can be accomplished by any CRM solutions using advanced analytics and reporting, although some do a better job of it than others. Find a solution to offer you the information you need to improve your workforce and processes. Keeping your sales goals and pain areas in mind, look for a solution that will provide you with the information you need. Find out how much of the procedure can be done automatically as well. For example, OnePageCRM enables sales managers to generate reports for each sales representative automatically and have those reports delivered directly to the respective sales representatives on a timetable that the manager specifies. They can obtain all the information they require at the precise moment it is required of them without even having to enter it into the system.
Vendor reputation
Be careful to question the suppliers, and even better, ask your users: How much of an impact will be using this CRM solution have on your company? Is it safe and dependable to use this technology? How simple is it to put into action? After you've signed the contract, will the vendor continue to offer you good customer service?
Customer testimonials and case studies can be important resources for selecting CRM software; however, suppliers typically promote only their most delighted clients in these materials. Instead, you should look at their reviews on third-party websites, find out what professional technology experts think about the solution, and most crucially, ask for recommendations from your peers, who are business leaders in your field who work for organisations of comparable size. Find out what solutions they have used in the past, what solutions they are utilising currently, and why they switched.
There are also many CRM software vendors that provide free trials, allowing you to test out the solution without incurring any costs.
Because there are so many CRM solutions currently available, there is no "best" CRM software; rather, there is only the CRM solution that is the greatest fit for your specific requirements. These criteria will help you narrow down the list as you search for the ideal fit; next, ask the people you trust who they trust for recommendations on the vendors they recommend.
Frequently Asked Questions
There are three main types of CRM systems: collaborative, analytical, and operational. Here's how to choose the best one for your business.
CRM and CMS are software tools for online businesses. Customer relationship management software (CRM) keeps track of all your leads and customers by recording and reporting their interactions with your website. A content management system (CMS) is used for building and managing a website.
CMS stands for content management system. CMS is computer software or an application that uses a database to manage all content, and it can be used when developing a website. A CMS can therefore be used to update content and/or your website structure.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company's relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business relationships. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.
As mentioned previously, any implementation of CRM needs to consider these four core components: technology (applications and infrastructure), strategy (business goals and objectives), process (procedures and business rules) and people (organizational structure, skills, and incentives).
6 Benefits of CRM Platforms
For those who work with a CRM platform to imagine a world without it. If you love structure and organization, an advantage CRM software offers is that it can keep everything related to managing your customer relationships — data, notes, metrics, and more — in one place.
A CRM platform helps companies target different audiences, set scores and alerts based on an individual lead or customer’s activity, proactively work with contacts and maintain relationships. Best of all, a CRM system can be used across departments to ensure that all customer-facing teams are empowered with the right data to create incredible customer experiences.
CRM benefits a company in a variety of ways. While the benefits vary by department or industry, six benefits of CRM platforms that affect every user include:
Opportunities: Leads who, at some point, make their way further down your sales funnel and are close to purchasing become opportunities. For example, maybe they spoke to someone on your sales team and asked for a demo, or perhaps they put an item in their shopping cart on your ecommerce site.
A person’s location in your sales funnel is not something that Google Analytics or social media platforms can show you, but reports from your CRM platform can.
These reports can also help you see which ads and marketing messaging are most successful at guiding leads down the funnel to opportunities and then opportunities down to sales.
Trustworthy Reporting
Data is a necessary part of business, and it’s available from a number of resources: social media, Google Analytics, business software, apps, and CRM technology. It’s not useful, however, until it’s sorted, cleaned, analyzed, and made actionable.
Companies of all sizes use social media and rely on metrics from those platforms. For example, Google Analytics is an important tool many business owners use, at least minimally, to monitor their website traffic. However, you can’t rely on these tools alone.
A CRM system helps you go deeper with all your data and metrics, including those from other sources.
When your company is dedicated to maintaining clean data, or data free from errors, you can use your CRM platform to collate, tabulate, and organize that data, which is then easy to interpret with reporting features. This is one of the biggest benefits of a CRM system, and it trickles down to other benefits that become available once you have this usable data.
CRM platforms have an advantage over other customer relationship management systems because you can see who interacts with your company and how. For example, a lead successfully filled out a form on a landing page after seeing a particular ad on social media.
You can also run reports to see where your opportunities are, how well you’re interacting with leads and customers, trends in your sales and customer service efforts, and more.
You can run those reports with any number of parameters. For example, it’s common to categorize the consumers in your CRM as being in one of three different stages in the sales funnel: leads, opportunities, or sales.
Generally speaking, marketing works with leads, sales works with opportunities, and customer service works with sales, though there is overlap.
Leads — These consumers have filled out a form or otherwise expressed interest in your company. They may be high-quality, prospective customers, but you won’t know until they continue on the customer journey. Reports, especially those with insights driven by artificial intelligence, help CRM users know how to work with leads to convert them to opportunities.
Opportunities — Leads who, at some point, make their way further down your sales funnel and are close to purchasing become opportunities. For example, maybe they spoke to someone on your sales team and asked for a demo, or perhaps they put an item in their shopping cart on your ecommerce site.
A person’s location in your sales funnel is not something that Google Analytics or social media platforms can show you, but reports from your CRM platform can.
These reports can also help you see which ads and marketing messaging are most successful at guiding leads down the funnel to opportunities and then opportunities down to sales.
Sales — Once a person converts and becomes a customer, that doesn’t mean you’re done gathering and analyzing data. The data you collect before the customer’s purchase, the additional data you collect on their habits after purchase, and the information you glean from the reports you run on that data will ensure you understand those who purchase your products and services.
The best CRM systems can do more than tell you which ad a lead came from. They can show you exactly what a person clicks when you send them an email marketing message, how often they open an email, how often they have conversations with your sales team, what they need when they contact customer service, etc.
Reports are one of the most valuable benefits of CRM platforms, especially when AI enhances them.
Actionable data allows you to communicate with your current audience more effectively while also making it easier to reach out to those who have shown interest in the past. These reports guide your decision-making process and are invaluable.
Your company needs data visualisations at its beck and call to keep an eye on absolutely current statistics to make minute-by-minute or daily decisions. This is where another one of the benefits of CRM comes in: dashboards.
Dashboards that Visually Showcase Data
Using a spreadsheet to manage your company means inputting or importing data manually, figuring out what’s important, and then creating a graphical way to present this data. But, again, CRM does most of this for you.
Once you’ve invested in the platform, you can take advantage of another CRM benefit, the dashboard. You can set up a dashboard for every individual in your company who has login credentials for your CRM platform.
For example, a director of marketing would be most interested in email marketing metrics, specifically the click-through rates of each campaign. They can set up a dashboard that immediately displays how many people a particular email was sent to, how many opened it, the click-through rate, and more.
However, a director of sales would want to know how many calls are made per hour and how many of those calls resulted in positive action, such as a future meeting or demo.
Dashboards let users quickly see the most important data to their workflows without having to dig, sift, sort, or run a report.
More Personalized Outreach with Automation
Because you are continually capturing data about and insights into your audience, market, and industry, you can create more relevant, personalized messaging and outreach — in both your manual efforts and your automated campaigns. This is the advantage of dynamic content and automated messaging: You can put people who have an important similarity — for example, an interest in a niche product — into different drip campaigns.
This capability benefits many CRMs and lets you set up a series of automated emails that speak to that audience specifically and are triggered by specific actions. Drip campaigns can be used throughout the sales funnel.
For example, on a tour company website, if someone builds a custom itinerary for a trip to Thailand, instead of sending them generic emails about travel, you can start them on a drip campaign for people who create custom itineraries for Southeast Asia.
Automation also allows you to take someone out of a drip campaign at any time based on their actions. So if, for example, the person who was interested in a trip to Thailand finally books the itinerary, your platform will automatically remove them from that particular drip campaign to avoid redundant emails and confusion.
Proactive Service
In the same way that the data in your CRM platform can help automate more personalized outreach throughout the marketing funnel, it can improve a sales team’s outreach efforts or customer service’s ability to help customers.
If a sales team knows what interests a particular customer most, they or a support representative can meet the customer’s needs and solve problems more proactively.
This is a major advantage for a customer service team. There's no need to dig for information with relevant data available in their dashboards and cases, so a rep can get right down to what matters. It saves everyone time and makes your potential and current customers feel important when sales and customer service are proactive and knowledgeable — plus, it can improve your bottom line through higher customer satisfaction and reduced time to resolution.
Efficiency Enhanced with Automation
Don’t make tracking and managing customer information harder than it needs to be. CRM ensures your data is in one place and can easily be updated by anyone.
Automation is an advantage CRM platforms offer users, and it can be seen throughout the company. Three examples include:
Cutting the time it takes to email and nurture leads with drip campaigns.
Scoring leads using custom parameters you set, or with built-in AI, your teams can better prioritize which marketing qualified leads, or MQL can transition to sales qualified leads or SQL.
Handling simple customer questions, such as the status of an order, with chatbots and other automated messaging
Marketing can spend more time creating campaigns that resonate with their audience, analyzing data, and testing different strategies based on analytics. Sales can focus on selling the right product or service to customers. Customer service agents can dedicate their time to working with customers who have questions, problems, or more complex needs.
Ultimately, an efficient company can better serve its customers — that’s the greatest benefit of CRM software.
Simplified Collaboration
Your CRM serves as a record of conversations, interactions, needs, notes, and contact information. And if it’s cloud-based, it’s always up to date, and your teammates can easily look at its records to make decisions.
Additionally, some CRM platforms have built-in collaboration tools that allow multiple people to work on one file simultaneously or follow the progress of a document, such as a sales quote.
Everyone who has access to your CRM can work together through this shared record. For example, when a salesperson speaks with a customer and learns more about them, they can fill in certain fields in that person’s record or make notes on their file. This helps make sure the rest of the team is working with the latest details to the best of their ability.
Marketing, sales, and customer service work together instead of worrying about siloed information.
All team members can gather insights and data and work together to provide exceptional customer service.
Data organized and presented by a CRM platform leads to a better understanding of customers. This leads to better messaging and outreach, which can be done with automation, which helps you offer better, more efficient customer service. Furthermore, your teams can collaborate more easily and reduce siloes.
Of all the benefits of CRM software, using data and technology to power a more efficient company is one of the biggest. This helps you serve customers more effectively, leading to better business.