CRM Software Guide: What To Look For Before Buying

For businesses across all industries, CRMs are a revolutionary tool. Instead of juggling information between spreadsheets or other platforms, a CRM tool serves as a single source of truth for your marketing, sales, and customer service operations.

This is very important - how your business nurtures relationships with both existing and prospective customers to increase loyalty, trust and profitability. CRM software, which plays a critical role in your overall customer relationship management strategy in three main ways: supporting you organize operations, enhancing sales and conversion rates and across teams making collaboration easier.

CRM Software - 12 Ways It Can Benefit Your Business

CRM system brings a multitude of benefits for your business, the most important ones being:

#Centralizing data in your organization - A CRM application enables you to store important information about your sales pipeline, customer relationships and performance of team members, and then makes it easily accessible anytime, anywhere. This is critical as it prevents the information from getting lost or dispersed amongst different platforms.

#Organizing data - A CRM tool not only centralize data but also organizes it. You can swiftly and easily search for and find information about customers as well as data on business performance.

#Increasing productivity and saving time - With centralized and organized data in the CRM, your team will spend less time chasing the answers they’re looking for, thus increasing the productivity and efficiency of your organization.

#Making customer service better - Your customer service team can easily view every history of customers’ interactions with your business, what products or services they’ve purchased from you and many more. Having access to this information helps boost the satisfaction of the customer since your team will be able to provide a higher level of service.

#Improving customer segmentation - Every company has a huge list of contacts and it can be overwhelming, but a CRM application will help you organize your huge list based on whatever criteria you have set. Therefore, your team can prioritize tasks and send out more targeted communications.

#Facilitating and making internal communications easier - With CRMs, communicating across teams become simpler. The members of your team can tag each other in different tasks and updates within the system so that everyone can view it and stay updated on what’s going on internally.

#Reports automation - A CRM has a robust report feature and you generate certain useful sales reports for your team automatically, thus giving a quick and more accurate window into performance.

#Providing more accurate business forecasting - CRM systems enable you to interpret your data, and with the help of those data you can more accurately forecast future performance.

#Managing relations with a prospective customer - In the journey of the sales cycle, follow-ups are a critical activity. You can set a reminder in the CRM and it will notify you when it’s time to schedule a call or send an email to a prospective customer so that you’re more likely to reach or exceed targets.

#Boosting sales - Your sales are likely to increase with the help of all the insights and organizational benefits a CRM provides. More time and accurate data can empower your team to sell smarter and faster.

#Enhancing customer retention - Existing customers in your organization reap the benefits of CRM software as well. Through faster communication, better ticket management, and analysis report, your retention rates are also likely to boost after implementing a CRM application.

#Easily allowing your operations to scale up - Your team can expand without as many logistical hurdles and headaches by centralizing your information and making communications much more straightforward. A CRM platform can grow as your business does.

Type of CRMs

CRMs are mainly categorized into three types, each of which serves a different core purpose. Below are the different types of CRM software so that you can make a more informed decision when choosing one for your business.

Operational CRM

Operational CRMs provide a database for storing and updating information about the prospect and customer. This valuable information is then made accessible to your marketing, sales and customer success teams.

This CRM is designed to be a centre point for information on all customer relationships and can help you determine the location of each contact in the sales process, how many times they reached out to sales or support and which marketing emails they received.

Sales/Analytical CRM

An analytical CRM helps analyze the entered data to draw valuable insights about your business. And you make can make smarter business decisions by using these insights.

A special type of database called a data warehouse comes equipped with Analytical CRMs that allows data to be easily prepped for trend analysis and visualization. The application also includes data mining modules and OLAP (online analytical processing) technology, which helps make forecasting, charts, graphs and reports possible.

Collaborative CRM

With Collaborative CRMs you can easily share data and information internally. Your team gets benefits from easier communication, and also your customers ultimately receive a better experience too.