CRM system helps your organization efficiently manage your customers and customer data. It will help you streamline the sales & marketing processes and enables you to automate sales & marketing processes to make the life of the sales person easier.
A CRM system allows organisations to make the communication more personalized, it can help your organization manage SMS, email and social media campaigns more efficiently and it enables management to keep a finger on the sales managers pipeline. Sales reporting gets really easy with a CRM system and it brings the organization together with the focus on the most important sales goals.
Relationships with customers are more important than ever; you need a tool to manage them, especially if you’re a growing business in a competitive environment.
What are the signs for when you need to implement a CRM system?
- If you are getting leads, but you don’t have time to manage efficiently or if you don’t have time to analyse if the leads you are getting is the right ones. With a CRM system can add all leads to a central point, gather data from multiple sources to help the lead qualification processes and most important set-up automatic communication processes like sending out emails, sms or marketing during the lead qualification processes.
- IF you sales team don’t know what they are doing or not communication. Then you need a CRM system that can bring them together and closer. You need a CRM system that can present what is most important to focus on and it allows everyone to get access to the same data.
- Your support team and sales team are not in sync. Your account manager don’t have knowledge when the service is down. The Account manager can see and follow the service request and/or incident tickets customers has sent in. You don’t want to sit in a meeting with the customer without this info.
- Scaling your business is hard. If you feel like manual data management is taking up all your time and you don’t have enough resources to work on expanding your business, you need to delegate it to a CRM system.
How do you select the right CRM system?
In this blog, we present the most important things to consider when choosing a CRM system for a business. The first thing you need to do when choosing a CRM for your business is to map out your sales and marketing processes and see which parts of it you want to streamline and improve. Traditionally, business needs go hand in hand with the problem the business is facing, so focus on the things you’d like to improve first.
Identify your needs and requirements
There are alot of different CRM system on the market and they might seem pretty similar, but the functionalities and CRM features they offer can vary significant. Reviews are helpful here but every organization is different, and what may work incredibly well for one business may not be so good for another.
A well organized and planned requirement phase is essential in the selection process. If you get your requirements wrong it can result in a CRM system not fit for your needs and a very costly project. Make sure you documents all your requirements first, and if you don’t know how to do this take help from a company like Salespie that can guide you in the process. When your requirements are documented send this out to a number of potential CRM solution providers and ask them to help you further to improve your requirements and come with recommendation of what type of system and implementation that is best for your company/organization. And for many other complex projects start small and the add new functionalities and complexity as your knowledge increases.
Must have needs
Once you have document your requirements and know what you want to achieve by implementing a CRM solution, you should be able to tell which features are the most important for you to have. Then, you should look for the tools that offer that set of features. Easy-peasy.
Here are some of the features that could be nice for your business CRM to have:
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Contact management
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Sales pipeline visualization
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Marketing capabilities
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Social CRM capabilities
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Visual dashboards & reporting
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Sales automation
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Email marketing automation
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Integrations with other tools in your tech stack
At the same time, you should remember that at the beginning of your journey, you don’t need an overly complicated tool that your larger counterparts are using to manage their business workflows. In fact, opting for software too elaborate can set you back. If your employees find the software too difficult to use, you’ll quickly find yourself in a situation where you aren’t leveraging the benefits of using a CRM system for small businesses due to the low adoption rate
Select system integrator partner
Don’t implements and customizes your CRM system yourself. Instead, select a system integrator that can help you implement the system and adapt it for your requirements. There are large/expensive system integrators such as Infosys, Accenture, Cap Gemini, but as well smaller and more cost efficient players. The important here is to select a partner that fulfil your needs and wants to growth with you and understand your needs and requirements.
What type of CRM system should you select?
Today most CRM system are cloud based which is to preferred compared to on-prem CRM systems. All CRM- systems have the basic functionalities such as Lead Management, Opportunity Management, Account Management and Contact Management. Some CRM systems offering a more simplify and basic amount of functionalities for a less cost and others offers everything you can think of, but then for a much higher costs.
These are the most popular CRM-systems today:
Best buyer guides
Here are some of the best byers guides for CRM that I recommend you to look through
Good luck with your selection of CRM-system and please make sure to always focus on staring small and simple and then grow CRM functionalities as your employees and organizations is getting more experienced in using it.
