What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software?
Key Features of CRM Software
1. Workflow automation
2. Contact management
3. Account Management
4. Lead generation and follow-up tracking
5. Sales network management
6. Sales Forecasting
7. Email marketing
8. Document Management
9. Management of quotes and proposals
10. Customization and integration Bottom Line
What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software?
Customer Relationship Management software or CRM system as it is popularly known is very useful to businesses when it comes to nurturing their relationship with their clients. Now, enable the business professionals to improve customer satisfaction through each step of their journey and elevate operational efficiency using CRM software features and by utilizing the best from the development of ERP applications.
Although CRM software has existed since the mid-1990s, it had taken off in the last decade. It is a powerful system that gathers all kinds of data including sales leads and customer information and stores it all in one place according to Nirav Patel, Enterprise Solution Specialist in Enterprise application development company – TatvaSoft. It also keeps the records of all the calls, emails, and meetings to help your business team enhance customer services, boost sales and reap great revenue. Make your sales and marketing extremely smarter by tracking and slicing the data into relevant customer segments. CRM proves to be very helpful in offering an enhanced experience to the customers with just-for-them messages and other personalized services.Â
Yes, customer relationship management is what CRM software does but that’s not the only thing it does. It is specifically designed to stay on top of things. So, business owners need to keep themselves updated constantly. Let’s look at the details of what more CRM features this software has to offer.
Key Features of CRM Software
1. Workflow automation
Just automate the workflow using CRM software and your life will be much easier than before. Choose a software that has a sales automation feature and also allows you to set up some custom rules. This will help your team become more productive.
You can use these custom rules to program your CRM software to automatically perform certain tasks based on some events or triggers like:
- When a potential customer fills out a contact form on your website, the CRM software automatically directs the message to the right sales representative or department.
- When a sales representative receives a message, the CRM software automatically sends a preset response to acknowledge the message.
- If a lead, prospect, or opportunity doesn’t respond to your message or proposal, the CRM software automatically sends a follow-up message after a preset amount of time, such as 48 hours or two business days.
- When a sales representative makes calls or sends messages to a contact, the CRM software automatically logs hours and keeps track of all communications.
- As sales representatives complete tasks, the CRM software automatically reports them to supervisors and upper management for performance reports.
Automating the workflow can take the time and effort out of mundane tasks like order processing, order tracking, and inventory control.
2. Contact management
The meaning of contact management is to keep a record of the customers’ details like name, phone number, address, social media handle, and more. All of this customer data is stored in a searchable database. To create integrated client profiles, CRM features also keep track of and save all the customer interactions in the contact database. Contact management features of CRM save the time and efforts of sales representatives that they spent on remembering the details of the customer or searching for them in multiple storage locations.
But before you go out to shop for a CRM software with a contact Lobby management software feature, you must look for the following things:
- How many contacts can I store?
- What are the additional charges for increasing contact storage/numbers?
- Which details does the contact management feature let me capture?
3. Account Management
Developing opportunities, nurturing client relationships, and retaining business is the part of account management features of CRM. It is a collective post-sales process. After incorporating the account management features in your CRM, you will be able to define multiple accounts and territories as well as manage multiple contacts. This feature also helps you in calculating the potential value of every business account that exists in the system.
When a client pays for the product or services, it is generally believed that the sales process is completed. But you can extend this sales process using the account management features. It allows you to monitor various metrics to check the health of an account and keep track of all the client interactions to understand whether your customer is satisfied with your product/services or not. Following such details will give you insights into project budget overruns requirements of your client. Then you can offer them an upgrade, an opportunity to upsell, or whatever other option you can think of that would address their needs.
Account management features of the Salesforce Essentials’ :
- A complete view of your customers’ activities and communications from a single place
- The opportunity management feature allows you to track all details of your deals, including stages, quotes, and products
- Monitor tasks and customer engagement
4. Lead generation and follow-up tracking
Whenever a sales representative contacts a person or a client via email or call, it is added into the CRM system and that is known as follow-up tracking. It also enables you to add some remarks below like whether the prospect seems interested or explicitly rejected your offer and doesn’t want to be bothered again.
Why track your calls and follow-ups on an Excel spreadsheet when you have the latest contact information and status update quickly accessible online? You can also set reminders in the system, to get notifications when it’s time for you to contact your lead again or automate some drip emails to communicate smoothly.
5. Sales network management
Do you want to get a quick overview of your entire sales funnels? If yes then just start managing all your leads and customers in a pipeline view or a CRM with sales network management features. It can categorize your clients in various sales stages which can be further filtered in detail using tags and differentiated by colors.
You can effectively use this sales network management as one of the most beneficial leads management tools. Just drag and drop leads from one sales stage to another and see how your prospects become your paying customers. Sometimes, businesses have a single pipeline in their sales pipeline management software whereas others might have multiple pipelines for different countries, products, and lead sources as well. What you need to do is opt for CRM software that will allow you to segment and label your leads and customers.
When you are adding the custom tag for each of your leads, the labels make it easy for you to access the filtered pipeline. For instance, you can segment your leads and customers based on their geographic locations, language, device, lead source, retention, and more.
6. Sales Forecasting
CRM features of Forecasting help you take out an estimate of your future sales and revenue based on the data from the present and past years. You can further improve the predictability of your forecasting model by testing it through different kinds of what-if scenarios. Forecasting also helps you create new data-driven hiring strategies, decide on the optimal inventory levels and invest in new channels.
If you are looking for a customer relationship management CRM software with forecasting features, you must check out the following thing in the system:
- How robust are the tool’s built-in forecasting models?
- Can I build custom models?
- Is the forecasting feature powered by machine learning or artificial intelligence capabilities?
7. Email marketing
Lifewire states that an average office worker receives hundreds of emails and tracking an email amidst them through a traditional inbox can be a little confusing and overwhelming. So it is highly recommended that every single sales email must be addressed and received in a timely fashion so that the possibility of generating revenue is increased.
You can keep your sales reps productive and organized using the email features from the CRM. Scheduling appointments, engaging with the prospects and clients, and more things can be done once the sales reps integrate their calendars with the CRM. It will also save their time and effort in creating the content of the email as the CRM email marketing features automatically provide the necessary email templates including:
- Basic information about the company, segmented by industry
- Follow-up after a phone call
- Follow-up after one email has been sent
- The follow-up to a proposal that reps are waiting on customers to return
8. Document Management
Now you can capture, store, track and share electronic documents with the help of the document management feature of the CRM system. Documents include everything like business proposals, contracts, and other digital scans of your business files. Your team members or relevant departments can also access these documents from a centralized location without logging out from the CRM app with the help of this feature.
You no longer need to scan your documents to share them with other team members manually, the built-in document management feature in the CRM has got you covered automatically on this one. You can also decide who can have access to your document and who will be authorized to modify them. As you retrieve the customer data easily from the CRM, it not only speeds up your response time but also enhances the efficiency of the employees.
9. Management of quotes and proposals
Similar to the emails, now you can create and send quotes and proposals directly from your CRM system with the help of this feature. You can revise them and customize them to meet the client’s currency and tax structure and you can also export them in the form of word or PDF files. These quotes and proposals can also be shared with your colleagues and superiors for approval.
If you find this feature helpful then before shopping for it, you might want to ask the vendor the following questions:
- Do you provide customizable quote templates?
- Can quote templates be auto-populated using data from Excel sheets or PDF documents?
- Can I add digital signatures to quotes?
10. Customization and integration
An ideal CRM solution works as a mediator between various business operations. After all, the customers are at the heart of the business. The chance of gathering relevant data to make more sales increase with the number of third-party integrations a CRM consists of. You also need to avoid double data entry too while collecting valuable insights. Therefore you need to integrate your sales network management software with your email and marketing tools.
If you have a large organization then not all information will be relevant to every salesperson. Set your CRM software on role-based access to specific information such as field service app. For example, the invoices and bills would be accessed by accounting professionals only. And it will be best if the software experience of every team member is customized as per their job. For example, an ordinary salesperson does not need CRM software with lead generation and marketing features.
So, it is better if the employees get access to only those tools that they need for their work. A large range of tools might confuse the users which might result in them revealing the information they weren’t meant to know. A sales manager can have complete control over the access to the set of tools and customer data in a custom CRM software.
Bottom Line
So, in this blog, we looked in detail at different types of CRM software available in the market. But it is important to know that each system is a combination of features and functionalities and has something unique to offer. So, when you go shopping for CRM software for your business, it is highly recommended that you compare the capabilities of a CRM system against your business needs and your budget.
Also Read: Top 10 CRM companies in California
