This article is the 2nd part of our Best CRM Tools for SMBs in Indonesia in 2023 white paper. If you wish to download now the complete white paper, register your email address on this page
In the previous Article, we introduced the Benefits you could get when using a CRM , we will now discuss about some essential Features to look at when considering a CRM. In the following articles, we will also give you some tools and techniques on How to Choose a CRM that best for you and will finish by sharing our own Benchmark of some well-known and some less known CRM tools available for SMBs in South-east Asia.
What is a CRM tool?
CRM is a technology for managing all your company's relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers (prospects). The objective is straightforward: strengthen business relationships to expand your business. CRM systems assist businesses in maintaining contact with clients & prospects, streamlining procedures, and boosting profitability.
What Features You Should Look in a CRM
While every company will have different needs, there are some essential features that you should be looking at when considering a CRM. It is also a critical stage as missing an essential feature might lower the added value of the solution, or even worse, jeopardize your implementation. Wondering what to look for in a CRM? Read the following pages.
Contact & Account Management
Contact Management is utilized to keep track of, manage, and record the information about your leads, prospects and customer. Names, address, contact, are examples of the information included. It is useful for sales representatives to reach the leads before meeting.
Account management aids in keeping track of all activities and previous communications with leads and contacts. It is important to ensure tasks or activity for a specific client/company are managed and delivered on time.
Lead Management
Lead management is the process of gathering leads, monitoring their behavior and activities, qualifying them and nurturing them to convert them into paying customers. It will assist sales teams in prioritizing and organizing leads so that the right connections and clients are pursued.
The automated entry of lead information into your CRM system marks the beginning of the lead management process. The software then keeps tabs on the activities and behavior of that lead, recording their website visits and your interactions with them. Following that, the leads are given to the appropriate departments or salespeople based on their geography, interests, and other criteria you provide.
Sales Pipeline
Running a business is full of surprises. Having a reliable gauge of how much business may be headed your way can be a huge help when it comes to revenue forecasting, planning for growth, and being ready for whatever’s around the corner. One tool for estimating incoming revenue is the sales pipeline.
Sales Pipeline is a visual representation of where prospects are in your sales process. Sales pipelines give estimates of how much business your salespeople expect to close in a given week, month, or year. In turn, you can use pipeline to estimate how much revenue is coming into your business, and when.
Marketing Campaign
With the help of a CRM system, you can monitor each channel's marketing efforts from a single location and select the campaigns that are most successful for your business. Additionally, you may closely monitor the needs, passions, and involvement of your leads and customers and use that data to offer them tailored communications.
A wide range of campaign management tools ensures that you don't forget about your marketing plan. Ideally, the CRM you choose should provide all the tools you need on a single platform to plan and manage your campaigns. You may create automated campaigns for numerous channels, including blogs, social media, and email, with the use of this feature set.
UI/UX Experience
It's crucial to keep in mind that users will adopt a new system far more readily if they don't have to waste time looking for the appropriate field to enter or retrieve their data. At its core, a CRM solution develops a straightforward user interface for a set of data that aids companies in easily identifying and corresponding with consumers. Effective UI use will decrease the amount of efforts users must perform, improving their ability to process the data.
UX includes every interaction a customer has with a good or service. Customers today demand more than simply a service or a product; they also want to pay for an experience. Since the user will be the one using the software most frequently, it is essential that they feel at ease using it.
Workflow Automation
According to specified criteria and conditions, workflows automate the procedures needed to finish sales operations. It automates processes in your different CRM projects like deal management or email automation that are triggered by particular events like field entries, customer actions, or inactivity. When specific conditions are satisfied, actions will be taken, such as automatically sending email notifications to customers or task reminders to follow up with a specific lead.
Your CRM platform allows you to construct a variety of processes. Deal management workflows, lead scoring workflows, email marketing automation workflows, and customer feedback processes are a few of them. By using intelligent triggers to move items through various sales phases, workflow automation aids sales representatives in reducing human efforts.
Dashboard and Reporting
Users may access the data and metrics they need to track the operation of their businesses through CRM reports and dashboards. A summary of sales activity, revenue status, new leads, are included Charts and graphs sales pipelines, and key performance indicators (KPI) used as visualization tools to show these data.
CRM reporting technologies enable you to base business decisions on trustworthy, current data more effectively. This information assists in identifying your company's strengths and shortcomings and identifying market trends. Additionally, you may track your marketing initiatives with the use of gathered data and figure out where your clients are most active.
Mobile Version
A CRM that is optimized for a tablet or smartphone is known as a mobile CRM. CRM software that is optimized for mobile devices often contains standard CRM capabilities including contact management, lead management, reporting, and dashboards. The most recent information is constantly accessible thanks to a mobile CRM's ability to sync with the main CRM platform.
A mobile CRM should be used by salespeople who are frequently out in the field to access information whenever and wherever they are. Many mobile CRM solutions also offer offline access, so sales professionals won't ever be without what they need, even if they experience a loss of connectivity while traveling.
Customizations
A unique selection of customization possibilities is provided by each CRM. The most important ones, though, are your sales cycle, lead scoring factors, chances, and the kinds of contact information you preserve. Most CRM systems let you add new features or change current ones to better suit your company's needs. Depending on your unique company requirements, customization also includes sales and marketing tools or modules that you may turn on and off.
Integration
A crucial CRM feature that smoothly integrates your CRM system with other applications is called a CRM integration. These connections enable you to fill in any feature gaps in your CRM system and help it become more versatile.
By providing you and your team with access to all the data (and frequently most of the capability) of both systems on a single platform, it increases efficiency through process automations. You may make changes in one app, and those changes will be automatically updated in the other.
Bottom Lines
CRM, or customer relationship management, is a system used by businesses to manage interactions with customers and potential customers. To leverage its functions, the features you should look in CRM tools are contact & account management, lead management, sales pipeline, marketing campaign, UI/UX experience, workflow automation, dashboard & reporting, mobile version, customization, and integration.
Hope you enjoy reading about the Essential Features You Should Look for in CRM. If you wish to download now the complete white paper, register your email address on this page