Your customer base is constantly growing, the number of sent e-mails and made phone calls does not allow you to concentrate on anything else, customers complain about the negligence on your part? Your sales team complain about the chaos within the company and you lack the tools to monitor communication with customers and reporting sales results?
We live in the twenty-first century, the Internet offers hundreds of various business applications, tens of communication and lead generation tools. Thanks to the technological possibilities you can run your business from any place on earth. What’s more, marketing a long time ago ceased to rely on advertising on television.
The tools used in previous years simply no longer fulfill their role. So how a solution having all the cutting-edge functions (that does not require costly implementation and months of testing) should look like?
A well-designed CRM system should first and foremost accomodate a highly valued today “mobility”. Therefore, systems SaaS (System as a Service) enjoy considerable popularity these days. They guarantee not only mobility, but they do not require implementation, which significantly reduces the entry costs. Also, the systems are affordable thanks to the subscription model. CRM softwares are available through the browser and Android or iOS systems.
Tailored technologies
The most important thing you should consider while choosing CRM should be the level of its possible adjustment to your needs. Each company has its own specific work system. Each company differently designs their sales processes and provide service to customers. One solution is not able to meet the requirements of all those companies at once, but the more flexible the system is, the more benefits it guarantees.
Apart from flexibility, each system should have a few basic modules:
- Customer database – with advanced search and the possibility of configuration in order to collect any information about the client.
- Management of sales processes – an expanded tool for managing processes, gathering key information and building sales funnels.
- Reporting – analysis of sales performance is the basis for a successfully strategy. Monitoring the performance of all the employees, the number of closed contracts, the number of paying customers or the sales funnel are basic reports that must be found in any CRM system.
- Calendar – planning of the meetings, reminders regarding making a phone call or sending an email.
Sales equals good communication with the client
Unfortunately, a large number of traditional CRM systems present on the market still focuses more on reporting sales results than on improving the quality of sales team’s work.
Not many tools can fully monitor all communication between the sales and customer service staff and the customer. A modern system should fully support the basic communication channels that we use today:
- monitoring of e-mail communication
- monitoring of phone communication
- monitoring of communication based on Web solutions (chat, Skype, VoIP)
Thanks to the automatic monitoring, employees save a lot of time on manual data entry, copying the content of emails or additional notes. Thus, it is possible to build a strong relationship with the client, as the team focuses on him/her and not on the system.
Social Media
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Quora. These days modern companies use Social Media platforms to run their business, conduct marketing and PR activities, and even attract new customers. A modern CRM system should be adapted to the recent changes and not only let register communication based on traditional channels as meetings and phone calls, but also facilitate the process of gathering information from Social Media. An innovative tool should enable gathering such information as:
- tweets, customers’ posts
- avatars
- recent statuses
While adding a new client to the CRM system we should be able to download information about him/her on the basis of the email address itself.
Focus on your client’s needs
Older softwares were programmed to fix the problem of mass communication, but weren’t focused on its quality improvement. Your business contacts should be managed evenly and on a high level, regardless of the communication channel. Flexibility and accessibility are very important in modern CRM systems. In order to build strong relationships with your clients and partners, it is necessary to adjust to their expectations with every possible solution. This is why hi-tech programs offer intelligent hints and tools what can increase your team’s productivity.
Require simple and flexible solutions
The research on CRM systems effectiveness very often shows debacle connected with the inability of proper exploitation. Remember that multifunctionality of the product doesn’t have to come with complexity and inconvenience of a rough interface. The most recent websites and programs focus on intuitive usage and that is what you should find for your employees. Of course, training in new software is highly recommended, but the system itself should be transparent in every function and interaction. Data and knowledge bases, as well as their analysis, should be easily accessible to your team.
Integrations
Dozens of mobile applications are being created for mass mailing, social marketing, lead generation and cold mailing. In the past, CRM systems enabled importing data from Excel and offered limited manual integrations. Today, integrations are one of the basic function that each SaaS tool must have. Modern tools both need to be comprehensive and automatic and allow integration through Zappier, partnerships or individual use of API.
From a business perspective a modern tool must provide support to all the ongoing processes – from gaining the customer to building a long-term relationship.
