Customer relationship management systems (CRMs) are essential tools for B2C as well as B2B marketers because, in the current era, you can’t underestimate the importance of delivering a quality customer experience. Though at first, CRMs were deemed appropriate only for large enterprises, they’re now recommended for SMBs as well.
Since all businesses have clients and organizational departments that interlink and they need tools for coordination so, the need for a CRM is undeniable but that’s not the problem.
The problem many C-level executives and managers have when it comes to going for a CRM is to figure out how to choose the right one.
If you’re in a similar situation and want to know how you can go about choosing the right CRM system for your company, here are 5 steps to simplify the selection process for a CRM:
1. Identify Business Requirements
The first step is to identify your business requirements. This will require laying out set goals that are specific in terms of defining the purpose of your mission statement and complying with your current milestones. That is to say, these goals must be measurable and relevant to your organization’s vision. For example, you can have a goal of increasing customer acquisition or lowering the cost of acquiring customers, or perhaps improve brand awareness, etc.
There are different types of CRMs that serve a variety of different purposes with some of them even offering customizability in order to ensure that the system provides you and your organization with the relevant mechanisms and features you need.
2. Departments…Assemble!
If you think that a CRM is only for the support and the sales department, you’re wrong. Not only will your marketing and customer support department require access to the CRM and features that streamline their operations, but your finance department will also require access to the data generated by the system.
That is why it’s crucial that you involve seniors or department heads in the decision-making process. Their input will nonetheless be valuable as they’re the ones who know what they need to do their work efficiently. Though it’s not recommended that you let inter-organizational politics or power dynamics interfere, you need to think about streamlining the operations from the ground up. And that means you can’t ignore the features required by even a customer support representative or a salesman.
You can come back to this step after steps 3 and 4 again as many times as you want in order to make sure that you’re making the right decision.
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3. Feature Research
As explained above, CRMs come with a large variety of features that distinguish them for various industries and across verticals and even regions. For example, there are specific CRMs that have been specifically designed for real estate agencies, medical institutes, schools, etc.
To help you understand the variety of features that are present in each CRM, let’s take a look at the most common ones:
Lead Processing Automation
As the name shows, your CRM can help you automate the process of searching, narrowing down and qualifying leads by setting up customized lead scoring criteria that prove effective for your specific business. For example, with a CRM that incorporates AI-based business process automation, you can make sure that your past sales data is being utilized to analyze and predict customer behaviour.
This can help you gauge how your audience is likely to respond to your marketing strategies and tactics. Similarly, if a customer is displaying behaviour that was recorded in the past against users who soon left, your CRM can warn you of voluntary churns, giving you an opportunity to retain your customers.
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Sales Pipelines Management
Your CRM can help you design, strategize, map and streamline your sales pipeline by identifying steps and phases in the conversion and lead qualification process. Effective CRM solutions can equip your sales and marketing teams with all the tools they need to recognize potential leads and figure out the most effective way to reach out to them.
Reporting
All customer management systems come with reporting features that provide your customers, your marketing, sales and even your customer service/support department with real-time analytics and stats that can help you track the progress of your business operations. Not only will this help you generate credible event data to utilize for your marketing strategies, but it will also help you seamlessly get insights on customer experience and your marketing tactics as they run.
Read More: Leverage Customer Analytics To Improve Customer Experience with Freshworks Integrations
Multi-Channel Communication
CRMs are essentially designed to provide organizations with a platform to manage their customers and thus, it defeats the purpose if your CRM solution doesn’t provide effective multi-channel communication. This means that your CRM shouldn’t just make it easy to onboard customers by displaying and sending effective tips and notifications, but it should also provide your customers with the opportunity to provide valuable feedback. Ultimately, all SaaS companies rely on improving user experience in order to promote their service and reduce churn.
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Integrations
Many CRMs now come with the flexibility of supporting multiple integrations, making it even easier for you to streamline multiple processes from one dashboard. For example, by integrating MailChimp and other similar tools in your CRM, you can automate customized email marketing campaigns and rest easy as your CRM handles all your existing, newly acquired and churning customers itself.
4. Finding Alternatives as Per Budget and Usage
Now that you know some of the best features a CRM can offer, the burden falls on you to figure out exactly what you can and cannot afford. Obviously, every company can make use of all the features listed above and even have more in mind that could be added later on. However, we can’t deny that such an investment can require a large sum and businesses, especially SMEs have to be very careful about how they allocate and spend their budgets.
Needless to say, you’ll have to prioritize your requirements and though a few departments might have to compromise, you can choose a customizable and scalable CRM that supports integrations to keep on adding new features and tools to it as you see fit.
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5. Choosing the Right CRM to Scale
If you’re using a CRM already, you can have Odoo consultants integrate your old CRM into a new one so that you don’t have to adjust to the new interface and can continue using your old CRM with new technological features that can streamline your business. The way to go about this is simple. All you have to do is get in touch with Odoo partners or Zoho consultants like TechLoyce and discuss your business requirements with them. Not only will they tell you what you need but they’ll also install it all for you. So, don’t wait and don’t waste the opportunities and call now!
