Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

What is CRM Systems

CRM System (customer relationship management) - allows you to optimize and automate sales processes. When you have one,two, three customers you can keep all information about leads in your head. When the number of customers became bigger you should manage them. Salesperson can use different deal stages, add tasks, send a messages and make notes about deals. CRM System make your salesforce more effective. This software replaces Excel and Google Spreadsheets.

CRM Systems can be different. What is suitable for a small online store is not appropriate for a bank and vice versa. Companies have different sale processes and for each process you should have some specific software. CRM functions are the part of marketing automation.

Why use CRM

Any business wants to sell more. For that you should have modern tools. CRM it is a "modern weapon" of you salesforce. Today, it is very difficult to build a good business without tools. CRM is a main tool at your sales department. It helps not to forget about customers, calls, follow ups and other important things.

With CRM your company will get

• Increase in sales
• Full sales reports
• All communication history in one place
• Customer list control
• All requests in one system
• Transparent sales department
• Better communication with customers
• Measurable results

What companies needs a CRM

If your company has more than two customers you need a CRM. Also, companies need a CRM if they have a long deal cycle. It doesn't depend on product you are selling and how you do it. You have a big factory and you sell pipes to large b2b companies or you have a small cosmetics online store. If you have a salesperson you definitely need a CRM.

Standart CRM features

Different systems have different functions, but most of them are similar. Having understood this feature you will learn how to choose right software. When you don't understand those things every CRM System becomes similar, but with different prices. You can't figure out which CRM you need.

• Customer card

  This is a customer profile, where you keep all information for a sale processes. It's something like a "notepad". The most popular information about customer is:

  • Full name
  • Phone number
  • Company name
  • Social media profile
  • Notes about customer etc.
• Communication history

  A customer card contains all communication history with a lead. You can see every email and call records that a salesperson made during a sales process.

  It is necessary for a salesperson to remember all details about this customer and quickly understand what they were talking about last time.

  Also, it is very important when the deal owner is replaced. People come and leave your company. New salesperson should quickly understand what's going on.

• Task management

  When a salesperson is working with a deal's pipeline in CRM he is making a lot of touchpoints with leads. You can add tasks for all customers and deals. It can be a call, an email or some other actions. Ideally CRM should "spit out" a customer card with hot leads.

  Every morning a salesperson should have a list with tasks for a day. System can automatically create this list.

• Getting leads from different channels

  Today, there are a lot of touch points with customers. Direct calls, Forms on website, messengers, email etc. CRM allows you to connect all this channels in one place and automatically create or update a customer card. You will not lose leads.

• Deal stages

  The sales process is always divided into some stages. All businesses have their own stages. The most common sale process is: a call, a scheduled meeting,a held meeting, a payment received.

  This is called a sales funnel. With the help of CRM you can see at what stage your customers are, and where the bottleneck of your sales funnel is. These functions are in all CRM. It is an industry standard.

• Sending email

  In most cases a conversation with customers is only about sending offer details on email. If a salesperson sends an email from the simple Gmail interface it takes a lot of time.

  Also, you lose a control of the sales process. Who sent? What was sent? when was it sent? For this process you can attach your email to CRM and send emails from a CRM interface. (Don't confuse with email marketing).

Advanced CRM features

All CRM Systems are developing. The main goal is to automate communication with customers and make it easier to use. The best CRM System can offer you full marketing automation process.

Trends in CRM

The latest trend in CRM Software is a node interface usage. You can customize business processes without coders. In 2000s CRM used to be "Digital notepads" and substituted real notepads and Excel spreadsheets. Nowadays they are turning into marketing automation platforms. Everyone is able to create entire business processes and automate them.

In the node interface you can see conditions, triggers, and actions. It is also called "if this happens, do this".