Top CRM Features and Functionality

More than half of sales professionals (64%) use CRM applications. CRM adoption has grown 113% since 2016 and 28% since 2017(source). A CRM gives amazing opportunities for small businesses and large enterprises alike. Businesses need to expertly manage prospects and existing customers with great care. Top-requested CRM software features are basics like contact management (94%), interaction tracking (88%), and schedule/reminder creation (85%)(source). Using a platform with the best CRM features is an essential part of that strategy, here is a compiled CRM functionality list to help you get started.

 

  1. Contact Management
  2. Integration with other systems
  3. Sales Team And Customer Opportunity Management
  4. Lead Management for Determining High-Quality Leads.
  5. Reports and Dashboards
  6. Sales Analytics.
  7. Mobile CRM
  8. Sales Force Automation.
  9. Sales Forecasting.
  10. Email Client Integration, etc.

https://www.selecthub.com/customer-relationship-management/crm-features-functionality-list/

 

Fundamental Functionality

 

Super Powered Contact Management

Contact management is an element of CRM that is sometimes called customer management software. This allows users to segment their contacts into groups to organize them. With this CRM capability, you’ll be able to gather crucial customer data and improve your marketing strategies when introducing new products. It also improves the personalization of all contacts with customers, making them feel important.

 

While CRMs easily handle contact management, most of them are not built for managing your finances, which makes integration with accounting software essential.

 

Integrate CRM With Your Website

Website integration is the glue that holds disparate computer systems together. Interlinking your website with third-party systems. These other systems include CRMs, accounts solutions, merchandising systems, business platforms, gateways, and networks. Integration can be as simple as importing an excel spreadsheet of products or complex CRM solutions.

 

Integrating your websites with other platforms and applications has a number of benefits to your marketing which include automation, processes, seamless management, and better communications.

 

  • Increased sales - CRM helps to integrate with your websites and pull in all the data from the leads that you get from the campaigns. But integrating your website with your CRM should help you improve your organization’s sales. This summarizes one thing- increased volumes and more accurate data lead to better profiles, which leads to better-quality leads which in turn leads to higher sales conversion rates. Organizations spend a lot of time and money on their websites and marketing. Integrating your website with your CRM, it shortens the sales process. Potential leads are in the system immediately after the initial contact, and it gives your team better data to work with, ultimately aiming to improve conversion rates.
  • Better customer experience - it is important to fully support your customers at every stage as they research your products, compare prices, and use customer service, if not then you are risking your business by providing a poor experience and you lose a significant percentage of customers. Investing in technology to help you is perhaps the best business decision that you can ever make. Providing a decent customer experience is fairly easy for a business that is just starting out, but as consumer interest grows and you find that you are dealing with more and more inquiries it can become difficult to keep up with the demand. Missing orders, forgotten phone calls and billing confusion can become all too natural. As your team grows you could end up in a position where it becomes difficult for your team to coordinate with each other, compromising the quality of service for all concerned. For the majority of businesses, integrated websites are essential to delivering improved experience levels.

 

 

  • Instant access to up-to-date data - it is important to have access to up-to-date and latest data. Automated integration between the website and your CRM is seamless and in real-time. There's no more questioning the accuracy of the data, or wondering if yesterday's or last week's website orders have been added to the CRM yet. This is hugely beneficial when it comes to talking to a customer as you know, with confidence, all the details of their most recent purchase or other interaction with you, and that can only lead to improved customer satisfaction and increased sales.
  • Accurate data source - Integrating CRM with your website is a time saver for your staff and other sales or contact point systems, you end up with just one single accurate data source on each contact. What would having one master record on each customer or potential lead (with no duplicate data) mean for your sales or marketing team? For a start, it saves them time as they don't have to check multiple systems to get a full picture of the customer. In addition, because there is no manual human element in adding the data to the CRM, there is less chance or errors being made or duplicate records being created. As well as that, it is likely that more data is captured, and by consolidating all that data into one place, a more complete and accurate picture or profile of your customer is achieved, resulting in a higher conversion rate.

 

There are many integrations available with the CRM such as-

 

 

  1. Email integrations 
  2. Calendar integrations
  3. Connector integrations
  4. Social media integrations
  5. Prospecting software integrations
  6. Team Communication Integrations
  7. Forms and Data Collection Integrations
  8. Calling Software Integrations, etc.

https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/crm-integration#:~:text=A%20CRM%20integration%20is%20the,back%20and%20forth%20between%20systems

Lead Management

No CRM feature list would be complete without mentioning lead management. This technology allows a business to determine the best customers to follow up with based upon demographic and psychographic factors. Like lead scoring, it improves the efficiency and productivity of your sales team by helping them focus on the right leads at the right time.

 

Quantifying the opportunities that your sales team has with customers is a relatively basic feature of CRM. Referred to as lead scoring, it allows users to identify the customers that are most likely to convert. This helps streamline sales/marketing teams, improve efficiency and optimize your sales process.

 

 

Benefits of using a lead management

  • Talk to quality leads - Sales reps can quickly focus on the sales-ready leads; maximizing sales opportunities.
  • Engage with context - With a centralized lead database, your sales reps can quickly get context to make meaningful conversations.
  • Improve productivity - Automations in the lead management process saves your sales team time and effort to do what they do best—sell.
  • Quick response time - Sales reps can reach out to prospects via phone or email by looking at their buying intentions, increasing the chances of making a sale.
  • Measure results - Get invaluable insights into the activities in the lead funnel, such as the territories generating the most leads, the response time of each sales rep, etc.

 

https://www.selecthub.com/customer-relationship-management/crm-features-functionality-list/

 

Sales Analytics

Sales analytics is one of the most valuable features of a CRM, a subject of reporting. Users can create better sales campaigns in the future by analyzing the data from past campaigns. CRM helps you collect data from social media, polls and websites, then analyze it ,all with the same software. Social media integrations are an important CRM feature for businesses that find new customers through social networks like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

 

It includes:

  • The ability to have the social profiles of your contacts automatically imported into your CRM.
  • The opportunity to view your contact’s social media activity.
  • The capability to monitor brand mentions for new leads.

 

Reports And Dashboards

Reporting and dashboards have become some of the top CRM features. Reporting is the feature that brings the results of your sales and marketing efforts altogether, and it comes standard with all the CRMs. Users can view statistics in a highly visual, engaging perspective using customized reports and dashboards. It offers real-time data updates and a platform that can be accessed from various portals, it improves ease of access for a variety of personnel. Management can use these reports to make data-driven decisions, an investment in CRM is an investment in the future of your business.

 

An ideal CRM makes it easy to collect and evaluate your data. It should be easy to access real-time analytics so that you can respond quickly to unexpected scenarios faster. It should allow you to customize your reports in order to analyze past sales patterns, redirect current campaigns and create a stronger strategy. Reporting may include-

 

  • The number of leads that come in during a certain amount of time
  • The number of sales generated during a certain amount of time
  • Which of your sales agents closed which leads and how many they closed in a certain amount of time
  • The number of outbound calls being made
  • The effectiveness of your emails
  • The stage at which your leads converted, helping you identify opportunities to close leads in a shorter time

 

https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/10090-crm-software-features.html

 


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