Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software becomes the center of many businesses if properly integrated. A small business CRM could be the key piece your business could be lacking to achieve a higher sales conversion rate. When reviewing CRM solutions for your small business, keep the following key features in mind.
Remote Access
You should be able to get to your CRM 24/7 wherever you are. If your business has multiple locations or you have remote workers, you will need an online CRM solution accessible to you and your staff any time you need to update, manage, or generate reports from it. Your marketing and sales teams are most likely working from a mobile device, so a CRM solution should be accessible from any smartphone or tablet. Imagine you have a sales member at a trade show, imagine the vast number of connections they make and now imagine the speed they could enter information into your CRM. New leads could be contacted via email before they even leave the trade show with an email introducing them to your company and all the products and services you offer!
Integration with Current Applications
You need a CRM with the ability to integrate with your financial, accounting, time, billing, document management, and email marketing applications you already use. Integrations such as these will save you time and money because they will take a workload off your staff from manually keying data into different systems. Integration also reduces the risk of inaccurate client information due to multiple systems not having the most up-to-date records.
Customizable to Fit Your Needs
Although a pre-designed CRM out of the box ready to go may not fit all your needs, a CRM should have some level of customization. You should be able to create customized reports as well as custom fields to fit your business. The option of having different views from a single dashboard for every department will make for easy CRM management. You can streamline projects and tasks through a single dashboard with limited access for staff and management.
Track and Generate Leads
Although you may have an excellent sales team, you cannot rely on them to complete their sales cycle without tracking lead metrics. A CRM with a lead generation tracking as an automatic feature will take the risk and guess work out of generating leads. This feature can mean more sales in the long run. By automating customer tasks and sending out reminders to your sales staff, the sales team will have everything it needs to nurture their leads.
Campaign Management
A good CRM should offer a powerful campaign management feature that will allow a smooth transition from the initial concept of a campaign through implementation of that campaign. You and your sales staff should be able to select campaigns, design, and implement campaigns through a single web-based CRM dashboard. Mobile capability is the most important part of CRM and managing your campaigns on the fly will quickly become one of the most sought after features in any CRM solution.
