12 CRM Features for Your Business Growth

Priya Naha

Senior Writer

12 CRM Features for Your Business Growth

The major driving factor for ensuring continued success and growth in a business is long-lasting relationships with customers.

Looking for CRM Software? Check out SoftwareSuggest’s list of the best CRM Software solutions.

So, effective customer relationship management has been a significant area of focus for companies in recent years. The market for customer relationship management is projected to grow at a CAGR of 13.9% by 2030!

A CRM platform is designed to provide dynamic, customized, client-focused information to everyone in the organization by integrating sales, marketing, and customer support operations.

What is a CRM System?

CRM, or “Customer Relationship Management,” is a cocktail of all the tools, techniques, strategies, and technologies needed and used by organizations to develop, retain and acquire customers.

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Pro-tip

Maximize business growth with CRM functionality: Customize modules for efficiency, use social media insights for marketing, and employ real-time data for informed decisions. When choosing a CRM, inquire about analytics, customization, and mobile functionality.

It makes sure that every effort that goes in at all points of contact with the customer strengthens the customer relationship.

As a result, all the features of a CRM system ensure that every step of the interaction with consumers increases overall profits. The software gathers customer data from multiple channels and provides detailed information on overall purchase history, personal info, and even buying behavior patterns.

Key CRM Features To Know About

CRM software can ease the task of managing customers. But, how effectively the input from the CRM system is processed further defines the firm’s overall productivity. 

So, let’s understand how it can increase employee productivity, sales and marketing efforts, and efficiency with the help of the features of CRM.

1. Workflow Automation

Among the features of a CRM system, workflow automation leads the way!

Workflow Automation By SoftwareSuggest

CRM system comes with the flexibility of customizing its modules. CRM modules can be configured based on the marketing and sales needs of the firm. When the sales team executes a particular task, it gets automatically reported to the supervisors and top management for performance evaluation.

2. Customization 

Every CRM business is unique in its operations, and so is every CRM process. The best CRM software comes with the flexibility of customization for marketing and sales teams.  Customized CRM software responds better to the growing demands of the business.

Apart from the basic level of personalization, certain high-end CRM software systems come equipped with the highly advanced option of API. API provides all the technical specifications needed for thorough customization of the software parallel to the existing business system. 

3. Customer Service Management

CRM software improves the productivity of the sales and marketing team by enabling them to acquire and manage the leads successfully. Here are a few points to help you understand how the features of CRM help the team boost productivity:

  • Provides a comprehensive overview of the prospective customers from the first point of contact
  • Keeps track of all the data from lead acquisition to sales closure and sales history.
  • It makes logging all the data related to the customer easy and automatic.
  • Makes use of the first name of the customer to personalize every future contact through acknowledgments and follow-ups. This helps the sales representative build a healthy and friendly relationship with the client.

4. Tracking Employee Performance

Among the top CRM features, tracking employee performance plays a prominent role. It instigates them toward better productivity. But on a large scale, a single supervisor can’t monitor a large team alone. For this purpose, he takes the help of CRM software.

Tracking Employee Performance By SoftwareSuggest

This CRM functionality helps track the number of working hours, tasks done, meetings attended, sales numbers, goals attained, and other credentials of each employee exclusively.

5. Social Media Monitoring 

The social media monitoring feature and benefits of CRM software ease the task of the marketing team to individually visit all the social media platforms and monitor the company’s social media performance.

Social media CRM software features improve the productivity of the team by:

  • Providing insight into the social media performance of the brand through the number of likes, comments, and shares.
  • Allowing the team to craft the marketing strategy as per the trending market dynamics.
  • Providing insight into the customer’s profile.
  • By managing the social media accounts of the company automatically.

6. Lead Management

Lead Management By SoftwareSuggest

The CRM software of the company often works in sync with the lead management software of the company. So, this attribute of lead management ensures that the sales and marketing team can score new leads and filter them properly. All this is beneficial for the team in transforming good leads into loyal customers and customer satisfaction.

7. Pipeline Management

Pipeline management is among the top CRM features that make it easier for you to identify where in the sales funnel a particular deal is. You can even search or filter deals based on the stage and perform bulk actions, such as sending mass emails. This feature also helps you understand where most of your deals fall off so you can optimize the individual stage of the funnel.

8. Real-Time Data 

CRM data is beneficial for all business operations, as it pulls out real-time information from all the devices, applications, and appliances when needed. This feature/role of CRM thus benefits the firm’s productivity by:

  • Helping the team make well-informed sales and marketing decisions.
  • Providing an instant snapshot of consumer behavior.
  • Providing an overview of trending market demand and supply.

9. Reporting And Email

Reporting and documentation of data, tasks, achievements, and more make it easy for the team to plan further implementation strategies with contact management functionality. CRM automatically reports the tasks and also schedules emails for follow-up, thus allowing the sales team to focus on their other core activities.

The email feature in a CRM makes the team more productive and organized while reducing communication bottlenecks. Some of the critical information that gets automatically reported in the CRM software are: 

  • Leads generated
  • Sales generated
  • The point when the lead conversion happened.
  • The effectiveness of emails.
  • The number of leads closed and their respective sales representatives’ names

You May Also Read: CRM In Service Industry

10. Sales Forecasting 

A CRM system does the future forecast of the sales process. With this feature of CRM, the team can plan their marketing strategies and also align the other integrated business activities. In this way, the level of risk and loss is minimized to a large extent.

11. Document Management

Document management software feature in the CRM solution allows you to create, access, edit, and share documents from within the platform. Advanced CRM functions even let you set document access and edit rights to ensure security. It also acts as a centralized hub for storing important documents and ensures all your employees have the necessary files required for doing their work.

12. Proposal Management

Quotes and proposal management are vital CRM functions that allow you to create and send quotes to clients directly from your CRM software. You can even edit, revise, and customize quotes to meet your client’s currency and tax requirements. It also lets you share proposals with colleagues or supervisors for approval.

How Does A CRM System Work?

A CRM tool makes use of contact forms, phone calls, emails, or all other means of data collection to track and maintain customer data. It’s a highly effective system for recording customer data online with ease. CRM works in integration with lead tracking software to generate and manage the leads automatically. This improves the overall efficiency and productivity of the firm to a large extent.

CRM features By SoftwareSuggest

The CRM features list governs and drives every step of the sales and marketing funnel by managing the requests and services of the customers with proficiency. The capabilities of the CRM platform are not just limited to lead management. It also helps in the proper analysis of the collected data, thus establishing a track record of the marketing and sales strategies.

Therefore, we can consider an analytical CRM that signals and controls the activities of all the marketing modules that aim at managing customer relationships. As shared earlier, CRM keeps all the customer-relevant information like contact details, profile, last contact details, etc., always updated. So, whenever a follow-up takes place, it should be customized and personalized based on this information.

With the application of a good CRM process, no leads go untracked or missed. The team properly follows all of them, with proper documentation of the fresh information. It also eases the process of cross-selling and up-selling the business opportunities.

Why Should You Invest In CRM Software?

CRM solutions help your business constantly grow and stay afloat in a volatile market by allowing you to:

1. Track Customer Interactions

With a CRM account, your sales force can connect with customers through emails, phone calls, chat, and even social media. You can even follow customer conversations on social media and engage with them from the CRM software. It is these personalized interactions that bring in more leads for the business!

2. Respond Faster to Clients’ Requests

 Customers connect with the company to either place a new purchase order or to request help for an existing purchase. Prompt communication with a client is crucial, as delays can make any customer frustrated. With this CRM function, quick response with accurate data is feasible.

Respond Faster to Clients’ Requests By SoftwareSuggest

Whenever a customer needs an update on their purchase order, a CRM system allows sales executives to check inventory systems and track the order in real-time. The image below shows the key attributes that shape customer experiences.

3. Prioritize Your Customers

 Not all customers bring in an equal amount of business. Clients that bring in repeat business should be given valued services in return for retaining them. CRM software allows you to create a list of all your clients that are most valuable to your company. By doing so, you can target them better and follow up with them regularly.

4. Launch Customized Offerings

Your business can have certain old loyal customers, but they may not be the ones ordering your product or service each month. CRM software can give you purchase patterns, records of historical purchases, preferences, interactions, personal data, etc., of the client, which can be used to create tailored solutions for each client. 

You can design special sales strategies to focus on them to encourage them to buy more.

5. Benefit from Proactive Interaction

Looking at the customer profile data generated by CRM functions, the future demand of individual customers can be anticipated. Instead of waiting for your customers to call you with a query, customer requirements can be forecasted based on their lead scores. 

This CRM function can be used to fulfill purchase orders faster and have a higher inventory turnover. However, this requires a complex understanding of customer profiles and forecasting demands.

What To Ask Vendors?

Once you’ve settled on the features you want in a CRM, it’s beneficial to create a set of questions and ask vendors. It can streamline your search and help you make an informed decision.

  • What is the storage capacity for leads in the system?
  •  Can leads be analyzed and visualized?
  • What analytics and reporting features are included in the free version? Are there drill-down options in the reports?
  • What is the limit for contact storage, and are there extra charges for increasing this limit?
  • Can the quote templates be customized, and is there an option to auto-populate them with digital signatures?
  • Do marketing features come with the basic version, or are they accessible through integrations? Is there integration with other marketing tools?
  • Are the email templates customizable, and does the software integrate with Gmail or Outlook?
  • Does the system offer multi-user login functionality?
  • Which metrics can be tracked with the solution?
  • Does it provide cross-team visibility into sales documents and customer data?
  • Is there a native mobile app for the system, and what functions does it support on mobile devices?

Conclusion

Along with understanding the key features of CRM, we’ve learned that CRM planning and implementation is an ongoing process. It needs to be under the constant scrutiny of the management to ensure desired outcomes.

 In addition, there has to be some auditing system in place to measure the progress against set metrics to determine how effectively it is contributing to value additions.

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