Deciding on a customer relationship management (CRM) software suite is no easy task. While the IT department will certainly have a say, it’s often up to the CEO to weigh on what features are needed and what they expect from a package to deliver better business results for the entire company.
CRM Software Suites Must Get Results
A CRM package must be competitive with what the competition is offering. A top-notch development team is required to create a solution that just works. When software fails to live up to expectations, the management team feels let down. Accessing key sales data or information on customer interactions down to lower-level staff making follow-up calls with customers doesn’t get updated. Information isn’t available to make the calls, and the sales team grinds to a halt. Business reputation suffers, which is why the CEO of an SME might weigh in on the right CRM software for the business to avoid these types of issues.
Empowering Sales Teams to Deliver
Sales teams often live and die with the number of contact points they generate. This is true for real estate agents that sometimes make hundreds of calls in a given work day to generate interest or create buzz about a new listing that they’ve received. Calling around to fellow brokers – there are over 30,000 licensed brokers to sell real estate in Manhattan, New York alone – requires huge resources to touch base with these contacts that have buyers looking for certain types of homes.
Realtors must be able to track listings, make notes about calls made, along with the items discussed and deal points agreed to. This must happen in real-time, making it easy for the busiest of brokers – or their assistant – to update the CRM software quickly and efficiently. With CRMDialer, the interface is designed to be intuitive, quick to learn and simple to use to facilitate these sorts of requirements.
When the software isn’t user-friendly, lacks the necessary features or is cumbersome to enter new information into, it creates a bottleneck to the whole information gathering process. For any organization that makes money from sales through customer contact (or their representatives), ensuring a smooth operation is vital. To avoid the bottleneck, integrations and automation technology is used to reduce data entry requirements too.
What Features Matter the Most?
The core features of a good CRM package include the ability to store customer information in a logical manner, sophisticated search features to locate customer information and track sales leads. It can get complicated from there, but the essence is a computerized data collection and relationship tool to connect the dots between people and raw data.
Workflow management for each user is there to connect the customers/leads to the sales staff who are responsible for them. The contact information for each lead is stored to create a rich history of touch points to refer to. Software that ties different data together in meaningful ways helps sales teams understand how different customers relate to each other and where they can leverage past business relationships to create new success.
With CRM software like CRMDialer, their ability to integrate with existing software with a large customer base increases its usefulness while reducing the data entry requirements. For instance, initiating calls through the software allows recordkeeping about what calls were made and to whom, as well as creating a permanent record of the phone call. Voice recognition is utilized to avoid needing to listen to calls to glean the relevant facts and make notes about them.
Third-party Software Integration is the Secret Sauce
Software integration makes light work of customer contact. For instance, integrating with Gmail and Outlook lets the CRM software pick up new information like appointments just made. It can then automatically update the customer’s record. This avoids needing to make manual entries across multiple software packages which lets sales staff spend more time selling and less time hopping between software applications or performing administrative tasks.
Reporting and Analytics for Upper Management
For the upper management team, CRM software should let them track all contact points, in aggregate, within regular reporting. Seeing how many calls were made and being able to visualize the progression in the level of customer contact helps to indicate where things started to go wrong and how this might be prevented in the first place.
The insights gleaned can be used as a training tool to improve results by avoiding similar mistakes in the future. Moving away from vague acknowledgement and applying non-specific blame, to looking at specific results with a clear data-driven cause and effect lets management have the relevant facts in front of them to deliver praise or order changes, as is needed.
What’s the Pricing Model for CRM Software?
CRM packages like Hubspot currently offer free CRM software to a degree, but split out other features into different modules or packages that often carry a charge per user. Organizing things this way can become overly complicated for buyers who are confused with which packages they need and ultimately what using the software suite will cost them.
With CRMDialer as a hubspot alternative, there is a free option for up to two users with core functionality and some limited telephony options to make calls and track information for a few hundred leads. However, the real power of their CRM and Sales platform is when opting for the CRM package supporting unlimited users. This includes more core features and Gmail and Office 365 integration, along with unlimited record keeping and calls initiated through their CRM software using existing contact records. The price quote depends on the number of users and scales affordably without several bolt-on extra packages causing confusing over the total cost.
Operating a business is difficult enough without trying to do it in the dark. Without having the right information to monitor progress and make key decisions, the CEO and their management team are left working in the shadows. While they shouldn’t want to hover over the staff to get a better understanding of the workflow and progress being made, using an effective CRM package offers a bird’s eye view of what the sales team are doing and how customers are being managed.
When a customer survey indicates that they were called too often, or the company failed to deliver real value while pushing sales over the phone, the management can decide to act. Switching away from using harder sales tactics, they can refocus on delivering value through their staff to give customers what they’re asking for by using a soft-sell approach to get better results. Software should empower the team and the right CRM software can do just that.
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