Learn More About CRM Software
Sales and marketing teams use customer relationship management software to select warm, hot, and cold leads and qualify their intent. The software is distributed across a virtual private business cloud and is open for designated teams to access and review customer data.
The modules of CRM are lead management system, accounting and finance, marketing and sales automation, lead nurturing, campaign management, ERP, and add-ons. The CRM software segments customer data based on lead status, location, demographics, age, need, and query and automates workflows for different business development reps (BDRs) who will manage these custom pipelines. The data is secured and allocated based on backend automation to respective sales representatives, who take it all the way to the sales deal.
Many different CRMs have different purposes. The main incentive for purchasing a CRM is the strategic revenue goal attached to it. It is a direct investment towards managing existing customers and bringing new ones on board.
What is a CRM?
CRM is a category of software application with which a business manages its customer and lead generation lifecycles. The tool is a standard norm that enables a business to check the progress of its pipeline, send promotional offers, schedule appointments, and forward sales and marketing resources to respective customers.
The first-party data is acquired by call center infrastructure or voice-over internet protocol (VoIP) software that sales reps use to contact leads. The data is fed to the CRM software and marked as the new activity data. The lead management system captures, stores, and manages the data. Each lead is defined and registered under the lead management system with its contact background, job titles, industry, company revenue, score, strength, and other details. Leads have different acquisition sources, like page widget forms, social media, or campaigns. From here on till the final deal and even after that, CRM software manages and automates customer-centric workflows to build an account pipeline and increase revenue.
CRM tool facilitates all sales processes and manages customer payment transactions, outstandings, helpdesk tickets, queries, and customer service to give a central picture of the brand’s success and ease the tension of different stakeholders.
What's the best CRM app for small business owners?
For small business owners, I recommend exploring CRM apps specifically designed for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as they focus on ease of use and cost-effectiveness, such as:
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers a robust solution to boost sales productivity and marketing effectiveness with social insights, business intelligence, and campaign management. It provides both on-premises and cloud solutions, with mobile CRM apps for on-the-go management.
• Vtiger All-In-One CRM is tailored for small to medium-sized businesses, providing a 360-degree customer view. It optimizes sales, support, and marketing touch-points with AI-powered tools and robust automation to enhance customer experiences across various channels.
• BSI Software delivers a comprehensive platform for the digitalization of customer relationships, with a strong CRM system supporting industries like banking, insurance, and energy. It emphasizes a 360° customer view and uses AI to improve processes and customer interactions.
Types of CRM software
CRM cannot be implemented horizontally. Before proceeding further, businesses must assess business reports that have missed targets, revenue overheads, and burnt cash before investing in CRM. Post analysis, it is important to survey different types of CRM software that the business can use by factoring in IT requirements, employee size, and budgets.
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Sales automation CRM: This horizontal solution is tailor-made for sales teams to sort their leads based on intent, engage with them with mailers, and mark their remarks before closing the status. It automates sales enablement workflows and sends sales activity details to team leaders.
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Analytical CRM: This solution is used by data analysts, business analysts, data engineering teams, and R&D teams to understand their customers better. It builds intelligent reports with predictive modeling techniques and AI to help optimize future lead campaigns.
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Industry-specific CRM: This solution focuses on specific requirements of different industries like healthcare, financial services CRM, medicine, automotive, e-commerce, real estate, mortgage, and retail and customizes operating cycles, and targets and goals based on the use cases.
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Social CRM: It handles and analyzes data from social media platforms, messaging, and interactions and stores it in a backend analytical report. The report stores contact reports of those who approach via social media messaging platforms.
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Mobile app: Mobile apps can be downloaded from app marketplaces like PlayStore or App Store onto devices that run on Android or iOS platforms. The app provides updates on the current status of leads, gives a 360-degree view of investments, ROI, and marketing spends, and provides real-time alerts and push notifications.
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All-in-one CRM: All-in-one CRM is a suite of standalone tools like lead nurturing, marketing automation, lead management, query management, application processing, payment platform, and contract renewal software. This software supplants the need for broken software chains like standalone ERPs or human capital management systems (HCMs).
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Standalone CRM: A standalone CRM is an individual solution that doesn't have to be integrated with the existing infrastructure. It is an independent module encompassing all the latest features and data metrics to manage customer interactions.
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Strategic CRM: This tool involves aligning the sales-centric data to longer business objectives and charting plans, trends, and strategies that help achieve and go beyond sales, marketing, and revenue targets.
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Cloud-based CRM: Investing in a cloud-based CRM would free up hardware and local virtual private network (VPN) space by directly migrating lead data to the cloud. These highly scalable, adaptable, and secure solutions provide massive data storage.
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Small business CRM: Small business CRM solutions are ideal for small consulting companies with a modest employee network. These solutions can easily integrate with cloud telephony service and bulk export/import customer databases to build sales agendas.
CRM software features
There is no best CRM software for everyone. Different CRM features within CRM software can help users in a few ways:
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Account and contact management: Contact management features allow users to sort contacts by their associated accounts. This allows users to have key contact information such as phone numbers and email addresses of various roles at any company.
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Opportunity management: It allows users to track a sales opportunity through its various stages, forecast the likelihood of closing an opportunity, take notes on customer pain points and needs, and track opportunity quotes. As an opportunity moves through the various stages, users can assign a percentage chance to the deal closing and mark if an account renewal is at risk of being lost.
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Note and disposition: Salespeople must take diligent notes on customer needs and mark disposition as the deal progresses. For example, suppose a call was conducted, and the potential customer indicated their pain points and what’s most important to them. In that case, users can record that within the opportunity page on the CRM. This allows salespeople to respond with their needs addressed and increases the likelihood of closing a deal.
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Lead management: CRM stores the lead’s contact information and provides additional features to help pursue the lead. For example, CRMs generally provide lead scoring features that automatically determine the best leads to chase based on various factors, including how that lead has already interacted with the business website. If a leader has visited certain pages or downloaded certain resources, it may be a good indicator of what product or solution they are looking for.
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Reporting and analytics dashboards: CRM software helps display various analytics for sales departments. These sales analytics display historical sales data that can help showcase which sales activities have led to winning deals. This can include customer segmentation, profitability analysis, team performance, and more.
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Marketing automation: Based on the customer’s background, industry, and application, users can route specific content or marketing resources and set custom logic. The marketing automation framework of a CRM works as a drip framework. If the lead matches the logic, the system pushes an email or content asset to them to establish a touchpoint.
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Workflow automation: CRM designs automated workflows through preset conditions within modules. This makes the job of department verticals easier, builds productivity, and shifts user focus to critical and revenue-impacting objectives.
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System integration: Users can trigger ERPs and push extensions to existing CRM solutions to tap into different opportunistic initiatives and make smart investment decisions.
Benefits of CRM software
If you are starting a brand or have several years of experience, CRM is one of the prerequisite software as a service (SaaS) applications you need to invest in and implement.
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Improved customer relationships and interactions: CRM software tracks and registers customer interactions such as phone calls, emails, or in-person meetings. Salespeople can track where customers and prospects are in the sales cycle to determine appropriate levels of contact and opportunities for upsells or engagement.
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Data alignment: CRMs provide users with a 360-degree view of sales and marketing data across all departments within the organization. CRM software can also list all leads that have expressed interest in the business. Customers who fill out website forms can automatically get uploaded into the CRM to organize the contact details, company, company size, and more information about the lead.
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Increased revenue: By having more detailed information on customer pain points, businesses will better understand what needs must be addressed with potential customers. This allows businesses to close more deals and secure more revenue.
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Shared understanding of account status: CRM software compiles progress reports from different functional units of an organization and uses advanced data analytics and templates to build a customized analysis of each lead journey. CRM software provides reliable workflow management to prioritize customers based on their account status.
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Enhanced sales efficiency and marketing ROI: By educating sales reps to use and sort their KPIs with CRM software, you contribute towards sales efficiency. Marketing teams can keep their pulse on recent lead interactions, mark them as qualified, and improve budget ROI.
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Data-driven decision-making: The analytics and reporting tools of CRM software provide valuable insights into business health, customer behavior, and team performance, which leads to better decision-making and strategy building.
CRM software cost
The cost of a CRM depends on company size, business strategy, revenue model and budget bandwidth of businesses. The price is directly related to the specific processes and capabilities required. The CRM price varies for an on-premise or cloud-based solution based on the subscription plan.
Free, entry-level, mid-range, and enterprise plans are available for CRM software. In the free plan, users can access basic features suitable for small-scale entrepreneurs or small businesses. The entry-level or mid-range plan is ideal for companies with moderate team sizes, as they can subscribe to a monthly per-user cost plan that provides core CRM functionality, marketing automation, and customer service modules.
The last and costliest plan is the enterprise plan. It is suitable for large-scale enterprises with verticals to deploy custom and dynamic application programming interfaces (API), dynamic logic, and additional support. The leader of G2’s Fall 2023 grid report is Salesforce Sales Cloud, followed closely by HubSpot Sales Hub, ClickUp, and monday sales CRM.
Some vendors list their quotes explicitly, including implementation, training, and onboarding costs. Others would keep the information hidden until the prospect signs up for a demo. To know more about these additional charges, users can register for a demo or a free trial at $0 for 30 days.
CRM software implementation
Here is how CRM software can be onboarded and deployed for a business.
How is CRM software implemented?
Implementing CRM software includes analyzing different aspects of the business, capital, stakeholders, teams, and business objectives. The key to successful adoption lies in the client onboarding cycle. Research and choose a CRM (first-party, vendor, or in-house) and agree on a client configuration workflow with the vendor.
Before getting started, check for factors like customization, scalability, adaptability, user satisfaction, ease of budget, ease of admin, and market presence with the G2 platform of the software vendor. Analyze the user interface, integrations, add-ons, editors and studios, and other aspects of the software for a smooth sailing process.
Who is responsible for CRM implementation?
Ensure key stakeholders, like the managers, team leaders, CEO, and project engineering teams, are informed of the launch. All of these stakeholders need to be aware of the benefits and technicalities of a CRM.
Keep product teams, vendors, sales counselors, and marketing executives aware of the launch since they would be the primary point of contact. Educate and empower them with whitepapers, playbooks, and collaterals so they know the workings of CRM software to the best of their ability.
What does the implementation process look like for CRM software?
The implementation process can be divided into five major stages: module activation, data migration, integration and customization, user training and testing, and pilot implementation. These steps are followed by regular update and enhancement maintenance, feature release integrations, and user adoption strategies.
The new software package needs to be customized to the business infrastructure. This includes configuring fields, workflows, and paths. The system must then be plugged into other tools and systems and customized per the lead database.
Next, a literature training for all stakeholders is conducted to give a comprehensive view of the software. This is followed by QA testing to strike out any bugs or errors. Once the version is ready, a pilot of 4-5 groups of users is formed that use this CRM software. The pilot allows the software to roll out for everyone in the company. This way, CRM software is launched in a company and can be used by all existing teams.
Regular performance updates and service maintenance are crucial for the lucid functioning of CRM software. Be at par with service checks and performance upgrades to ensure the system doesn't glitch.
When should you implement CRM software?
Implementation must be done only after migrating existing databases to a secure drive and run a successful testing and pilot process. Based on test and pilot results, users can deploy the software across teams and gather their initial feedback on it.
Remember that deployment of CRM software is a later step. First, ensure that teams are aware of the working methodology of the software, modules are activated and tested, and the vendor has established contact. Migrating data without checking these boxes is not recommended.
Many companies can benefit from implementing a CRM system quickly, but deliberate planning is required to make the change successful. A CRM should only be implemented after the steps mentioned above.
With this in mind, businesses should expect this process to take at least a couple of months before they finally go live with the CRM. Even after the implementation, resources should be readily available so users can receive additional training or mitigate any challenges they have with using the CRM.
Future of CRM software
The future of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) will likely focus on AI-driven personalization, predictive analytics, and seamless omnichannel experiences. AI will enhance customer insights, automate routine tasks, and enable proactive engagement. Integration with emerging technologies like generative AI applications and virtual assistants will redefine user interactions. Privacy and data security will be paramount, and ethical AI practices will gain prominence. CRM will evolve into a holistic customer experience management system, fostering deeper connections, loyalty, and real-time adaptability to changing market dynamics.
Written and researched by Blue Bowen
Reviewed and edited by Sinchana Mistry
