Everything you need to know about CRM software

Making a sale and closing a deal isn’t just a task of handling the product and taking the money. It all starts from creating the need, persuading a prospective customer, building a relationship, and maybe then, after you’ve exhausted every ounce of strategy, making a sale. There are, in fact, various things that go in between. In today’s competitive scenario, there is no way you may manage all these things manually.

After all, you are just a human being and not a machine. Yet, there is one thing that may make you a sales machine in absolutely no time and that’s a customer-relationship management (CRM) software.

What is a CRM software?

• CRM is short for customer-relationship management. In simple words, it is a software that manages your relationship with your customer.
• Right from keeping a track of your leads, prompting you to call prospective customers, making more advance decisions like making offers to prospective customers based on their activities, and more, you get everything under one program.
• The CRM software keeps you updated about any recent activities that the customer might have undertaken. For example, it could be that the customer has recently visited a particular page of your website or is signing up for an email.

How is a CRM software useful?

• As you are well aware of what your customers are up to and what it is that they exactly need, you may pitch them better products and offer them better services.
• A CRM software lets you communicate with your team in a better manner as you may assign specific roles to your team members.
• You need not punch-in every customer’s or client’s details. The CRM is intelligent enough to fetch data from the sign-up forms on your websites and even from the Emails that you send to your customers.
• You may set your priorities, select customer transactions that are converting into deals, and approach highly lucrative deals even while on the go.

Who is a CRM software meant for?

• Sales professionals—from executive to managerial levels who wish to monitor and get insights into their leads—use CRM. A CRM software is also a way through which team heads may have a look at which of their subordinates logged maximum calls. This may be useful at the time of appraisal.
• Businesses of all sizes and shapes, who have small to large sales teams and desire to increase their return on investment use CRM. There are specific CRM software programs meant for all kinds of start-ups, small business firms, and large organizations.

What are the points that should be kept in mind when choosing a CRM software?

• The interface of the CRM software should be very simple and should have neat and clean indicators, tabs, menus, and more.
• Keep a tab on your budget. You would not want to spend a lot on software if you are running on a shoe-string budget.
• Look for a CRM solution that matches the needs of your domain. A brief case study of how you’ve solved customer queries may be a great way of shortlisting an apt CRM software.

What are some of the key features of a CRM software?

• A CRM software gives you an ease of managing leads. It lists out crucial information pertaining to your lead, their contact details, the communication you have had with them, how they are responding to your products and services, and others.
• A CRM software may also be integrated with your Email. With this, you may send standard and professional looking Emails to your clients and customers in a timely and consistent fashion.
• Reminders, alerts, and prompts are one of the features that CRM software is known for. For example, you might be prompted to call a person who has recently placed an inquiry about your product from a trade fair.
• You may systematically monitor your sales pipeline and, in fact, probe your team to work in alliance to expedite the deal-closing process.