5 Prerequisites of A CRM Software For Business

This article is trying to make a short list of the features that you should be considering must for developing your custom CRM solution.

CRM is a leading necessity for businesses to help them manage their huge data silos related to customers and purchases. It is also the tool to garner customer data that businesses should have to track all the possibilities that are coming across. Altogether, CRM is a comprehensive app that enables businesses to safe keep, organise, and maintain all customer details, contact information, sales prospects, transaction accounts and everything. They save up everything in a commonplace, preferably in the cloud. But what does a CRM require to help businesses achieve efficiency in their data storing and management? Here’s a list.

Address log

This is the most fundamental feature of any CRM and it is the address book that will be going to collect and store up all the data of the contacts. It stores all the essential details of the customers as well as prospects and everything else about them that matters in business at one place conveniently. This gives the business’s salesperson or marketing persons one-way access to all information.

Leads and deals

The process of conversions goes like this: potential customers are recognised as the leads and then after studying their details, businesses decide whether it is effective enough as a deal. The CRM should be helping businesses rightly in getting their decisions right by providing them with details of customer interactions at each stage in the sales pipeline.

Activities dashboard

The CRM should be provided with a built-in scheduling tool that will help the salespersons to set reminders for their upcoming activities. Calling up or following a lead, scheduling a meeting or attending one, the activities dashboard will be taking note of all and keep sending reminder alerts ahead of the time so that the salesperson doesn’t miss out anything.

Notifications Panel

This feature is about notifying the users of the CRM, i.e. sales personnel, marketers and others, about the significant milestones set up and need to be achieved. What big events are yet to happen, tasks need to be completed regarding campaigning/promotions or activities scheduled for email marketing, everything can be checked instantly from the updated notifications panel. So, users do not have consistently check in their mailboxes to know what’s upcoming or have to be done.

Sales reporting Panel

The CRM is, of course, incomplete without the Sales reporting feature which is the only way to know which product has got more sales, which got least, the number of deals closed in a month, and how that can be improved in future with monthly or quarterly reporting. The CRM should come with analytics and reporting features so that salesmen can filter out data, for a certain time period, or of a specific channel and make informed decisions for the future.

A CRM is perhaps not a tool for customer relationship management if not bears these quintessential features. However, every business is unique and every business has a separate mechanism of sales and how leads are generated. Ways to deal with customer services can be different too. Here you may be needing the assistance of an expert CRM consultant who can adjust your CRM’s functions to your specific needs.