It's hard to imagine life today without the Contacts app on your phone. Phone numbers are hard enough to remember, let alone the email and mailing addresses for everyone you know. So we outsource that to our phones, letting them remember everyone's contact info.
You need even more help with your business contacts—and your address book app isn't enough. In addition to names, phone numbers, and addresses, you need to track the products people are interested in, what services they've purchased from your company, the company they work for, and more.
That's why you need a CRM.
The follow is the qucik checklist for you when looking a buying or upgrading your CRM system
Checklist For Buying or Upgrading a CRM System
1. Contact Management
You won’t find a CRM that doesn’t have a contact management capability. If you do, chances are you aren’t looking at a CRM. All CRM systems allow salespeople to create contact records and store prospect and customer information in a database. However, the best systems that truly improve efficiency will reduce and streamline contact data entry as much as possible.
2. Deal Stages
Most CRM systems can be customized to operate on a specific sales process. Whether your company has three deal stages or 15, you should be able to program these levels into the software and attach associated values.
For retailer deals are sames as customers transations so you know what your customer has already purchased.
3. Daily Dashboard
Staff need visibility into a number of metrics on a daily basis. Metrics such as their progress to date against quota, how many deals they have in their pipelines at which stages, and what outstanding tasks they need to complete. Similarly, business owners need to be able to view these categories for the aggregated sales team.
Evaluate this function based on visual appeal and simplicity.
4. Task Management
An employee who has to toggle back and forth between several different systems to view and complete their daily tasks is not a happy person (though this is common). CRM systems that include task management capabilities streamline staff day-to-day workflow and help them keep on top of their follow up.
5. Content Repository
To cut back on wasted time searching for content, look for a CRM system with an embedded content repository. Look for a system that allows staff to save their go-to pieces of collateral in one place. And it’s not just collateral. Writing email copy can be another time suck for a busy poeple. Look for a system that also allows the user to file away customized email templates, so the sales rep is not reinventing the wheel with every new outreach.
6. Automated Data Capture
One of the primary reasons companies decide to adopt a CRM is to keep better track of customer and prospect touches (emails, calls, etc). But, beware: Many CRM applications require salespeople to copy and paste their email outreach into the system or even upload call recordings.
These extra steps can be maddening forstaff who are making 10 or 50 calls every single day, and it leaves room for human error. Look for a software that does this step automatically. Look for CRM that automatically logs calls made, emails sent, website visits and posts them in a timeline-like view on a customer’s record page,
7. Mobile
Business owners have seen productivity increased by 15% when they had mobile access to CRM applications. Tying staff to a CRM system that can only be accessed via laptop is bound to annoy them, especially if they’re in a role that requires travel. The majority of CRM systems today allow staff to log on to the application from mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones -- make sure the ones you’re considering do as well.
8. Integration with Marketing Automation
And last but not least, integration between your marketing and sales platform is crucial. After all, the underlying concept of “customer relationship management” is to provide a complete lifecycle view into each prospect and client. A gap between marketing automation and CRM can lead to lost information and lost opportunities.
