Selecting the Right CRM Solution for Your Business

In today’s competitive marketplace, one of the keys to successful business development is to build, manage and expand profitable long-term relationships with both key customers and potential new clients.

As a business owner or a decision-maker in a company, you know how crucial customer relationships can be to success. When a customer is happy and satisfied, they are not only likely to buy more products from you but also tell others about your product when asked for a recommendation. So, implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system is indispensable.

The right CRM solution isn’t just designed for the company which acquires it but is also meant to provide the best industry experience to that company’s clientele. If they find satisfaction in dealing with an organization that remembers them, interacts with them and memorizes and keeps all of it’s commitments to them, they will have a satisfying customer experience, and they will be back with more business.

The following six points can help you to select the right CRM solution for you –

1.  Define your needs

The first thing you should have in mind is what you need the CRM system to do for you. There are some really powerful CRM solutions out there, packed with a plethora of features. However, most enterprises only end up using less than a tenth of these features.

Before opting for a CRM, make sure the available feature set matches your business needs. Determine if your sales process is in sync with what you have in the system. List the “need to haves” and “nice to haves”; assess how you will use each feature and the possibility of you using it.

Find out what your existing, profitable customers want, so that their needs can be met. This helps in finding the business’s focus – whether in customer service, marketing campaign management, sales order management, call center sales, interactive voice response (IVR) systems or field force automation.

2.  Evaluate the integration potential

A key consideration for any business shopping for a CRM solution is how well the solution works with the company’s existing applications. This means you will need to evaluate CRM options in the context of whether they play well with your other technology platforms, including email marketing solutions, project management software, and email service providers.

The bottom line is that whatever CRM you select should be able to easily integrate with your existing software. If you need to connect all your systems through APIs, then you will need to look for a third-party platform that can integrate your systems to streamline data organization.

3.  Business growth

Whichever system you opt for, be sure it can scale with your business. It should also be flexible enough to adapt to your changing needs as your enterprise grows and evolves.

Some of the pertinent questions you need to ask yourself here include:

• Can it handle bigger client structures?
• What’s the cost of adding new users?
• Can it scale across markets and currencies?

4.  Get granular on features

The next step is to conduct an analysis of the features and functionality you need from a CRM system. These systems run the gamut from very basic to feature-packed, including components such as revenue tracking, data storing and retrieval, workflow automation, lead tracking, sales pipeline management and project management. The key to finding the software that is the right fit for your company is to realistically assess the features that your business needs and will use.

Does your company need more robust features that manage the entire customer journey and include marketing, sales, service, engagement, and commerce? Or does your company need a more basic feature set that manages communication with existing customers, prospects, and leads? It is important to keep in mind that sophisticated CRM systems are worthless if your company won’t use them or they are too complex to operate. It does not make sense to invest in a system that, while feature-rich, is usage-poor.

5.  Look at mobile-friendly options

The trend toward bring-your-own-devices (BYOD) and the ubiquity of mobile phones makes mobile CRM a must-have for creating a seamless, cohesive customer experience across multiple devices.

Because your customers are predominately mobile, you will need a system that allows you to be where they are. This means that your sales reps and managers need anywhere, anytime access to data like customer history, sales collateral, and pipeline activity—access that a CRM with strong mobile capabilities can provide.

Make sure your CRM system is accessible by looking at mobile-friendly options that allow your reps to quickly respond to customer needs, chase leads and prospects, and manage existing customer accounts.

6.   Resist the urge to build

Many businesses look at building a custom CRM solution as an attractive option, but often once you start down that path, you wish you’d rethought the decision. Regret really sets in when you migrate your single-purpose in-house solution to another CRM platform and experience the burdensome investment in ongoing maintenance, improvements, and support, as well as major expenditures of human capital. In most cases it simply does not make sense to build out a custom CRM solution. This is especially true as advances in cloud technology have driven an increase in CRM systems offering flexible and convenient platforms available for all use cases.

If you don’t have the resources to commit to a readily available CRM platform, resist the lobbying of developers in your organization for a build-now custom-developed solution; wait until you are ready to buy.

Conclusion

All said and done; a CRM system can help you achieve significant improvement in efficiency, productivity, and revenue growth. The most important thing is to assess your needs and find a solution that will meet those needs.

Here at Global Vision Technology, we offer CRM software designed for every kind of business. The CRM has a lot of helpful features that can enable you to generate more leads, get more conversations, and grow your businesses. Contact us today, and we’ll be happy to help you.

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