Many small and midsize businesses have decided to choose to start a CRM and develop a customized CRM of their own from scratch even if they have just understood the CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Is this customized CRM really necessary?

 

It’s important to know that many Fortune 500 companies don’t have a 100% customized CRM, since there are a large number of mature CRMs available on the market which already covers all kinds of services and industries.

Do you really need a CRM? 

 

This is like bookkeeping, many times you may need to purchase Quickbook, but there are also many simple situations that may be solved by an Excel. Before we start to choose, we have to determine whether we should choose to CRM or not.

 

No one knows your business better than you do, so make a list for yourself and see what specific points you want your CRM to help you with. For example, you can ask yourself, if you have encountered the following problems during the sales process:

1. Whether the sales process is too long for your business
2. Do your potential customers need time to convert
3. Your customers often deal with you on different platforms (e.g. website, Facebook, phone etc.)
4. Difficult to keep and store customers’ data
5. Hard to find the desired information
6. The performance of your sales is opaque to you
7. Need to automation the interaction with customers (e.g. birthday greetings, a reminder for holiday greeting cards)

If you have the above problems, then it is time to start selecting your right CRM.

 

How To Choose Your CRM

All CRM software is trying to help you out to gain more potential customers and convert those potential customers, but there will be differences in implementation. In order to select the most suitable CRM for your business, you need to identify some factors.

 

1. Does functionality work on your situation?

Most of the time, CRMs are self-proclaimed, they use fancy words and images to show their functions. Therefore, before you make the decision, you need to make sure that the functions required by your industry scenario can be implemented and can solve the pain point encountered above.

Case #1: real estate industry

A real estate industry should at least be able to achieve the following functions:

1. Monitor the sales process
2. Email automation
3. Collect and integrate potential customers

2. CRM Pricing

Other than the functions, the second factor need to consider is the price of the software, this sometimes can be the main factor for some SMBs. The high starting price of some CRMs can discourage many SMBs. In fact, when calculating the price, you must take into account the cost of learning for your business to use this CRM.

Of course, when choosing the CRM the price can’t be the main factor. The price can’t be as low as possible, but usually good CRM provides a free trial opportunity. You may wish to use this opportunity to experience it and see if this software is suitable for your business or not.

Common software charging methods:

• One-time buyout (not recommended)
• Monthly, free trial
• Annual, free trial
• Free features are free forever

3. Expansion and Integration

Once you have confirmed to use which CRM, you won’t like to change the CRM back and forth with your team. So you need to determine whether the CRM can be used after your business expanded and whether the learning cost will increase under the coordination of multiple users.

In addition, if you have already proficient in using some tools, then you may have to pay attention to whether your CRM can be integrated with your other tools to ensure you don’t have to learn everything again from scratch.

For example, you have a paid software and using it for a long time, when you choose the CRM you will wish that the software can integrate with your CRM, so you don’t have to use them separately or change to other software. This is where you need to pay attention when you are in the trial.

Of course, if you like your CRM very much, then you can do everything again, but do be careful not to make data migration difficult. Fortunately, most CRMs are move friendly, you can do the batch import unless all your materials are written on paper.

 

4. Whether it can support mobile devices?

This is an important question to ask because sales often spend more time on mobile devices than desktop devices. 

Imagine you are in a place without the Internet, and you take out your mobile phone and use your CRM app to take pictures of potential customers’ business cards, the basic information such as name, phone number, and address in the business card will be automatically entered into your CRM app, and there will be a place for Internet later Sync to your CRM terminal.

The mobile version of CRM is especially useful for many social occasions. After all, when you exchange business cards, you don’t have to always bring your laptop for any information recording, just use your app and scan the information.

 

5. CRM support and after-sales service

Even the most professional software in the world has bugs, especially CRM. In this case, an on-call after-sales service will be particularly useful.

A good CRM is usually accompanied by automatic, semi-automatic, and manual help centers, or online on-call support, they don’t want to miss you when something goes wrong either.

CRM with a large user base also has its own community where users with different experiences can help each other.

 

The key functions of CRM for SMBs

No matter what industry you are in, and whether your sales team is a group or individual, the CRM you use should be able to complete some basic organizational capabilities, such as collecting and organizing customer data, displaying the sales processes, synchronizing transaction details and automatically performing some basic tasks. 

 

1. Contact Management:

This functionality needs to be stronger than your mobile phone’s contact book, every time you use it, you should be able to use your CRM to quickly find the person you need from a large number of contacts.

2. Sales Pipeline:

Making the sales process visualized, clear and fully planned. Your CRM should be able to show you the value of each order, questions like who is responsible and at what stage the order is in your sales process. This functionality helps you quickly determine what actions should be taken on your next step.

3. Deals:

In the deals section, it should demonstrate the product value, status and other details of a specific order, and they can be associated with your contact and the company where the contact is located.

4. utomation:

Automation functions, things like synchronizing the data of different terminals, automatically sending emails, recording the sales personnel’s action information and more.

5. Notifications:

Be able to customize some notifications and reach you effectively. For example, when your potential customer schedules a meeting with you, you should be able to receive the corresponding prompts and synchronize them with the necessary software.

6. Integration:

The integration should at least be able to synchronize with your mailbox, phone or Calendar, and support batch import and export of some common format files like excel.

7. Reporting:

Be able to reflect your important data on your panel, such data like the number of transactions, the call duration, transaction rate, email sending and receiving, etc., in this way to have a more intuitive perspective to understand how your sales are.