What is CRM Software? A Complete Beginner’s Guide

Some challenges are overcome with the introduction of digital communication. Since the pandemic, the salesforce has been moving towards hybrid working models, but many customers are still comfortable and rely on face-to-face communication. Thus, it is becoming more critical to modernize how the sales team interacts with customers. For managing effective customer relationships, companies require a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system that is not only limited to contact tracking by maintaining a spreadsheet. CRM software can track, analyze, and surf the data whenever required by the company. But, this has raised another challenge in managing this new style of interaction that cannot be solved using spreadsheets. If you are new to CRM technology, you must go through this article to understand what CRM is, how it improves your sales, its benefits, and how to choose the right CRM software.

What is CRM Software?

CRM software is a tool introduced to help companies overcome the challenges of interaction with customers. These tools help companies provide a unique and seamless experience to build a healthy and transparent relationship with their clients. It is possible as these tools help them to track their sales, organize and prioritize their tasks, and improve collaboration. The adoption of CRM tools has replaced the need for managing spreadsheets, databases, and applications that keep the business together. These tools are a single interface where each team member can share their views. Besides, it allows all team members to access the information in real-time. If we look at the overall picture, it improves performance and productivity. But, to keep every piece of information in a single place and organized, you need to have a proper CRM strategy for tracking all touchpoints and interactions.

Benefits of CRM software

Having CRM software in place will benefit the company in several ways. Once you start using the CRM software with the right strategy, you will see the difference yourself. If you are new to CRM software, you must go through the below-mentioned benefits.

• Boost Sales

CRM software helps you identify quality leads and work accordingly. It helps you understand if investing time and resources for a specific prospect will work or not. Not only this, it will help you to generate more leads and convert them into loyal customers within no time.

• Seamless Business Process

With CRM software, it has become easier to define and build an efficient business process, resulting in enhancing the teams’ productivity. CRM software allows you to follow the necessary standards to have a seamless business process. Not only this, CRM allows the team members to automate the mundane tasks and focus on other important tasks to take the business forward.

• Improved Decision-making

Every business is based on data and how they use it to make decisions. Decision-makers use the data from across the market to gather valuable insights that help them make tactical decision-making without relying on assumptions. With CRM, you can generate detailed reports and share them among team members, so they all are on the same page and understand the scope for improvement.

• Data Security and Compliance

Even if your business involves critical information that needs to be protected against unauthorized access, CRM software is the right option for you. CRM comes with GDPR-compliance features, which is one of the critical assets of CRM software. It ensures the complete safety of the customer’s data stored within the company’s data centers via digital security processes. So, no one has to worry about how you communicate and share details about your work with the customers.

• Mobile Accessibility

As people prefer everything to be managed at their fingers. Thus, having an app for the CRM is also necessary to ensure that each team member can access CRM tools. It also helps the sales representative pull out every required information easily by logging into the CRM app through their phones and seeing the latest updates.

• Improved customer relationship

CRM software can help the team members log all the historical data, issues, and their resolution in a single interface. In this way, teams can help the customer quickly by providing quick solutions for their issues, resulting in a better customer relationship.

How Does CRM Software Help in Improving Sales and Marketing?

If you are using CRM software, there is no need to invest much in a huge team or advertising as everything can be simply catered by CRM software. Another benefit of CRM is that you can couple them with sales and marketing automation, such as Keap (formerly Infusionsoft). It helps create sales and marketing engines for improving the sales and marketing experience. Here, we will see how CRM improves the process in both niches. SalesBy integrating the CRM software into your sales process, you will end up with a streamlined sales process, ensuring improved visibility, prioritization, and easy follow-up.

• Improved visibility: CRM improves the visibility of the sales team for them to be more effective than ever. With CRM, you can have all the team members and the customers’ database in a single place that allows everyone to be on the same page. If anyone changes the data, everyone can see it in real-time. Not only this, you can even customize and personalize your communication for better visibility. You can also use the CRM systems with the VoIP systems to improve the incoming calls’ response. It helps the individual sales representative to track the activities and performance and manage the entire sales pipeline.
• Clear prioritization: With the help of CRM software, you can easily prioritize your tasks and act accordingly. It helps the team members understand the task’s urgency and calculate the leads’ interest in a specific service. Not only this, CRM software allows you to prioritize outreach to the customers by keeping all the necessary contact details within the software. It helps the team members to follow up with the lead customers efficiently.
• Easy follow-up: CRM ensures easy and quick follow-up as it helps in automating the follow-up task with the required person. You do not have to create notes for each task and remember them. The CRM system will do that for you and inform you about the follow-up at the right time. This will help the team members stay updated and be more productive in their work.
• Marketing: Marketing has been one of the crucial factors for increasing sales. CRM has changed the outlook of every marketing process. It helps the team members get valuable insights, personalize the work, and test all possible opportunities that help them improve sales. So we will look at how CRM has fast-tracked this process.
• Insights: Data plays a vital role in every niche, and it has become necessary to work on that data to get valuable information that can positively impact future decision-making. For example, a business can analyze the typical characteristics of its customers. With this insight, you can smartly invest in the right strategy that will be beneficial and prevent the budget from going to leads. Insights from your stored data will increase revenue.
• Personalization: With CRM, you can personalize your communications and provide a fantastic experience to your customers by communicating with them directly. If you connect the CRM system to a sales and marketing automation tool, you can send one-to-one emails and text messages as per the customer’s requirement. Personalization also helps you provide specific offers to specific customers as per their interests without spamming other customers’ mailboxes. You need to use the data to understand the everyday needs of a group of customers and tag them in your messages.
• Testing: Without testing, you might be able to see the flaws in your sales and marketing strategies. Testing provides you with hard facts to move forward and increases your chance of success. A CRM allows you to test every aspect, so you understand the scope of improvement and act accordingly to improve the experience for your customers. It helps you find innovative ways to connect with your customers and increase sales.

Why Use CRM Software?

There are many scenarios where you might not be able to handle sales, marketing, and customer relations simultaneously. It is time for you to update your business software to be more productive and efficient. If you are looking for software to manage everything with just a few clicks, then CRM is the right option for your business and to strengthen customer relations. Below are the cases when you must consider adopting CRM into your business.

• Lack of knowledge: The sales and marketing teams work hand in hand and are the base for good customer relationships. If you do not have the correct data to keep track of your customers, then both teams might face difficulties while working. This challenge increases with the increased customer base. The CRM system will help you have a centralized repository where you can store the customer’s data and all other information.
• Inability to close potential deals: It might be challenging for a sales representative out in the field to keep everyone else updated about the ongoing sales. It results in the inability to close the deals and share the required documents with the team members. But, with the CRM software, you can easily overcome this challenge, as the sales rep can share and update the details of the ongoing sales from the app.
• Poor customer satisfaction: Having many customers can create chaos, and sometimes it becomes challenging to handle everyone and fulfill their demands. But with CRM, you can get over this challenge by having a personalized experience with each customer and dedicating a specific time to interact with them and act on their demands quickly. It will help the company to retain its potential customers.
• Lack of centralization: Having scattered information on your clients will not help you and your business achieve your goals. With a centralized system storing information, you will miss many opportunities and cannot solve your customer’s demands. But with a CRM system, you will have a centralized system to store all the information, accessible to each team member so they can take a collaborative decision.
• Unorganized communication: Misleading or lack of communication can harm your business and impact your reputation among customers. So, you must have a centralized communication system that will keep all the team members updated about the ongoing work. Also, the team members can see the changes in real-time.
• Efficient utilization of your money and effort: A sales representative is the core person who creates the company’s customers. If they leave, it will impact the relationship with their customers. It requires a lot of training and understanding of massive data for a new person. So with CRM, you will get every detail in a single place, providing you with detailed reports, making it easier for the new person to understand.

How to Choose the Right CRM Software?

While choosing the right CRM software for your company, there might be several questions running through your mind, such as which software will be good for you, whether that software can cater to all your business requirements, the price, and others. There are two types of CRM software — On-premise and Cloud-based. You can choose any of them depending on your requirements. We will see the pros and cons of both types to understand them better. Cloud CRMThe cloud CRM is generally built and maintained by the service provider. It allows the companies to deploy the services without installing them on their systems. The companies can avail of these services through the Internet.

• There is no need to maintain an additional infrastructure to run the CRM system. All you need is a good Internet connection.
• You can access your CRM system from anywhere. Also, you can leverage its mobile app for greater accessibility.
• You can avail of its free trials and understand if this software meets your requirements.
• It is cost-effective as you only have to pay for your services.
• You can customize the plan as per your business demands, and it is quick to deploy.
• You can integrate these systems with other applications to increase their functionality.
• It is secured as it implements robust security measures ensuring the integrity of the data.

On-premise CRMUnlike the cloud CRM, on-premise CRM requires you to set up the servers locally and install software on your local network. It increases your responsibilities to manage everything in-house.

• You need to set up servers on your premise, requiring bigger infrastructure space.
• As the data is stored on the local servers, only the local devices within the company’s network can access them. Creating mobile apps requires more investment.
• There is no trial available as you need to prepare the entire setup to test it.
• You need to have a high budget to maintain this type of CRM.
• You need to hire an additional team with the proper knowledge and expertise to handle the infrastructure, customization, servers, and software-related tasks.
• The company itself is responsible for monitoring and protecting the customer’s data. You need to have a dedicated team with the required resources to manage every task.

Things to Consider While Implementing CRM

Before investing in CRM software, make sure that you consider the following vital factors. Every CRM might come with different features and functionalities but make sure the below are available for efficient working.

• Customization: Every business has different business requirements. Thus, they must have the facility to customize the CRM software as per their requirement. You should be able to customize and automate tasks and have everything in the right place that suits you.
• Mobility: Make sure that the chosen CRM software has a mobile application to help the sales rep in the field. It helps them access and upload the current data and close the deals more effectively. This way, everyone in the team will be updated and on the same page.
• Migration: With CRM, it will be easier to migrate all the data as everything will be at a centralized location. After migrating to other systems, you can easily start your business quickly.
• Usability: Make sure that the CRM software comes with a clean interface and excellent user experience that everyone can easily understand. Also, make sure that the CRM is compatible with the technologies and can adapt well to the upcoming technologies.
• Scalability: If you have a consistently growing business, ensure that the chosen CRM software supports your scalable business requirements. The CRM software must provide additional support, custom processes, easy third-party integrations, etc.
• Security: Security is one of the major concerns for every business dealing with crucial customer data. With multiple security measures, you can save your data and customers’ details from being compromised. So, you also have to ensure that your CRM software comes with the proper security measures, protecting the integrity of your centralized data.

Conclusion

Sales and marketing companies depend on their relationship with their customers. Maintaining a solid and healthy relationship with customers can help your business grow and generate more sales. With CRM software, it has become easier to collaborate with customers and provide them with a personalized experience. CRM enables you to track, analyze, test, and monitor all the tasks and details related to the customers. Not only this, you can prioritize and customize your tasks according to the customer’s demand. With CRM software, you can efficiently grow your business. This article will understand how CRM has streamlined the sales and marketing process. But, make sure that your CRM comes with some required features that will make your mundane tasks more manageable. So choose the right software and start implementing it.

Vijay Singh Khatri

My name is Vijay Singh Khatri, and I enjoy meeting new people and finding ways to help them have an uplifting experience. I have had a variety of customer service opportunities, through which I was able to have fewer returned products and increased repeat customers when compared with co-workers.