9 CRM Productivity Features Your Company Should Be Using
Jack Hodges
Sep 14, 2021
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8 min read
CRM
There is no dearth of Customer Relationship Management software in the market - in fact, you can find one with any kind of features, price point, integration options, and much more. While there are a lot of options, not all of them will be the best fit for your company.
Picking and implementing the 'best CRM software' in the market is easy - but is that the best CRM for your business?
If you're still wondering whether the Customer Relationship Management software you are currently using is giving you the most it can, there might be a problem. A big part of finding the perfect solution for your business is identifying the areas where you need CRM capabilities the most. Analysing these needs and matching them to what your software is providing you is the first step towards boosting productivity and achieving success.
Table of Contents
CRM for sales
One of the biggest reasons for companies to use a CRM for their business processes is the ample automation it offers for sales reps. It helps in eliminating the plethora of repetitive tasks that don't need manual intervention and frees up the reps' time to focus on other important tasks such as getting more purchases.
Here are some of the sales features your CRM should be offering.
Lead management
Leads lie in the centre of every sales and marketing campaign and are required by both departments to make more profits. Lead management is a feature offered by CRM and it helps through the life cycle of the lead, from when they first make contact with you till they become a customer.
Such a tool offers lead nurturing through lead scoring, emails and social media, lead behaviour, tags and notes, lead buying patterns, web and email analytics, and much more.
Sales calls
Sales calls are like bread and butter for reps as they are required to place calls and connect with leads and prospects. With the use of a CRM, sales reps will be able to access quick and efficient features such as auto-dialing, recording calls, taking notes, tagging calls, send alerts for missed calls, and much more. With such easy to use features, reps will be able to place calls faster as well as reduce the time it takes between calls.
Contact management
Managing contact details and information is extremely necessary for businesses but doing so is a manual and time-consuming task. As a sales rep, the main KPI is to generate more revenue and to do so they need to get in touch with more leads and increase their target audience by nurturing them.
By using the tools in your CRM, you can perform contact management tasks that make the above job much easier. Functions include contact organisation, exporting from Excel, emails, and social media, as well as adding tags for various categories, among others.
CRM features for marketing
For a marketing team to function successfully, they need to identify and capture ample leads on a daily basis. Apart from this, they also need to stay up to date with the sales team so as to portray a uniform brand image and combined lead nurturing strategy. Your CRM should offer effective marketing tools to create more interactions with leads and prospects as well as future them into customers.
Here are some of the marketing features your CRM should be offering.
Email campaign management
Email campaigns are used by every business to reach out to prospects and customers. In fact, marketers send out several emails every day for customer interaction, newsletter distribution, drip emailing, press releases, and more. Such campaigns can be easily strategised and analysed using email automation tools that offer customisation. Make sure the CRM you are using offers such personalised campaign management features.
Social media integration and automation
Social media integration and management is yet another time-consuming task that your CRM should be able to automate without intervention. Such a tool will allow your marketing team to work further on capturing new leads and increasing customers instead of taking time to upload statuses on social media.
Capturing leads
Leads are first sought after by the marketing team and then sent to the sales team for further nurturing. With an efficient CRM software, your marketing reps will be able to find more leads faster through various ways such as signup forms, customer popups, surveys, and more. These prospects can then be integrated perfectly with a drip emailing process to move along in the marketing and subsequent sales processes.
Analytics and testing
All your business's marketing strategies are largely dependent on analytics and testing. Without this insight, your reps will be lost and wouldn't know whether their efforts are faring well or not. Having detailed analytical reports at hand will help you understand what you can alter as well as use A/B testing as a way to get the right statistics for your campaigns.
CRM features for service
Service reps need to interact with customers on a daily basis and answer over 40-50 tickets. With the help of tools, getting through these can become much easier and less time-consuming.
Here are some of the service features your CRM should be offering.
Responding to tickets
The first contact with the customer regarding their ticket always plays an important role, which is why service and support reps are always in a hurry to send out the first response. Unfortunately, with multiple tickets issued every day, reps end up wasting a lot of their time doing this. With the use of automation features in your CRM, you can automate responses that can be sent in real-time. You can also personalise these responses to match your brand messaging.
Ticket categorisation
While the first response is important, the main problem at hand still is resolving the customer issue. Sales reps need to prioritise tickets and resolve them based on their urgency. When using a CRM with the right service and support features, this process can be made much faster and easier. It allows automates ticket categorisation by letting reps add various tags and SLAs.
When choosing a Customer Relationship Management software for your company, make sure it is positively influencing your business and providing you with the much-needed tools to increase efficiency and boost productivity. Automation that comes with a CRM platform can help you do more with your sales, marketing, and service teams.
Wondering which software is the right choice for you? Get in touch with FIVE CRM to know more about our robust and scalable platform.
Michael King says...
"I can’t think of a time where a client has requested something that we weren’t able to do with FiveCRM. Unlike most systems, it has a lot of flexibility."
Managing Director, Senior Response
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“Each client, and each of their campaigns, has its own unique specifications. We essentially needed to set up mini CRMs on one platform to meet those requirements.”
Operations Director, Team Telemarketing
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