With so many CRM tools on the market, people are usually confused and don’t know exactly which functions to choose a tool based on. It is important that the system can adapt to your company and at the same time does not contain unnecessary and expensive functions. Since not every system on the market contains all the useful functions, make sure you look out for the following five when choosing, without taking into account the uniqueness of your company, because they are the must-haves of any CRM software. Without these 5 CRM software functions, you won’t want to and won’t be able to live in the future. They will change the way you work and boost customer management to a higher level.
- Contact management
Contact management is the be-all and end-all of CRM software. With a small number of customers, contact management is still relatively simple and the data is clearly arranged. As the customer portfolio grows, so does the customer-specific data. It’s easy to lose track. The more customers you have, the more important it is to keep your customer contact data in order. CRM software saves all customer data and changes to this data. This allows your employees in sales and other departments to save contact data and other customer-specific customer information and everyone can access this data later. However, in order to take full advantage of contact management, this function should be implemented in such a user-friendly way that the entry of customer data is optimized and automated. To this end, it should have an import function with which the data (e.g. from a newsletter registration) can be automatically imported into the address manager. This reduces manual maintenance and leaves more time for the essentials.
- Offer management
The preparation of quotations can take an enormous amount of time. The customer may want to negotiate after receiving the first quotation and ask for a little more discount, perhaps they want different payment terms or similar. With several quotations and different customers, you can quickly get bogged down in chaos. A quotation management system integrated into the CRM system makes it easier to manage quotations, access all relevant customer and product data, create and amend quotations quickly and automate the entire quotation management process. It also documents all changes made to quotations, which can be viewed by all sales employees. Another important function is the automated creation of orders from quotations.
- Reporting
Sales employees need an overview of certain data in their work, such as the number of deals in the pipeline, tasks to be completed or agreed deadlines. Sales managers and senior executives want to analyze performance by team or industry to assess where optimization is needed to build an effective sales force.
Good CRM software enables you to improve your sales performance with an integrated analysis tool. It should have a clear dashboard that can be accessed by employees in the various departments. It should be customizable to your requirements and export data easily and clearly. Reporting should be as time-saving as possible, which is why automated evaluations and statistics are a must for effective sales controlling. Forecasts and reports support transparent decision-making processes and help you to monitor and control your performance.
- Online marketing and campaign management
This function enables all marketing activities and successful e-marketing campaigns, such as marketing campaigns, newsletter creation, SMS marketing activities and competitor monitoring. It makes it easier for the marketing department to create, manage and evaluate their campaigns for the acquisition of new customers or the maintenance of existing customers. The function also makes it possible to analyze and evaluate the activities carried out. Data evaluated in this way can then be used as informative reports and analysis methods to enable precise, target group-oriented success monitoring, as well as to generate and process leads.
- Task management
With the CRM system’s task management function, you can boost your productivity to a higher level. It facilitates project planning, communication and work on individual tasks and helps you to keep track of all tasks at all times, as well as control over all communication processes in the company. For example, this function in the task planner allows you to mark phases, due tasks, completed tasks, the assignment of tasks to the responsible employees and the current status of tasks. This also improves time management in the company. Task management should be presented clearly, e.g. in a Kanban view.
The 1Tool CRM software also includes the five functions presented here, as well as numerous other functions. At 1Tool, we are happy to respond to your wishes and needs and advise you in the search for individual solutions for your company.
