Thanks to the continuous, marching advance of technology, it has become common for companies to find themselves dealing with a costumer base of hundreds or thousands of people. Heck, it could even be millions: Amazon had 310 million active user accounts worldwide in Q1 2016 . With these kind of numbers in mind, the benefits of using a CRM in your company are something you definitely want to have on your side.
The problem is that as the number of clients you have keeps growing, so do the chances of forgetting about their email or a scheduled call or even misplacing their contact information altogether. Except none of this will happen if you implement a CRM. And because we all know one of prerequisites for sustainable growth is perfect customer service, we think it’s time to look at the 7 advantages of using a CRM that you maybe haven’t thought of just yet.
1 – Contact details with activity feeds
When it comes down to the basics, you should have all your contact details and leads centralized and formalized. It is also crucial that members of your sales team know who is working on which lead to avoid awkward situations. The last thing you want is for potential customers to be forgotten or contacted multiple times by different, unaware, members of your sales team. And you also want the rest of the team to know how to keep the communication going with a lead in case another team member goes away on a holiday, gets ill or even leaves the company. No, all of that is solved with customer relationship management tools by standard, but what are some additional advantages of using a CRM?
Custom fields
By default, you would be storing a list of information on your contacts that goes something like this: Name, Title, Brand, Company, Email, Phone, Address, Email. But what if you need anything else?
Well, as a matter of fact, that is not a problem at all, because in Platformax you can go ahead and create custom fields for any additional data your inside sales team might need about your contacts. If you’re running an HR agency, you would want to store data about their education and a list of their skills. If it’s a marketing agency, then that would be a list of things that would be included in their project. What ever it may be, you can simply include it in the customer persona template.
We feel that custom fields are extremely important and are one of key elements that make a CRM adaptable to any business and company. Our users’ feedback has only confirmed how important this is to them.
Activity feeds and call logs
Besides having detailed contact information available to the whole team instantly, you also need your team to be aware of all activities that have taken place between the customer or lead and the designated sales rep. This makes any team changes truly painless and very efficient, since a new member can simply jump in the CRM and learn about everything that has happened previously.
As any sales person will surely know, when you’re making calls to generate sales, you have to make A LOT of calls. And you have to send A LOT of emails. And then you need to follow up and try again. All of these actions are kept recorded with your contacts.
This is also very handy for sales managers, as it provides them with a seamless way to track the productivity of the team and to measure performance. It can even help them find repetitive conversion fail-points and organize team trainings accordingly.
2 – Automation of time-consuming tasks
Survival of the fittest, or at least surviving in the wild can force us burn our final energy reserves to stay alive. On the other hand, surviving in the business world more often means working as hard as you are smart, or working smarter rather than harder. Hard work done in a non-efficient way isn’t productive and doesn’t pay out. And this is where again we can clearly see benefits of CRM usage, as it implements well-thought out procedures and basically forces your team to work smartly and efficiently, this time by eliminating the need to do repetitive, time-consuming tasks.
Automatic activity tracking
We have already mentioned that all sales team-to-user activity is stored within contact profiles, but we didn’t mention the best part – this is all done automatically. Since Platformax is made as a complete inside sales solution, which means it has an emailing engine built in, as well as the option to call straight from the CRM and to track all leads through the stages of your company’s sales pipeline. And since all of this is built in, all activities are automatically added to the corresponding contact. Neat!
Automated email campaigns
One of the most time-consuming tasks for an inside sales rep could very well be sending emails. Find email address, type out an email, triple check what you typed, double check the address, send, and then repeat that for the rest of the day, right? But it doesn’t have to be like that. What you can do instead is filter your contacts and create an emails list, prepare emails, and setup an automated prospecting campaign. You can then take a break and later focus on other tasks.
Email templates
Another great thing about sending emails with Platformax is that you can save any of them to your email templates. Later, once you need to use them again, you simply pick them out from your list, either for sending to a single person or to a new email list you just segmented.
3 – Unified Calendar
Sure enough, you have a calendar app on your phone and you have a calendar hanging in your office and then one more at home. But having a shared calendar, one that keeps all scheduled calls, meetings and follow-up reminders, will allow you to easier keep track and remind you about what you and your sales team need to do and when. If you’re the sales team manager, it will also instantly show you when you’re team members are available or occupied and what their overall workload is.
Your inside sales CRM system is the perfect place for this – it only makes sense for this unified calendar to be integrated with the whole sales process. A complete inside sales CRM basically has built-in team organization functions this way, enabling its users to send requests for other team members to join certain scheduled tasks or notify them about upcoming deadlines.
4 – A functioning To-Do List + Notes
As mentioned, a Sales CRM System should enable the users to prioritize their workload. A To-Do list is the kind of thing that could get out of hand but, because people tend to forget, especially if there is lots of work to be done. So, you can set up reminders for yourself via email, phone, in-app messages, or set up reminders for your colleagues! Don’t forget things you have to do, that’s bad for business. There are plenty of ways to work a To-Do list, some people clear them daily, others use them as reminders for less important tasks that might be otherwise forgotten. The one thing you can be sure off, there should always be something To-Do in Sales, planning your next step!
5 – Workflow (status of business opportunities)
Your workflow is how you interact with the contacts you have in your CRM’s pipeline. This is your digitized process and includes the categorization of steps and the logical process of statuses. Make sure your sales CRM includes the ability to customize the workflow options to fit your company’s needs and sales process.
6 – Simplicity of use, combined with all the help and training you could want
To be honest, simplicity isn’t a benefit on its own, it’s more of a recurring theme for customer relationship management platforms. Because a CRM is simply designed to simplify the sales processes and all team activities relevant to sales.
Yes, you probably had some experience at some point or another that made you think a multi-tool is really never the best solution, especially if you can’t even figure out how to open and use the basic part of it. The same goes for any CRM. It’s really essential, that you find a “simple” CRM package, which will be easy implement and use right away, without configuring and importing for days on end.
On the other hand, there should be training options available for you and your team, , since even with the greatest level of simplicity offered by the CRM, you still want to make sure that everyone in your team is on the same page with the CRM’s functionality, inner workings, and how you all plan to work to get the job done from here on. Training each member thoroughly will help get you there. Not to mention, your company grows, and as it grows, you will start needing more things from that adaptable sales CRM. So, make sure that the support – training is in hands reach!
Bonus: A chocolate bar!
Hey, you never know when you might get hungry for more.
In conclusion, if you are looking for an adaptive sales CRM / platform, that does all of the above and more, you might want to take a look at Platformax Price/value at it’s finest, while adaptable to most companies needs.
Or feel free to browse the market, there are tons of solutions out there, some have more, some have less, in the end it’s up to you for what you decide. But remember, decide well, since integrating such a tool into your company is a long-term investment.
Cheers!
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