Top 10 CRM features that every small business should need
Many small businesses have started using CRM to improve their sales and productivity. In the last five years, CRM usage has been increased from 55% to 75%.
Over thousands of CRMs in the market, with hundreds of features and functionalities, aids in running a successful business. CRM software not only helps you to solve the problem of tracking and connecting with customers but also helps in getting all your leads in one place through integrations and other means.
CRM software lets your small business collect, analyze, and retrieve all the vital information associated with the customer base and manage them with ease. All CRMs possess a few standard core features and many other which are peripheral. Not every feature will be useful for you and for your team to manage the leads. However, here are the top 10 essential features that you should have in your CRM tech stack.
- Contact management
- Lead management
- Email integration
- Document management
- Workflow automation
- Reporting & analytics
- Sales forecasting
- Customization
- Social media
- Third-party integration
1.Contact management
CRM’s major function is to maintain all the information of the leads and customers in a single place. One of the important information about the lead is their contact information.
Contact management involves storing customer’s contact information such as names, phone numbers, addresses, and social media account links in a quickly searchable and retrievable manner. This information will come in handy when you want to reach your potential customers, any time and from anywhere.
2. Lead Management
Lead management is one of the vital functionalities, every business need from their CRM. It is also important to manage all your leads under one roof to convert your potential leads into customers. Leads are those who have expressed some level of interest in your product or offering but have not been qualified to determine if they fit the ideal buyer persona. Your CRM should be able to help you to track and manage such leads to convert them into paying customers.
CRM software assists in capturing details of leads from various channels, including phone calls, web forms, social media platforms, and emails. Lead management functionality makes sure that you don’t lose any leads and also ensures that you score and qualify leads correctly. This functionality also tracks the progress of customers and leads through the sales cycle and helps decide on marketing initiatives for nurturing them. Lead management helps in improving the efficiency and productivity of the sales team by focussing on the right leads at the right time.
3. Email integration
Email is the preferred channel for an effective B2B communication. Emails also serve as a centralized hub for internal cross-collaboration. So, it makes sense for integrating with email clients such as Gmail, Outlook and, Yahoo.
Email management offers the ability to send bulk emails, plan email campaigns as a part of a marketing initiative, track email conversations with clients, and send automated emails to customers for events such as birthdays and anniversaries through the integration with calendars.
4. Attachments and Document Management
Attachments and documents in a centralized location with colleagues or clients directly from document management let you create, collect, store, access, and share attachments to the CRM system thus making it easier for everyone involved to access information. Today you need to have the facility of attaching images, photographs, PDF documents, spreadsheets to leads that you have to improve productivity.
To improve security, you can set document access and edit rights. Further, version history lets you access the previous versions of any file.
