Key factors to consider while choosing the right sales CRM

Businesses crunch numbers for moving forward in the market and they need an advancing sales team to back them up. How do you manage your sales team’s productivity? How do you manage the time they spend closing deals? How do you check their output?

Having a sales CRM (Customer Relationship Management) eases all the tasks related to managing your team. But how do you select the best CRM for your business and your sales team? There are market leaders who are providing CRM features but at the price that is not feasible with every business model. Moreover, there are CRM providers who are in the market just for earning the profit by selling their product.

CRM implementation is a crucial task because it helps you in boosting sales by enhancing your entire sales process.

Considering the value a successful CRM deployment will provide to your organization’s sales process, these are the key factors that must be considered while choosing a sales CRM:

Scalability of CRM

Deploying a CRM solution will help you grow your business and help you increase the revenue. Consider adopting a CRM that will grow with your organization, make sure you have a well-developed plan that allows scalability of your CRM.

Your staff’s expertise comes into play here, so let them test out the customer management software. If they find the software to be complex, they will stop using it or decrease its usage hence reducing the software’s overall value and the ROI.

On the other hand, an application that offers limited features will not be helpful for your sales team in managing their daily tasks. Take trials of the software and have one or two members of your sales team use and evaluate various software. You cannot risk the situation where after implementing a hefty CRM, the need of switching to another CRM arises.

Mobility or Mobile CRM

The current sales team is more active outside the cubicle and office space, and they want a CRM that suits their mobility. Most CRMs have iOS and Android mobile apps but you need to make sure that the features present in the SaaS-based CRM should also be supported by the app. You do not want to be embarrassed in front of the client just because the mobile app was not able to open the reports file on your mobile device or it failed to make an outgoing call from the CRM mobile app. Always visit the app stores to read the reviews where customers and users have rated the app and have provided their feedback about the usage of the app during actual events.

Exploring the Untapped Opportunities

CRMs can do many things with their latest features so before you select one for your organization, make sure the CRM helps:

• conveniently deal with the goals of other departments,
• is cost-effective; does not put a dent in your organizational budget
• delivers the ROI; sticks around for the proposed number of years.

Successful implementation of the CRM selected by you involves various crucial factors, such as customization and integration. Once you implement it and automate all your organizational tasks to ease your sale reps daily sales process, they will start using it efficiently and will be more productive at their work. Your growing sales team wants a system that is simple and easy to use and helps them do what they are good at; selling.

Customization and Integrations

Customization

’’Our CRM is easy to adapt without any downtime and has the flexibility of better customization.’’

You search for ’’CRM for business, ’’ and many websites with the above claims pop in your search results.

Verification of such claims is in your hands, so to have an in-depth understanding of how you can personalize your CRM, ask the company product experts to show you how you can:

• Add custom fields and have list view
• Switch some of the features on or off
• Set up the dashboards, both individually and for your team

Based on your experience with the product expert, give them points and evaluate every aspect of your conversation and experience with the CRM demo before making your choice.

Integrations

Paying a hefty price for the features that your team does not need or paying less and not getting the essential features for is the dilemma every company faces, especially a startup or the SMBs. This is where CRM that offer seamless integrations step in.

CRM’s nowadays provide plugins and add-ons that help you a lot with automation. These integrations make your sales team a lot more intuitive and efficient as you can

• add contacts
• create invoices
• schedule reminders for calls and meetings

These out-of-the-box functionalities come inclusive with the price that you pay for the CRM. So before you pay up, check how well it integrates with your business process.

Alignment with Business Goals

Align your business goals and match them with the features that the CRM you are testing is offering. Determine the problems faced by your business daily:

• Is it tracking your deals?
• Is it providing you with perfect sales forecasts?
• Does it help increase your team’s’ profitability and productivity?

Pricing

Capterra did a study where it found that 61% of businesses are spending more than $50 per month per user. Most CRM that are developed today are not that costly, but you need to be sure of the type of support and user analytics they will be offering at their price. Many vendors have different price slab to suit today’s business process. Most CRMs charge you per user every month, your first task is to calculate the price against your workforce and count it against your organization’s yearly budget. Doing so will help you determine how much are you paying per month per user against the features that the CRM is providing you.

’’Begin by always expecting good things to happen.’’ ’ Tom Hopkins

Concluding Words

CRM for sales must provide these benefits to your organization and your sales team:

• Decreased cost per sale
• Increasing accountability of your sales representative
• Accurate sales forecasting
• Help improve the client retention rate
• Provide better analytical insight into your sales process

Taking a demo for getting a basic idea about the CRM’s key features is essential before you decide the implementation of a CRM.

We do not offer flashy advertisements in the name of ’’demo.’’ So, get acquainted with our CRM system and upgrade to a full plan when you notice the difference after using Salesmate CRM.
Salesmate has an objective of providing a firsthand experience of how it can ease the sales process and generate better revenue.