What should a crm include

Your company and its people create vast quantities of data every day. Each time someone picks up the phone and talks to a customer, goes out to meet a new sales prospect, or follows up a promising lead, they learn something new and potentially valuable.

But where does this data go? Into notepads or documents on laptops perhaps; or maybe it's just stored in their head. If that's the case then details can get lost or forgotten, meetings and phone conversations may not be followed up, and choosing what to focus on can be a matter of guesswork rather than a rigorous exercise based on fact.

Worst of all, if the staff member leaves then all their knowledge may walk out of the door with them. Fortunately there is a solution to this problem. CRM takes your customer data and turns it into useful, actionable insight that can transform your business.

Fundamentally, a CRM system allows you to manage the business relationships you have with your customers to help you grow your business. In fact CRM goes far beyond customers, allowing you to focus on your organisation's relationships with all sorts of people — colleagues, suppliers and service users as well as customers.

How does it do this? At the most basic level, a CRM system provides a central place where you can store customer and prospect contact information, and share it with colleagues. Once this is in place you can track the history of all your interactions you have with those customers: phone calls made, emails sent, meetings held, presentations delivered, enquiries received.

Because tracking is everything. With a CRM system in place, every question, every service request, every preference and every past contact detail about every customer is at your fingertips.

And that means that every contact you have with your customers is always personal, relevant and up to date. By understanding your customers better, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities become clear — giving you the chance to win new business from existing customers.

And as well as tracking contact histories, you can also add notes, schedule follow-ups and organise the next steps that you or your colleagues need to take. That means you need never miss an opportunity to close particular deals or grow customer accounts. But modern CRM platforms such as Salesforce go much further, integrating with marketing automation and customer service systems to provide a complete, cloud-based ecosystem for customer data.

Your customer information needs to be as up to date and as convenient to access as possible. This lets salespeople access key information wherever they are, and update that information straight after a meeting while they are still in the field, so colleagues can follow up with the very latest information before the competition.

With mobile CRM you can run your whole business from your phone — closing deals, servicing customers and even delivering marketing campaigns without being tied to a desk. Social media is having a huge impact on many businesses and the way they interact with their customers: they have to respond as never before to Tweets, Facebook postings, LinkedIn discussions and more.

Sound familiar? If so then you'll need a platform that helps you to make the most of social media as a source of new leads, intelligence on prospects and information for customer service agents.

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Use our research library below to get actionable, first-hand advice. There are a variety of CRM software options on the market for small businesses. Make sure to check out our must-have features before making a commitment. We may receive compensation from partners and advertisers whose products appear here. Compensation may impact where products are placed on our site, but editorial opinions, scores, and reviews are independent from, and never influenced by, any advertiser or partner.

Customer relationship management CRM software typically include the same basic CRM functions: some type of customer data collection and reporting. But for most businesses shopping for a CRM, the basics are not going to cut it.

The CRM features that go beyond the basics are where your business can reap the rewards of the software. Among the numerous types of CRM solutions available, every business can benefit from specific, must-have features. Selecting a CRM with these important features can propel a business to higher degrees of success, both in terms of sales growth and customer satisfaction.

These functions help all types of businesses because they are designed around improving client relationships, sales processes , and marketing tactics while meeting the unique needs of each organization. A unified view of your customer means the CRM database serves as the repository for all customer data in your company.

Every CRM houses basic contact information for each customer. Beyond that, the CRM should also capture the following data about your clients:. The contacts section of Salesforce illustrates how CRMs provide a unified customer view. By centralizing all customer data, CRMs, like Salesforce , make it easy to analyze and understand your client base. This also opens up the opportunity to segment your customers to more effectively move them through the sales cycle and communicate with them.

The best CRM software automatically tracks and segments your clients as they travel through the customer life cycle. This capability allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your sales and marketing strategies in converting prospective customers into leads, closing a sale , and then deepening the client relationship post-sale.

An example of life cycle management within the Salesforce CRM. Source: Salesforce software. This is further enhanced by combining segmentation and life cycle management with other CRM abilities like lead scoring. For example, a CRM can inform your organization on insights like which customer segments are the most profitable.

These insights also uncover sales and marketing tactics that work best, as well as deliver information critical to sales management systems, such as average close ratios and number of leads in your sales pipeline.

Some CRMs, like Zoho CRM , even possess the ability to identify trends and make recommendations like the best time to contact a customer. Zoho CRM reporting incorporates a lot of data insights. Source: Zoho CRM software. Some pipeline management tools include an email client integration, e.

Outlook and Gmail. Synchronising emails between your CRM and email service leads to a highly integrated customer communication.

Furthermore, think how great it would be to see how every single customer interacted with your newsletter: did the open it, click on it or unsubscribe? Integration with an email automation service is an incredibly useful CRM feature if you want to evaluate the reach and impact of your campaigns.

Moreover, you can benefit from automated campaign lists. Instead of exporting and importing contact information from CRM solution to email automation tool, you can create customised contact lists in the CRM system and synchronise these with the lists in your email service. Follow-up tracking means that each time a salesperson contacts a prospect or client, a mark of their call or email is added to the CRM system.

Instead of tracking your calls and follow-ups on an Excel spreadsheet, you could have the latest contact information quickly accessible online.

It might seem like a little add-on, but when your job is to manage over customers, you need some assistance. If you tend to forget meetings, set up a reminder for two hours before each. A helpful notification provides you all the information about the upcoming meeting — time, place and client data.

Add deadlines to tasks that need to be done in a certain time frame to remember all important calls, emails, and activities. This feature is essential for creative project management solutions as agencies need to bill their customers for projects. The invoicing feature helps you to compile and send invoices to clients in a few clicks. By using pre-designed PDF-templates , you can bill your customers for project hours or ordered products.

As the CRM system already includes contact information, you can forward the bill real quickly. Not all CRM solutions have a built-in invoicing feature, but many software providers offer integrations with billing software. To create quotes in a CRM system, you need to insert your product database and create some pre-designed quote templates. By creating custom tags, you can mark quotes as accepted, revised, cancelled, lost, etc. The sales team will have a complete overview of filled orders and knows whether the customer was happy with the service.

A great CRM solution works as a mediator between different business processes. After all, customers are at the heart of your company. The more useful third-party integrations a CRM has, the more likely that you can gather all the relevant data you need for efficient sales. Look for pipeline management software that integrates with your favorite email and marketing tools to avoid double data entry and collect more valuable information. If your company has a large sales team, not all information is relevant to every salesperson.

Some CRM solutions let you set role-based access to certain information. For example, only people responsible for accounting might have access to invoices and bills. Customizable CRM system gives sales managers a complete control over the access to certain tools and data. Not all teams need such a large set of CRM tools to efficiently manage their sales pipeline and client database.

But if you need to manage thousands of leads and keep track of all the meetings and tasks, a comprehensive CRM solution is a must-have for you. Karola has got years of experience in growth marketing and working with SaaS startups. She's all about writing and generating new ideas, and we believe her spirit animal's a unicorn. By clicking "Accept All Cookies", you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts.

Cookie Notice. Work Management. Multiple pipelines Managing your leads and customers in a pipeline view gives a quick overview of the entire sales funnel. Company and Client view Many companies opting for a CRM for small business forget about the need to distinguish companies and customer profiles.