What CRM Software to Choose for Your Business
When you’re thinking about the most important software for your establishment, what type of solutions springs to your mind? Some of you may say that it’s a mobile app or a website. Nevertheless, investing in a well working customer relationship management (CRM) solution will bring you more payoff than any other software your business employs. In this post, we’ll shed some light on the different CRM options, so you could choose the one that can meet all your business goals.
photo/ Gerd Altmann
But before we get into the comparison of CRM software, let’s discuss the benefits your company can get investing in such solutions.
CRM advantages for your business
It may seem that the only benefit CRM brings is well-structured information concerning your existing and potential customers. In fact, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Here are some other powerful arguments for investing in a CRM solution.
- Higher customer satisfaction. CRM allows you to build strong, long-term cooperation with your customers. How? By providing better access to key information on leads, you let your sellers be more productive and never lose a deal. When deals are streamlined and are closed in the shortest time possible, clients get more satisfied.
- Improved customer loyalty. Imagine you get to a clothes shop you often visit. Sellers already know your size, preferred style, and favorite colors. Now, imagine another clothes shop you also visit quite often. However, in the latest one, no one knows (or bothers to remember) your preferences and your style. Every time you enter the second shop, you need to explain all your desires and needs one more time. Now, imagine that a salesperson from the first shop calls you and says they have a suit of clothes from your favorite brand in your favorite color, and you have a chance to try it on earlier than any other customer. Which shop would you be more loyal to? The answer is obvious. A CRM solution allows your company to be that first shop that offers the best deals and knows all the needs and preferences of your customers.
- More insights to improve sales. The customers’ data that you collect using your software program allows you not only to build strong cooperation and retain clients but also provides your business with tons of insights. When using various analytical data sets, you get more information (and understanding) of your buyers’ habits, needs, desires, and preferences. With this data in hand, you can improve your offers, provide highly personalized services, and thus improve your sales. More than that, now you know exactly which way to head and which one to avoid.
Now that you know what to wait for from your CRM solution let’s consider the CRM options you can choose from.
Types of CRM solutions
When starting your CRM development, you can choose one of the three CRM options: operational, analytical, and collaborative. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.
Type 1. Operational solutions
This type of software is mainly focused on all processes that concern cooperation with your potential and existing buyers. With such programs, you get all sorts of features to help your salespeople automate and streamline deals and be as productive as possible.
One of the most distinguishing traits of such solutions is the visual presentation of information concerning each lead. This high visibility allows salespeople to easily track prospects, leads, and customers and analyze where they have conversion problems.
Another specificity of these programs is their ability to automate a number of routine tasks to save personnel’s time and allow them to allocate their efforts more efficiently.
Operational CRM solutions are great to streamline not only the selling process but advertising and service efforts as well. With this software, your team can efficiently launch, track, and modify advertising campaigns and automate offered services targeting them to different customer groups.
Type 2. Analytical solution
Such a software solution is great if you need guidelines on your business and its further development strategy. Such software allows you to collect as much data on your customers and business in general as possible and squeeze valuable insight to make more data-driven decisions.
In a nutshell, such software is a massive database that is able to collect data in real-time. Nevertheless, data without analysis is non-informative. Analytical CRM provides you with reports and gives you a holistic picture on your business.
Modern solutions of this type can analyze both data sets and data flows in a real-time mode, so you can always know how to react to the ever-changing market conditions.
Type 3. Collaborative solutions
Collaborative software is aimed at making your company staff more efficient and productive. How does it work? Its main goal is to reduce hurdles between various teams in your establishment, especially in terms of data sharing.
When all the departments can easily access the data they need and get the necessary information on deals and customers in a matter of seconds, then there’s no need to waste time on emails or unnecessary phone calls.
Despite the great benefits such software can bring to your business, for such software, it’s critical to adjust role-based access systems to avoid data theft and corporate espionage. If you opt for this program, you need to ensure that every employee who needs to access this software has a unique login and password. An activity log is another crucial feature of this CRM solution. With an activity log, you can always track who’s responsible for every data tweak.
The parting thought
In this post, we’ve covered the most obvious CRM benefits for your company and the types of such software you can use. Nevertheless, we didn’t give you any hint on how to choose a specific CRM program for your business. This is because, in the modern world, it’s very likely you’ll need all three of them. Today, companies prefer to get the functionality of operational, analytical, and collaborative solutions in one by ordering custom software development.
Author: Ilya Petrov
