So you’ve decided to purchase customer relationship management (CRM) software. You probably already have a good idea of which CRM vendors you’d like to work with, what you’d like to pay, and how you’d like your software to look. But before you sign any contracts, it’s crucial that you look beyond the brand and instead focus on the deeper features you’ll need.
For example: When speaking with vendors, make sure you ask about things such as automation, dashboard customization, whether there are dedicated Apple iOS and Google Android mobile applications, and especially which third-party integrations are available and how those integrations work. These are important features that, if missing, you’ll wish you had asked about before making a purchase decision. To help, we’ve compiled a list of five key feature sets, how they work, and why they’re essential to factor into your CRM purchasing decision.
Customizable Dashboards
This might not seem like a major requirement, especially for CRM newbies, but eventually, you’ll want to organize your lists and data in a coherent way that’s specific to how your company sells. Imagine opening up your software each morning and having to scroll past two or three lists that aren’t even relevant to your work. This would be a consistent and annoying waste of time. With the best CRM tools on the market, you’ll be able to customize almost every aspect of your dashboard.
For example, Salesforce lets you not only organize what you see when you log into your dashboard, but you can also add, subtract, and alter data on the fly. You can click on user files, add them to new opportunities, view their records, see contact information, and open sales activities. You can also view that customer’s history, related emails, and any files attached to the record. The Status Update box lets you add notes about your subject. What’s best about this feature is that you can easily eliminate any of these fields, add more fields, or alter fields to your heart’s content.
The rub is how much initial customization you’ll need to do before you can take advantage of such a dynamic environment. In Salesforce’s case, you’ll probably need some of the other apps in the Salesforce Sales Cloud as well as either on-staff or consulting technical expertise. That means added cost and more implementation time. Contrast that with simpler tools, like our Editors’ Choice winner in the small business CRM category, Bigin by Zoho CRM, and you’ll find easier ways to build your custom dashboards yourself, but you’ll be more limited as to just how much customization you can do.
Every vendor handles customization differently. Some vendors let you make changes on your own. Some require you to work with their developers to make adjustments. Talk to potential partners, ask them what they’re capable of doing, and choose a company that jibes with your workflows. After that, put an evaluation version in front of your sales managers and make sure it gives them what they need.
The Right Third-Party Integrations
Every competitive CRM player should have a lengthy list of third-party integrations. After all, that’s a CRM’s essential purpose: gathering customer data and then parsing it out to other business units that need it. One of the most common integration points is a customer-facing help desk. Scanning CRM data for detailed customer information directly inside the technician’s help desk application means they can have a more personal conversation with the customer, factor in the customer’s previous purchase history and how happy they were with those buys, and even present upsell opportunities.
Vendors with large software portfolios often focus mainly on integrating their own products. That’s fine if you’re all-in on that vendor. But if you’re already using tools from another vendor in different categories, having your CRM talk to other brands is critical. Editors’ Choice winner Zoho is a good example of doing it right.
Zoho sells over 30 different software products aimed at small to midsized businesses (SMBs). As expected, the company does a great job of tightly integrating its CRM with all the associated tools you might need from the Zoho stable: Docs for productivity, Desk for customer service, Analytics for business intelligence (BI), and a good deal more. But Zoho doesn’t stop with its brand. The company has also put in work on third-party tie-ins. The system integrates with all of Google’s apps, ClickDesk, Evernote, Microsoft 365 (especially its Outlook calendar and email clients), and Intuit QuickBooks, to name a few. Now Zoho customers can opt to standardize on Zoho products or keep using what they’ve already got.
That’s the kind of flexibility you’re looking for. But another aspect is precisely how those integrations are done. Most cloud software vendors have standardized on REST APIs for data interchange. This lets developers pump data between apps from different vendors, and it’s the best way to build a deep and customized relationship. But some vendors also use tools like Zapier to trade information and put together automatic workflow-style exchanges. Zapier is a solid tool, but it’s also simple enough for even non-programmers to use, which means its options necessarily won’t be as deep as those offered via REST. Again, the key is pressing your CRM sales rep for deeper information and evaluating your CRM candidate before spending any money.
Drill Down Using Analytics
The single most improved feature set in any CRM over the last five years has been analytics. CRM software manages more than just how your sales leads interact with customers. It can also track deals, your pipeline, and sometimes even your inventory. That makes it a key data repository for revenue collection to marketing. Transferring that data to the other tools that need it is one part of this equation. But the other part is being able to slice, dice, and better understand that data so you can get new insights directly in the CRM.
Vendors know this, so the analytics capabilities of CRMs have improved dramatically. At a basic level, CRM tools not only collect interactions but can also track customers’ behavior, both for your sales staff as well as your online sales presence or brick-and-mortar stores. The CRM should be able to turn that data not just into reports, but into immediately actionable data for new opportunities and pipeline prioritization. And it should be able to do this visually using easily understood and completely customizable dashboards, not reams of spreadsheet data.
Large CRM players, like Salesforce, have highly sophisticated analytics capabilities, but be prepared to pay extra. In Salesforce’s case, it has pieces of its analytics features in the Salesforce Sales Cloud. Still, it also has a separate analytics platform that includes artificial intelligence via its Einstein technology as well as Tableau. However, the company has also integrated some of that with the Sales Cloud. Microsoft Dynamics CRM leverages that company’s most popular business intelligence tool, Power BI, though again, that’ll cost you extra.
The extra investment may well be worth it. The more sophisticated CRM vendors can provide customer and sales data from a large variety of sources. Customer touchpoints, satisfaction, service desk interactions, and more can all be factored in when analyzing sales performance and organizing leads and opportunities. Decisions that used to take weeks can now happen in minutes if you take the time to carefully evaluate and customize your CRM solution.
You Can’t Ignore Social Networking
Almost every product or service vendor can take advantage of social media as a customer touchpoint, which needs to be reflected in your CRM. Even back in 2019, a Bizrate Insights study showed that more than 34% of the consumers it surveyed were buying products directly from social media.
Fortunately, competitive CRM vendors have addressed this strongly. Along with direct sales contact, vendors like Apptivo, HubSpot, and Salesforce have social media tracking and engagement tools built directly into the app. This lets colleagues collaborate on projects within the confines of a Facebook-like interface. You can share content, update team members about project and pipeline status, or pass along lead and prospect information. Even more important, you can interact with your customers directly using a variety of social media networks.
Similarly, Zoho CRM has a feature that enables its clients to monitor the social activity of leads and prospects and take advantage of new opportunities. Like HootSuite , Zoho CRM is more adept at social listening than it is at social networking. Still, it also enables team members to gain instant, social-based information from Facebook and Twitter without having to leave the CRM tool.
Bottom line: social media interactions are a mandate these days, not a luxury. It’s a major channel for digital marketing and those tools now have highly sophisticated ways of identifying and segmenting your social media customer audience. That means this data needs to be reflected in your CRM and the CRM should also push that data back to marketing.
Mobility Is a Must
One of the biggest points of failure in a CRM implementation is when your salespeople don’t actually use it. If it devolves into just another place they need to dump data in order to make their manager happy, then you’ve wasted your money. Customizing a CRM means listening to how your salespeople do business and then injecting the CRM where it’ll actually do them some good.
A key factor here is that sales folk move around in most businesses. If the CRM can’t move with them, it’s already at a disadvantage. That will become even more important now that we’re looking at a permanent hybrid work scenario. If they’re working mainly on a remote basis, people tend to default to their personal hardware, especially when it comes to mobile devices. Sure, cloud CRMs work via a browser so your employees can always get to them that way, but using a browser on a phone or even a tablet can get cumbersome. To make your CRM choice as useful as possible, look for dedicated mobile apps for both Android and iOS.
These apps need to reflect all the features your salespeople need in the CRM and then some. These additional features often revolve around communication and collaboration. That’s easy to do when everyone is in the office but much more difficult when the staff is on the road or working remotely from home. With all the focus on remote work, vendors pay close attention to this need in their latest product iterations. Some have delivered deep integrations with third-party unified communication platforms, like RingCentral. Others are looking to bring these features in-house, one example being Salesforce’s recent purchase of Slack for $28 billion.
Once you’ve found some mobile apps you like, test them and test them again. Find out not just if they work, but how. Build a pilot team of sales users who will use the app in the field and provide feedback that’s actually useful. Many, but not all, CRM vendors will allow some level of customization even for their mobile apps. If your salespeople give you the right kind of feedback, you can build them a mobile experience that they don’t have to take on the road, but one they’ll want to take.
Your IT people also need to evaluate the CRM’s mobile capabilities, especially if the data moving back and forth between a roving seller and the cloud is personal customer data. If a real estate salesperson is filling out electronic leasing documents and sending them to a central repository using clear text, that’s not only a security risk for his customers, it means he might be violating a variety of privacy regulations, too. Your IT people need to look at how a mobile app transfers data, authenticates users, and protects data once it leaves the seller’s device.
