Whether you’re still on the fence about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or you’ve begun to use it with lukewarm results, you may be concerned about what your salespeople will really get out of using CRM. Is it basically a digital rolodex? Does it take too much time? Can they learn how to use all the features? Start by helping everyone on your sales team master the most useful CRM features.
Collaborative Tools
CRM isn’t much more than an address book if your team isn’t using it to collaborate. Marketing and sales teams, especially, can use CRM to stay on the same page and keep projects moving forward. Create a pipeline, assign responsible parties, and attach pertinent information.
Collaborative tools arm your salespeople with all the information they need to follow the sales pipeline. It lets the marketing team see where their efforts are going. Best of all, it allows both teams to work together more effectively to complete a sale.
Calendar with Scheduling
If you have an SMB CRM, it likely has a calendar of some sort, but you need one that really works for your team. It must have reminders, notifications, and recurring tasks as a bare minimum. If it can also include sales pipelines, collaborations with other team members, and the ability to sync with other popular calendars it will work out even better.
Robust calendar features save your team the time of double checking deadlines, tasks, and others’ schedules each day. It also lets them avoid double booking anything by having a completely synched schedule. With reminders and notifications, there is no chance of forgetting about a deadline.
Social Media Integration
Typically, data gathered from customer social signals is most useful to your marketing team. Sales will find this data useful as well, when they know how to leverage it. Using CRM with social media integration allows your salespeople to see all of your company’s social interactions with a contact. They’ll be able to gauge a customer’s sense of satisfaction and tailor their approach based on past interactions, rather than starting fresh each time.
File Sharing
As your team progresses through sales pipelines, they can attach relevant documents. File sharing ensures that everyone in a project can see those documents. Indeed, any contact given access can see shared files, including clients if appropriate.
For your salespeople, file sharing means instant access to such important information as past purchases, personal information, relevant images, and so on. Having files from other team members at their fingertips empowers your sales team and saves them time.
Ongoing Support
Sometimes we assume that a product like CRM automatically comes with lifetime support and training. It’s a feature that can easily be overlooked during the buying process. If you want your team to use CRM effectively and feel supported in doing so, make sure the product you choose has support. Typically, different plans have varying levels of support, such as priority email support or chat support. Your team will want personal help when they need it. Onboarding is equally as important to setting your salespeople up for success with CRM.
Lead Management
When someone is interested in your business, but they’re not quite at the sales point yet, your team needs to stay on top of nurturing those warm leads. That’s where lead management in a CRM comes in very handy. Create leads from web forms, social media, and other places. Your team can reach out to gauge interest in buying, then converting them to a sales opp when the customer is ready. In CRM, sales opportunities can be linked to a contact’s data, history, and interactions, giving your salespeople all the information they need to close the deal.
For small businesses, shopping for CRM can be an overwhelming task. The lists of features all sound wonderful until you and your team are trying to wade through them. Tools that give you more customer data, encourage collaboration, and save time are always the most useful. Help your team master the CRM tools that will empower them to work more effectively.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
