What You Need

November 2019

What You Need: Identifying the CRM Features your Business Needs

At Lunar we create bespoke CRM solutions that are tailored individually, so that any business can have a CRM to suit their needs. It’s always a good idea to have a think about the features your CRM will need to include in order to best fit your business’ needs.

Do you need your CRM to integrate with CMS (content management systems), e-mail management, reporting or something else entirely?

Ask yourself, and your team and business partners: what solutions are available and what solutions does the business require?

 

What Features do You Need?

It’s not always easy to identify the features you’ll need from a CRM right off the bat. So, collaborate with your team – talk to management, sales, marketing and customer services to figure out where they feel they could use more support. Now you’re starting to build up a wish list of criteria that your CRM solution will require.

 

Who and What Drives your Business?

You need to build an accurate picture of the problems your business is trying to solve, and who is trying to solve them. Again, by discussing with your team, you can identify the processes that you’re trying to improve in your business and the service you’re offering to your customers. So, you can identify the features a CRM solution would require to help here.

 

How do you Measure Success?

You’ll need to prioritise the measuring of success, or failure, of your CRM from day one to ensure a good ROI. So, it’s important to employ a CRM solution with robust reporting features that is easily customisable in response to report data.

 

Are You Ready for Changes?

Look at the long term needs of your business: are you anticipating growth and are you adequately prepared for potential downsizing? A scalable, cloud-hosted CRM allows your company to expand, or shrink, as you require, without the need for additional costly hardware. Cloud hosting also grants you the added benefit of data security, thanks to regularly backed up services.

 

The CRM Must-Haves

Identifying the problems your business needs to solve is an important step, but what about the must-have features? There are some features that your business can’t do without, so use these as a good CRM shopping list starting point:

  • Opportunity/Contact Management: Every business has a different sales cycle, and you need a CRM solution that allows you to communicate with buyers at different stages. A CRM that allows for that level of communication at any stage, particularly if that includes automated messages, is therefore a must-have.
  • Marketing Integration: E-mail integration is a necessity, so you’ll need a CRM that allows for that. This eliminates the need for you to keep separate e-mail databases and allows you to contact and record interaction directly with your CRM. Using your CRM to regularly contact your mailing lists can go a long way towards converting cold leads to warm leads.
  • Website Landing Page Integration: It’s important to maintain a lead generation strategy and equally important to capture lead data efficiently. Landing pages with contact forms should be linking directly in to your CRM, so that information someone provides is recorded automatically and accurately.
  • Accounting Integration: Accounting with your CRM benefits from many automated processes. Automatically send invoices, reminders and keep detailed reports on your finances that update in real-time. Doing accounting manually is a time consuming task, prone to errors, so let your CRM take over accounting.

Know what you need from a bespoke CRM solution? Try a free demo of Lunar CRM and find out why it’s the one for you.

 

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