CRM Software Features - Salesmate CRM

 From the early 2000s until now, the industry has seen an explosion of technology and the proliferation of software providers. Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM achieved rapid success and dominated the decade. Today, the CRM marketplace is saturated by products from numerous companies like HubSpot, Zoho, SAP, Oracle, and many others.

 Today’s CRM platforms integrate business tools into their workflows to make customer relationships a core part of businesses. Since the late 2000s, software providers have integrated social media data into their products, and more recently, platforms have started integrating AI capabilities to provide users with more comprehensive insights.

 CRM platforms are centralized repositories of customer data. Because of that, CRM systems are indispensable tools for in-house and remote teams. Since every customer interaction is tracked and recorded, marketing and sales teams can operate more efficiently by making data-driven decisions.

 Automating repetitive tasks gives employees more time to work on other valuable projects like strategic decision-making, creative work, and empathizing with customers to provide better services. Employees remain more engaged and productive by focusing on these types of projects. Across every industry, automations are transforming jobs and positively impacting the efficiency of organizations.

 As companies scale, their contact databases grow. Segmenting these customer lists manually based on specific requirements is labor-intensive and consumes numerous productive hours. By adopting CRM tools, companies can automatically segment their contact lists based on specific criteria and obtain invaluable data insights.

 Database segmentation features in CRM systems allow sales teams to optimize their daily schedules and prioritize tasks related to their key prospects. With sales dashboards, teams can discover new opportunities for upsells and cross-sales. Companies can configure their CRM systems to alert their support team about clients’ requests and needs so they can address them before they turn into potential issues.

 Planning future tasks and targets is significantly simpler and more effective when companies can use insights from their past data. Historical metrics and trends can help uncover valuable insights and assist sales teams in prioritizing accounts and forecasting more accurately.

 A CRM platform is much more than a fancy electronic Rolodex. When you work with the right software, its features will allow you to seamlessly manage the entire customer lifecycle.

 Leads and contacts are managed daily via multiple communication channels and with different touch frequencies. The frequency and touchpoints can differ based on the lead’s status in the pipeline, personal preferences, industry, and many other factors. Contact management is at the core of these rules. It allows teams to segment contacts into groups to better target them with the right promotional campaigns at the right time.

 Additionally, reaching out to prospects based on priority (a lead’s readiness to buy) can increase the chances of converting them into clients by addressing their needs on time.

 Automation is one of the top features that CRM platforms offer. Leveraging automation workflows is key to increasing a team’s productivity. Using a CRM tool that assists in workflow automation can help simplify multiple tasks such as:

 With the right CRM tool, workflows can be automated in a few clicks. Spreadsheet.com’s automations, for example, give users an easy way to automate repetitive tasks:

 Setting up alerts based on custom triggers allows for greater efficiency. These triggers can include order processing, tracking, sharing delivery updates, and new lead notifications.

 Notifications can be customized and shared via different channels. In Spreadsheet.com’s CRM Template, you can share notifications by integrating with popular work management tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Gmail:

 CRM tools let users aggregate summary statistics and detailed insights with customized reports and dashboards. These reports deliver real-time data updates and let users access data from different locations, making CRM systems single sources of truth for organizational data. CRM systems synchronize all activities seamlessly, improving ease of access for team members across the organization.

 Sales forecasting uses predictive analytics based on previous sales data from a sales pipeline (or sales projections) to project potential future sales. This information helps companies understand what actions need to be taken by their sales and marketing teams. For example, a company may want to increase their Google Ads budget to add more leads to the top of the funnel or add more sales reps to follow up with existing leads.

 Many CRM platforms are available on the market, but they typically come at a considerable cost. Often, startups and small businesses use Excel and Google Sheets as an affordable solution. According to Statista, millions of companies worldwide and over 730,000 companies in the United States use Microsoft Excel to run their businesses. These companies use spreadsheets to keep track of communications, lead management, customer interactions, sales pipeline tracking, and data visualization.

 Spreadsheet.com offers the same spreadsheet capabilities as Excel and Google Sheets with more advanced features like automations and tools to let your spreadsheets act like relational databases, as well as ready-to-use templates like the Simple CRM template.

 If your business already uses Excel and you’d prefer to stick to the same system instead of exporting your data to Spreadsheet.com, there are a wide variety of pre-built Excel CRM templates readily available.

Best CRM For Real Estate

 CRM Software is a cloud or on-premise system a business uses as a database to manage their customers and all of the communications and interactions they have with them. In this CRM guide we will explain in layman terms what a CRM is, and what is not a CRM, the benefits of CRM, how much a CRM costs, how to find the best CRM, and how to get started with a CRM Software.

 CRM Software is used by organizations as a central system to manage their customers and leads, as well as all of the communications and interactions with them. An organization normally has their sales team use the Sales Force Automation features of the system. The marketing team will utilize the Marketing Automation features of the system, such as Drip Campaigns and Email Campaigns. The customer service team will use the customer management and ticketing features of the system.

 In simple terms a CRM is a software program that acts as a database to store the customers, leads, and contacts of an organzation. It will also store all of the communication and interactions with those customers, leads, and contacts. CRM Software is a Relational database, that lets you link or connect different records of data with others. Such as linking a contact with a customer, or an email to a contact. An organization that uses a CRM can open a customer in the system and see all of their information, such as basic information like the name and phone number of the customer, and more granular information such as the date and time of the last order the customer placed. Additionally when viewing that customer in the CRM you can also see all of the notes, calls and emails relating to them.

 Excel spreadsheets are not a CRM, Outlook is not a CRM, a contact manager tool is not a CRM. There are many contact manager tools available that simply let you store your contacts in a database, that does not mean it is a CRM. Instead it means that it has one feature of a CRM. Systems that are non-relational cannot be considered a CRM.

 For almost all organizations CRM Software is a necessity, the benefits of CRM are plentiful. We will discuss many of the benefits that come from deploying a CRM for your business.

 For many businesses having one central system where all customer information lives is the biggest beneift of CRM. Without it, customer data would be saved to spreadsheets which leads to all sorts of problems. For example what happens when the customer phone number has to be updated on a spreadsheet? Someone has to make that change, but what about all of the other employees with a copy of the spreadsheet? They will all have an old version of the spreadsheet, and would need to be sent an updated copy. There are many other benefits from a CRM that are listed below.

 Organizations that use CRM have a real time accounting of all employee activity. When employees login to the system each morning, when they logout, how many calls each employee makes each day, etc. All of these basic employee metrics are captured by the CRM automatically, and can be easily reported on.

 Reports can be ran on all data in a CRM system, running customer reports, lead reports, order reports, performance reports, and others are all done quickly and easily. Unlike with legacy software or traditional databases where you need a database administrator to build the report and send it to you a few hours later. Those days are gone, with a CRM running reports is simple and quick.

 With most CRM Software you can log notes and calls, schedule tasks and events, and send emails. With good CRM Software many of that data entry can be done automatically by the CRM itself. Email Sync is a good example, where all emails you send from your Outlook or mobile phone will automatically sync and appear in the correct customer or lead timeline. This is a great benefit of CRM as all email your organization sends or receives from a specific customer will appear in that customer record, regardless which employee sends the email.

 All CRM systems have a way to forecast future sales, this is a critical function of any sales team. Many sales managers will forecast the sales their sales people are expected to close and plan accordingly. CRM sales forecasting does this for, using an expected close date field in the Opportunity records sales people create.

 A few good CRM systems provide CRM VoIP, which is a virtual phone system that can replace your existing analog phone system. The benefit of this is huge, it will save you a lot of money and integrate the phone system with the CRM. After configuring your CRM VoIP system all phone calls will automatically log to the customer, contact, or lead you speak with. Call recordings will also be attached to each call. Voicemails will also log automatically to the customer. This will provide a benefit to any organization, especially those which need to know how many calls employees make daily.

 Organizations that use CRM Software also have the benefit of using the many integrations their CRM has available. Integrations are programatic connections between the CRM and third party services. This is how organizations can keep all of their data up to date when using multiple different systems. For example a very common integration is Quickbooks, integrating your CRM to Quickbooks will keep all customer data in Quickbooks up to date. Normally the accounting team uses Quickbooks and the sales and customer facing team use the CRM. In the case of a customer whose phone number gets updated in the CRM, that edit triggers an API call to Quickbooks that instantly updates that customer. The benefit of this is that the data is always accurate between both systems.

 In the event there is not an established integration with the third party service you are using, you can always take advantage of the open API (Application Programming Interface) the CRM offers.

 In 2024 the cost of a CRM can vary widely, some CRM providers charge as low as $12 per month per user and others charge upward of $250 per month per user. You will also find many of them put in small print in their pricing that the cost must be paid annually. This is a huge cash expense that is not worth it. A fair price for CRM is anywhere between $12 to $60 per user per month depending on how complex the needs of your business are.

 As of June 2024 all CRM's in the market have the same pricing structure, except for Snapforce CRM. All of these CRM's offer a few different editions, each including more features than the last and costs more per user per month. You'll see names like "Basic Edition" and "Ultimate Edition", for example Salesforce's "Ultimate Edition" currently costs $250 per user per month paid annually. Additionally all users must be on the same edition even if the majority of the users do not need most of the features included.

 The "a la carte" pricing structure of Snapforce CRM provides a flexible pricing model where you only pay for the features each user needs. If you have ten users but only one of them needs the Campaigns feature you only pay for one user of that module. Which is the complete opposite of the other CRM's where you would need to increase your edition to the next higher level.