When you are buying a new CRM for your business, you find hundreds of CRM software solutions available in the market. Too many options may confuse you. This is why you need to consider how you manage your sales pipeline, mature new leads, referrals and client database. If you find the right software for your business these processes and your team learns to use them to their maximum potential, there is a high chance that you can boost your business to the next level.

To further make your evaluation easier, we recommend that you carefully test all the essential features of the selected CRM before you buy it. But to do that, you need to have a clear understanding of what is CRM and which functionalities are needed for successful leads and sales management. Interestingly, you may get some bonus features along your testing process that you never considered before. These features may help in easing your business workflow and increasing sales.

Multiple Pipelines

What gives you a good quick overview of the entire sales funnel? A pipeline view of your leads and customers, of course. You get to see all clients categorized in various sales stages, on a single screen. They can be differentiated by tags or colour for detailed and distinct filtering.

Having multiple pipelines in your CRM is also good for effective lead management. A modern user interface can allow you to drag and drop leads from a particular sales stage to a later level. Once you see that your prospects are transforming into paying customers you can easily update their status.

Most popular CRMs, often give you a single pipeline. Even if you go for a separate pipeline management software, you will find that it offers a single pipeline too. In this case, you can be intelligent and look for CRM that allows you to segregate and label your leads and customers. Through the addition of custom tags to numerous leads, you can filter pipelines and separate your audience based on their language, location, digital device, retention level, lead source, etc.

Comprehensive Customer Profile

A comprehensive customer profile helps you understand your customer better and make specialized marketing messages to engage them. Customer history is also important in this case as it will help your marketing team to understand that customer better and send messages to urge them to do repeat business with you. This improves customer retention and increases your sales.

A complete customer profile is not only good for your marketing but also your sales team. As the sales team can get all information about a client on one page, they can close sales easily. Information such as previous correspondences, bills, meetings, and quotes can help your sales team a lot.

Lead Tracking

Lead Tracking is another important feature that a CRM software can offer to assist you in boosting your business. If you track the lead source you will get to know how a customer found your company. Knowing these sources is important as it lets you develop focused or personalized marketing campaigns. Through these campaigns, you will send your leads some relevant sales materials which will help you convert them into paying customers.

For example, your marketing team is developing social media posts and on-site blogs. Both are targeted at generating leads. You are getting good leads but you aren’t sure where they are coming from or which blog or social media post is getting you all those leads. In this instance, if you have a good CRM at your disposal, you will know exactly what marketing efforts of your team are working and where you have to focus more energy to generate more leads.

Sales Dashboard

If you have a good CRM solution at your office, you will know all about sales dashboards. If not, then read on and you’ll know. Sales Dashboard is a great tool for having a quick overview of all your monthly sales results. This will let you know how your company performed in a particular month and let you devise strategies to improve further.

A good CRM will allow you to add charts, graphs, and key performance indicators to your dashboard. This will help you to quickly observe key trends in your sales performance. Other features that your sales dashboard must have are as follows:

• Frequently used figures on a sales dashboard:
• New customers
• New leads (Monthly)
• Monthly sales
• Net promoter score
• Lead-to-sale conversion rate
• Cost per conversion
• Cost per lead
• Customer turnover rate
• Customer lifetime value

Business tip: Sales dashboard can also come in handy during meetings. It can give your team a quick overview of their efforts and their results on a weekly or monthly basis.

Task Management

You have a team and you still have to do all the work. Whenever you ping someone only to find that they are busy in one thing or another. This happens when you don’t effectively manage your team tasks. With managing tasks, you get to manage the time of your team and see how they are performing.

If you can manage tasks such as calling and emailing in the same CRM your pipeline management becomes very effective. Task management in a CRM is a helpful tool that offers a quick overview of your important tasks and their deadlines. This helps you check whether you are right on track or not.

There are many digital branding agencies that offer marketing services to their customers to help them deal with the important tasks, and grow their brands.

The task manager can also let you link assignments to your client profiles. This will help you to find all related tasks in the customer view. So, the next time when you are visiting a customer or emailing them you will know everything that happened in the past and get on track quickly.

Ending Words

These were some features that can help you boost your business growth and manage your leads, sales and team effectively. If you will meet some startups today, you will find that there are people who still use spreadsheets and google docs to manage their workflow. Just don’t pay any attention to them. They will learn with time. All you need to do is to get out there and start testing some quality CRM software. You will have a booming business in no time!