Why Your Sales Team Needs CRM Software

The needs and responsibilities of most businesses are extremely numerous and diverse, but at some point almost every company will need to pose the question, why CRM software for my sales team? It’s a good question – one worth investigating further for a conclusive answer that’s ultimately best for the bottom line.

CRM software for your sales team, simply put, means an increase in the overall effectiveness of any sales operation. It eliminates the rigors of manually managing customer relationships or tracking sales progress and frees up a sales team to consistently meet sales goals and achieve desired results.

A CRM system is a reliable and secure investment that can improve the overall accountability and productivity of a sales team. Consider what business is like without a CRM system for your sales team. In today’s fast-paced, social network-driven society, businesses without secure and reliable data visibility, lead analysis tools and capacity to manage workload, follow-up and information capture often fall fatally behind the competition.

Some may argue that web-based solutions are better, given the amount of time and money that must be put into IT staff and infrastructure.  However, the very best CRM software places all customer information at the user’s fingertips and offers a fully integrated, customizable package at a one-time cost per user – creating a significant sales team asset and even more significant cost savings in the long term.

Why CRM software for your sales team? The list could go on and on. Our business world relies heavily on the cost- and time-saving solutions found in advanced technology reliable enough to ensure future profitability. Customer relationship management software for your sales team is an essential ingredient for survival in today’s changing economy.

 

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How to Define Your CRM Software Requirements

Learning how to define your CRM software requirements begins with a basic understanding of what an effective CRM can do for your business. A CRM system is a great way to manage and support business activities such as, incoming and outgoing emails, calendar events, projects etc.

The best CRM software can even provide increased visibility and organization for many more office management activities.The next step should be to compile a definitive list of your top software requirements based on company goals, internet research and vendor demonstrations. This will allow departments to clearly outline the necessary requirements for moving your business ahead both in the short-term as well as the long-term. It can also help keep costs down and shorten the implementation process.

When defining the requirements for effective CRM based on company goals, consider what your company hopes to achieve with the software. If it’s an increase in overall sales, the software should provide support for your sales team that integrates communication lines among and between departments and saves time and effort in tracking and monitoring customer relationships and sales progress.

If the goal is to streamline office management processes, it may be smart to go with a fully integrated software solution that combines the ability to manage contacts with tools for overseeing document archiving and sharing and that offers phone integration and full collaboration among departments. Whatever the outcome may be, using a goal-oriented, business savvy method to define your CRM software requirements can be a very wise decision.

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Can Outlook be used as your complete CRM solution?

Many individuals and businesses are using Outlook as their personal information manager. This is useful if you want to manage basic contact management information, calendar events and emails. However, there are many limitations to Outlook that most businesses cannot overcome. As a result businesses today will simply use Outlook as the front end contact management software solution but require an additional CRM package on top that can fully integrate with Outlook and provide features like document management, complete email management and full sharing and collaboration without the need of a complex exchange server.

A basic but key feature Outlook does not have is the ability to archive documents let alone link documents to a contact. Almost all users require the functionality of associating documents to a contact so they can access files, pics or pdfs that are related to the contact. Some more feature rich CRM systems take it even a step further and provide a full blown document management system with check-in/check-out and versioning control. With this users can edit documents without having to save multiple copies of that document and still see all the previous versions.

Outlook is great if you need to just manage a small number of emails in your inbox but most people today have multiple email accounts and receive hundreds of emails every day. Many business users of Outlook tend to create email folders and then manually drag and drop each email to the specific folder. This is useful but if you need to do it 100 times in a day this can of course be a huge waste of time. However, there are CRM solutions on the market that can provide auto email linking. This means your emails will automatically be linked to a contact as long as the contact has been added to the database.

Outlook also does not include an easy solution for SMB’s that need sharing and collaboration. With Outlook a company can set up an exchange server and begin sharing contacts and calendars but this is usually very expensive and requires an IT person to properly set up. The best option is to purchase a CRM software that has all sharing and collaboration built right into it and that way it does not require any exchange server implementation.

Overall, Outlook is a great tool if you want to perform basic tasks but I would not recommend Outlook as the complete CRM and contact management solution for any professional business or individual user. The best option is to purchase a CRM software that integrates with Outlook that way you have all the additional functionality but can keep using Outlook, an already familiar system.

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