Selecting the right CRM for your team

Choosing CRM is an important step for companies that constantly keep in touch with clients.

With the right CRM, you may take under control all your deals and projects, moreover, it stands for the secure storage of your clients’ personal data.

So, what is CRM? It stands for Customer Relationship Management. All your workflows, business processes, and client interactions are clubbed into a single view interface.

Nectar Desk CRM is focused on customers and in this blog post, we’d like to share with you some tips on what your perfect CRM should be like.

Why should you think about CRM?

Give yourself some time to think and evaluate your need for a CRM. Are there processes in your company that are all over the place? Which are the most inefficient and time-consuming processes in your company and can they benefit from a CRM? Does your sales team constantly lose track of the leads and customer follow-ups?

If the answers to these questions are ‘yes’, you should try and explore options for CRMs. You should also take into account the number of employees that would actually be utilizing the CRM and what is your budget. More often, your company might already be using a CRM but you feel there is a need to integrate it with a new CRM so that all functionalities work in your favor.

In domains like Sales, Marketing, and Client Servicing, incorporating a CRM provides several benefits –

1. Customer Segmentation
2. Campaign Development and Execution
3. Leads and Customer Accounts Management
4. Account queries
5. Request Management

While these are just a few basic examples of what a CRM could provide you, each CRM in the market has further advanced features too.

Points to consider when choosing a CRM

Simply deciding that you need a CRM for your business is not enough. You have to select the right one. Yes, it isn’t easy. But it doesn’t have to be too time-consuming either. Making a business decision, as important and crucial it is, isn’t rocket science after all.

Steps for choosing the right CRM for your sales and support team:

1. Evaluate needs and issues

The first thing to make sure is to clearly outline your problem statement. Understand what you need rectified or simplified in your company using the CRM.

If you do not understand your needs crystal clear, you cannot expect the provider to solve those issues for you.

Get people in different departments who would be involved in actually using the product to give you a clear picture of the requirements. Get them on board and you can then sit down to chalk out the plan together as a team. Do not carry out the entire decision-making process alone.

2. Don’t go for the first big company you hear of

Yes, a company could be doing very well for themselves by selling their CRM product. They could be very famous for it and have great customer reviews. This does not imply that the features they provide are relevant for you.

You should be clear about the issues you are expecting the CRM to solve. Make sure that your prospective CRM provider can effortlessly help you with the issues.

There could be scenarios where none of them are able to fit into your needs; try to see if there are any CRM providers in the market who are adept at providing customizable solutions.

Create a list of all prospective CRM providers, prioritize your choice, and rank them in order of what you think would be the best option.

In case you are already using a CRM, and wish to integrate it with another CRM, get in touch with your existing provider and ask for their recommendations. This makes CRM integrations much smoother.

3. Schedule a demo

The next thing for you to do is to get in touch with the company and schedule a demo.

CRM implementations are renowned for being challenging. Owing to the wide range of features and customizations available, CRM demos can turn out to be confusing too. Many CRM companies face the problem of not being able to demonstrate to their leads exactly how it works, in a language that is not very tough to understand.

While CRM companies try very hard to not use industry jargon, you could take a few steps to help make the demo smooth too.

• Make sure there are other people from your company who sit for the demo with you. This way, if there is something you missed out on or couldn’t understand, you have someone on your team who could come to your rescue. Moreover, this helps to get everyone familiarised with the product.
• Do a bit of research about the company’s product before the demo. Get yourself familiar with the language and terms.
• Before the demo starts, let them know how much time you have at hand since CRM demos can last as long as two hours. That being said, make sure to clear out your schedule and of everyone else’s attending the demo so that it doesn’t have to be stopped in between.

4. Ask questions

This phase of selection cannot be stressed enough. You have got to ask questions. You do not want to fall headfirst into something that isn’t crystal clear to you. Even a sliver of a doubt should be brought to notice and made clear.

Ask questions about the deployment process, pricing, trial period, customizable features, collaborative/integration features, ease of integration with other CRMs, etc. Another thing to take note is of how quick and helpful their customer support is. Even if you understand the product completely, there can be several ambiguities and glitches which come up while using the product. In that case, the CRM provider should be available to help you out so that your business isn’t affected negatively.

Remember, you are investing in their product and expect a good ROI (Return on Investment). You should clear all ambiguities before deciding to go ahead with it. Do make sure that the company does not try to slip in any hidden costs later. Address any issue that feels fishy.

That being said, do not base your decision on a single demo. Schedule demos with all your prospective leads and analyze every perspective.

5. Discuss with your team

Once you have all the information you require, have sat for the demos, and cleared all ambiguities, you should now discuss with your team and consider everyone’s opinions. The main points of discussions should be about

• The efficiency of the CRM to solve your issues.
• Costs it would incur your company – deployment, maintenance, annual/monthly subscription, hidden.
• User Experience – This is probably something that should be given great weight. The superb problem-solving CRM would be of no use to you and your employees if they are not able to use it effortlessly. For eg, During the demo, pay attention to how long it takes to carry out a particular task. This can be judged by the number of clicks it takes to carry out a feature.

Conclusions

Once you have reached a final decision, purchase your subscription. You might as well get a free one month trial along with it. If all goes well, continue with your CRM and let it help by giving a virtual brain to your business. In case you do not wish to continue, simply end the subscription.

Using a CRM could literally save you hundreds of manual work. It streamlines all your work and helps you manage your processes far more efficiently.

Remember, take a methodologic approach, do not do it all alone, and go ahead only after all ambiguities are cleared.

At the end of the day, make wise business decisions that would help your business grow, and while you are at it, enjoy the technologies you are using. Choose the most optimum CRM solution for your business and watch how your business grows, making your workflow smooth, and your company’s processes top notch.

Schedule a demo with our team and we’ll be glad to present you with the benefits of Nectar Desk CRM