?Sales? is perhaps the most difficult thing in the business cycle yet it is the most important one.
While businesses struggle every day to achieve their sales targets and meet the revenues it is very difficult to keep a track on the progressions. There are several aspects of sales that need to be taken care of.
It may be easier for smaller organizations to track and monitor all their sales activities manually, but when it comes to bigger organizations, it becomes imperative that such sales activities needs to be monitored properly through some tools that can provide insights in return.
There are several sales CRM software that cater to different needs of different organizations from SMB segment to large corporate houses. Let us see what exactly organizations look out for in a CRM software in order to run their business:
Contacts and Deals Management
Every day, the sales teams are bombarded with lots of leads and contacts that need to be sorted and structured in a proper manner. This is the first step of a sales cycle, i.e. to identify your prospective customers. As a matter of fact, just identifying your customers might not be sufficient. You may need to index them and mark them as leads and create prospective deals against those customers.
This is an important part of a CRM software.
Customer Communication Management
Next comes your customer interactions.
You might be interacting with your customers in many ways like, calling, SMS, emails or WhatsApp etc. But you need to have a proper history of all your interactions with the customer so that, whenever you call them next time your sales reps should have a complete picture about that customer at one place. This helps your company to become person independent in your sales cycle.
Of course, there must be features to add next actions or follow-up activities and you must get reminders for your next actions.
Pipeline Management
The next important feature you should look out in your CRM is pipeline management. All the deals that you created against your leads need to be tracked properly.
Your pipeline funnel gives you a snapshot of your entire sales activities.
It not just tells you about the stages of your sales cycle i.e where your actual sales is happening, but also can give you picture about your different sales teams and their performances. Your pipeline funnel must include stages like Deals identification, proposals, negotiations, wins, lost etc.
Visit Management
Part of sales may also include physical visits to the customer for a number of things. Your representatives might be needed to visit your customers for important meetings or taking orders or collecting payments or even leaving gifts or samples on important occasions. All such visits should be documented in your CRM. This must add up to the interaction history of your CRM.
Order collection feature can be extended further with features like order delivery, visit feedback etc within your visit management module.
Service Management
Service plays an important role in your sales cycle since repeat business from your existing customers is a major portion of revenue. Especially for product and service companies, this is an important aspect in which your service or support engineers need to have the list of assigned task in their system every day before they start their work.
Your CRM software should be capable of allowing you to assign those tasks and prioritize the different activities throughout the day.
Analytics & Dashboard
The next and most important thing of a CRM software that you must check out is its capabilities for analytics.
What is data without information?
Unless and until you create information out of your data, it is of no use. Your CRM software should have sufficient MIS or analytics in form of both graphical and tabular formats, having capabilities to even download in Excel or PDF. This must help you in not just monitoring your overall activities but also planning for future. This is what will save money for you.
Hopefully, this list helps you in understanding what a CRM software should be and how are you should choose your CRM software with or without these features as per your need.
There are a lot of such software is available in the market. Some specific to industries and some generic and they vary from all ranges starting from few rupees to thousands of dollars per users per month. There are big names like Salesforce, SAP, freshdesk etc, however my personal recommendation is TimeKompas app.
Not only it is highly optimum as far as pricing is concerned, but also for the fact that it is very simple to use. Your employees and sales teams would love using that.
While it has all the features that are mentioned above, additionally it also helps you managing your other teams through an interactive HRMS module and tracking the time through a project management module. It also comes with their innovative Selfie based attendance feature that uses Artificial Intelligence too.
It doesn?t offer a complex & big software, but just all that you need. The best part is that, your teams can simply perform all their activities from their mobile & while on-the-go.
You may choose TimeKompas or any other CRM software, but make sure you must have the right capabilities to perform all your activities.
Happy selling !
As the editor of the blog, She curate insightful content that sparks curiosity and fosters learning. With a passion for storytelling and a keen eye for detail, she strive to bring diverse perspectives and engaging narratives to readers, ensuring every piece informs, inspires, and enriches.
