S3 Blog

Businesses of all sizes need an accurate way of keeping and maintaining customer records which hold details from quoting and invoicing to project planning and this is where CRM software comes in very useful. CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a way of identifying and understanding a customers needs whilst improving your relationship with that customer leading to increased profits and customer satisfaction.

There are many different CRM solutions available on the market but how do you pick which is the right one for your business? Here are the top 10 things that you should be looking out for in your CRM solution –

1. Ease of use – this is the most important aspect of any type of software, after all if you can’t use something quickly and easily it can eat away at your time, meaning precious hours are lost figuring out how to get your customer information on screen!

2. Does it fit into our business – if you are looking for a CRM solution you need to make sure that it will be easy to integrate into your business. Solutions that take too much time to set up and do not do everything you need them to are not worth it.

3. Features – features should be relevant to your business i.e. if you create invoices you should be able to do this on your software – the same goes for creating quotes.

4. Marketing tools – does your software solution offer marketing tools such as average revenue per customer? Such tools can help you identify where your custom comes from and make it easier to plan marketing campaigns from this information.

5. Financial planning – if you can see your best customers and see their pattern of re-ordering you financial projections are more accurate.

6. Accessibility – you might find that you need to access your customer data when you are not in the office, or even the country, so choose a CRM solution that will allow you access to your business information from where ever you are in the world – providing there is an internet connection.

7. Project planning tools – these are invaluable if your business has several projects open at the same time. Your CRM solution should have a way in which you can plan projects and monitor them to see that they are on target to be completed in time.

8. Staff calendars – these should be integrated into your CRM solution so you can see what your workforce is doing on one screen.

9. The ability to see your business at a glance – do you have to open up endless screens to see outstanding invoices, current projects, quotes to chase etc? Choose a CRM solution that will let you see an overview of what is happening in your business on one screen.

10. Reasonably priced – this is self explanatory, if you are paying too much for your CRM solution it is not cost effective, choose a solution that has all of the above and doesn’t cost the earth too.

Tags: CRM, Email Marketing, s3, Top 10