There are a variety of enterprise CRM software options on the market for small businesses and perhaps it becomes very cumbersome to choose one. Make sure to check out our must-have enterprise CRM features before making a commitment.
What is an Enterprise CRM?
Enterprise CRMs are designed for complex, larger businesses. Good examples are Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and SAP. They will be able to deal with many customer-facing departments, vast databases, and robust requirements. Enterprises tend to have multiple sales teams, all needing access to the same customer data. With so many people involved in the business processes, it makes sense for them to all use the same system. This is where the enterprise CRM comes into its own. Allowing a great deal of automation, it may be more expensive but most of the cost will be involved in customizing the system and deploying it throughout every area of the enterprise.
11 Must-Have Features for your Enterprise CRM
1. Contact Management
Contact management, an element of CRM that sometimes goes by customer management software, is a vital CRM capability. It allows users to segment your contacts into groups to organize and better cater to them. With this CRM capability, you’ll be able to gather crucial customer data and bolster your marketing strategies when introducing new products. It also improves the personalization of all contacts with customers, making them feel important and catered to. This is a key factor in customer satisfaction!
2. Lead management
Identify your best customers based upon psychographic/demographics, making the management of leads far more accurate. This deals with the process of converting prospects into leads by scoring and moving upwards through the pipeline. Sales employees need to be happy with how this works and the process needs to flow in a way that you would naturally use as a business. Look at your existing manual process and see how this fits.
3. Sales Analytics
Another important feature to look for during your search for an enterprise CRM is the use of sales analytics. By using this feature, your sales team can make future sales campaigns a lot more impactful by analysing any data from previous projects.
The enterprise CRM you pick with a sales analytics feature needs to be able to pull data from every corner so your team really enjoys the benefits, such as website traffic, social media and more.
4. Email integration
Integrate with email such as Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc., allowing for management and segmentation of contact lists, as well as a centralized hub for internal cross-collaboration.
Key considerations: Think about how your team primarily communicates. If they’re not used to collaborating within an app, you may want to prioritize CRM software with email integration capabilities.
5. Reports and Dashboards
Once relegated to business intelligence tools, BI, reporting and dashboards have become some of the top CRM features. Users can view statistics in a highly visual, engaging perspective using customized reports and dashboards. They offer real-time data updates and a platform that can be accessed from various portals, improving ease of access for a variety of personnel. Management can use these reports to make data-driven decisions — an investment in CRM BI is an investment in the future of your business.
6. Sales automation
You need to be able to automate the sales process, taking control of outgoing calls and follow ups, and data organization for effective campaign planning. This frees up more employee time as many manual tasks will become part of the CRM automatic process. Repetitive tasks can be taken care of by creating workflow triggers for specific actions or the sending of reminders. This is often sold as an upgrade so when choosing your enterprise CRM software, think about the amount of repetitive tasks involved in current processes. Be sure that if these were automated, the benefits will outweigh the additional costs. Most of the time, this is definitely the case.
7. Document Management
Collect, upload, store, and share documents in a centralized location, making it easier for everyone involved to access information.
Key considerations: Document management is a great CRM feature if you have a large team involved in your marketing and sales funnel. A centralized hub for important documentation can go a long way toward ensuring all team members are in the know, and promotes a smooth, consistent experience for your customers.
8. Communication and collaboration tools
By leveraging the contact history of all your customers housed in the CRM, your business can deliver better client communication and follow-up.
This allows you to tailor customer outreach based on factors like whether or not this is the first interaction with a client or if the customer called previously with a complaint.
Instead of a one-size-fits-all message, your business can send an email customized to where the client lives in the customer life cycle.
Personalized messaging results in improved response rates, so this functionality is key to lifting performance of sales and marketing tactics such as lead nurturing.
Tools to facilitate customer communication are included in the best CRMs. For example, HubSpot allows you to send emails to clients and provides email templates to streamline this process.
9. Template Library
Templates are pre-built content that helps you kickstart tasks like an email or blog post. Using the template library included in a CRM streamlines your work and accelerates task completion. And the templates are customizable to meet your specific needs.
Templates address a wide range of scenarios as well. Some CRMs can even become project management tools through the use of templates.
As a result, templates can not only accelerate task completion, but they can replace the need to purchase additional software.
10. Sales Forecasting
Provides far more accurate benchmarks with regard to sales, comparing actual results to forecasts. This way you can see if your sales team are on target and use this valuable data to fine-tune future campaigns. Future sales and revenue figures can be predicted by making use of historical and current data and trends. This is an essential feature if you need the ability to create forecasts for months ahead or even proposed new geographical areas. This is a great way of making your data work hard, enabling you to make far better informed decisions about moving forward with the business.
11. User Management
Finally, look for a user management feature in your enterprise CRM, like a hierarchical format that HubSpot offers. This is something that’s needed or at least recommended at an enterprise level because of so many users and international users coming into the equation.
This feature lets you organise your users on multiple levels based on the team they’re in, their region, business unit, product line or pretty much any other dimension you choose. By having this feature on hand, you can be more flexible in what you enable or disable for your users and only giving relevant access to the right people.
Conclusion
Today’s CRM applications contain a vast array of capabilities beyond those reviewed here. Some may prove essential to your business operations.
Therefore, to choose the right CRM for your company, start by examining your business needs. Then contrast those needs against the capabilities of the CRM to find a match. For instance, if the ability to manage advertising campaigns is important to your business, select a CRM that supports this, like Zoho.
Because CRM software is so extensive, the time spent researching options now will ensure you get the most out of your CRM investment.
To know more about CRMs Checkout Digitify CRM Page.