Implementing the best CRM system for your business makes sense with employees across departments. Your team members are not solely a point of contact—they are extensions of the marketing, sales, and support departments. Your team consists of order takers, cross-sellers, branding representatives, and problem solvers.
When choosing which solution and CRM vendor to go with you need to do two things:
- Evaluate the features you require through a needs-based analysis in order to narrow down your possible CRM vendors.
- Ask pertinent questions to find which CRM vendor is the best for your needs.
What is CRM Software?
Customer relationships management software or CRM vendors provide a platform solution with marketing automation, salesforce automation, and client management services to allow businesses to manage and optimize how they approach customer service. CRM benefits empower your entire company, and choosing the best CRM features for your business needs will set you up for success with your CRM software.
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Evaluating CRM Features
Choosing the features that will bring you to your desired end result will help you to narrow down the CRM vendors and improve your CRM workflow significantly. Typical features for call center CRMs include:
- Easy-to-Use Interface and Dashboards
- Contact Management
- Calendar Integration and Management
- Interaction Tracking
- Task Management
- Email Integration
- CRM and Social Media Integration
- Lead Management
- Optimized Sales Pipelines
- Lead Scoring
- Lead Tracking
- Workflows and Automation Tools
- CRM with Text Messaging
- Analytics and Reporting
- Document Storage
- Mobility
Once you have your list of criteria, you should cross-check them with CRM vendors features to narrow down your list to a select few CRM vendors. From there you can dig deeper into each of the few CRM vendors in order to drill down to the best CRM vendors for you and your company.
Criteria for CRM Vendors
When choosing one of the many CRM vendors, you must first grill them like a steak. Come up with a list of questions to pose to your shortlist of vendors in order to find the best CRM vendors of the bunch. These questions should be pertinent to your needs, the features you require, and the service you will want. Here are a few sample questions to point you in the right direction when researching CRM vendors:
- Do you provide implementation assistance, or are you reliant on partners to perform the work?
- Have you and your product worked with data volumes similar to ours?
- Will your software work with our existing platforms and databases?
- How do you migrate data?
- How long will it take to implement the solution?
- How long is the learning curve for users?
- Describe what your customer service is like?
Getting the answers you need during this shortlist of best CRM vendor comparisons will help you narrow your scope from a few to the lucky ones.
Top CRM Vendors
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud is one of the leading cloud-based CRM vendors that offers a comprehensive suite of customer relationships management tools to promote collaboration and lead management for your business. Salesforce CRM vendors allow businesses to have a 360-degree view of customer interactions and can be integrated with other business solutions such as the contact center or social media platforms to streamline customer communication.
Zoho
Zoho is also one of the leading CRM vendors that feature user-friendly dashboards, contact management systems, calendar integrations, and all of the other typical features offered by other CRM vendors to improve productivity.
A CRM like Zoho also allow businesses that choose them from the wide variety of CRM vendors available to get better insight into customers with accurate and secure data.
SugarCRM
SugarCRM is one of the leading CRM software solutions that is customizable to provide easy usage options for businesses. With sales forecasting features provided by these CRM vendors, Sugar allows businesses to predict their sales trends to allocate more or less staff depending on the requirement at hand. Sugar CRM is available as a cloud-based or on-premise solution to provide businesses more freedom with how they want their customer data to be handled.
Oracle
One of the highest-rated CRM vendors in the market currently is Oracle CRM solutions. Oracle’s extended marketing, sales, social media, commerce, and CPQ functionalities allow for the best cross-channel customer experience for your business. Oracle is a scalable CRM vendor that allows businesses of all sizes to enjoy the benefits of CRM.
SAP CRM
SAP CRM solutions focus on customer-driven growth to allow businesses to remain agile and become operationally efficient. SAP CRM vendors solutions can be easily customized and adopted by businesses to allow them to reap the benefits of a CRM system as soon as possible. Its simple user interface as well as analytical tools allow businesses that choose SAP CRM out of all available CRM vendors to enjoy a cloud-based version of the software to have access to on-demand. SAP CRM enables businesses to coordinate sales, marketing, customer service, and support teams to communicate via different mediums to collaborate efficiently within your organization.
Zendesk Sell
Zendesk Sell is another one of the popular CRM vendors that allow cloud-based services for an affordable and fixed rate. This makes Zendesk Sell one of the ideal CRM vendors for small businesses that do not want to invest heavily into their customer service efforts yet want to have something to ensure that customer data is stored and handled the correct way. Zendesk Sell’s automation tools allow your employees to automate mundane tasks and focus their efforts more on servicing customers better. Zendesk Sell can also be integrated with other leading CRM vendors to handle support requests through one convenient platform.
Service Hub
Service Hub by Hubspot is a part of their suite of business organizational tools to eliminate manual work and in turn, enhance your business’s sales and customer service sectors. Service Hub can be customized based on a business’s requirement and best of all, is it one of the leading CRM vendors to be completely free to use.
The biggest objectives of all of the best CRM vendors above are to organize and streamline how businesses handle customer data while using this data as the superpower that can help drive sales and marketing efforts. Hence, it is important to do thorough research before selecting the right CRM vendors for your business.
