CRM Features

Lead Nurturing

AKA: Prospect Management

Leads refer to people you don’t know well, don’t have a lot of information about, but who you think you have the potential to do business with.

Nurturing is the process you use to turn them into a customer. This could include automated emails, sending out fact sheets, chatting on the phone, office visits, etc.

Opportunity Pipeline

AKA: Potentials, Sales Funnel

An Opportunity helps salespeople track a potential piece of business. The deal itself. Opportunities exists to hold the details of the negotiation and estimated revenue.

The Pipeline refers to both the graph used to visual upcoming Opportunities and a group of Opportunities in a revenue forecasting period.

Opportunities typically move through different “sales stages” from “Prospecting” to “Closed Won.” But you may already have terminology you wish you use here.

Quotes and Sales Agreements

AKA: Sales Orders

Quotes typically refer to a record in your CRM system showing the current status of the negotiation. It shows which products you are discussing and the current negotiated price.

See also: eSigning

You may or may not want to have a way to formally record your prospects’ agreement of the Quote. Some CRM systems will give you the option of having a way for your prospects to electronically sign to confirm their acceptance of the terms.

Invoicing

You’ve negotiated the deal and have reached an agreement. Now the time that is music to every salesperson’s ears: asking for payment.

In the CRM world, Invoices are likely to be created directly from a Quote, Sales Order, or Opportunity. Copying all information directly from the final, agreed copy.

Recurring Invoices

If you have a subscription based system you may want to send our Invoices automatically on a rolling basis. This could be monthly, quarter, or annually.

Asking your prospective CRM provider how this is managed is certainly worth it!

Product and Stock Management

AKA Inventory Management

Most CRM systems will let you add Products into the system for use on your sales records (Quotes, Sales Orders, Invoices, etc.). This will represent the actual products and services (time) you sell.

Some system will give you either basic or advanced tools to allow you actually manage the stock (or inventory) you have. Whether you need the basic (manual) or advanced (automate) tools is down to your business practices.

Contact and Companies

AKA Accounts

This is the heart of many businesses’ CRM systems. Your database of Contacts, Companies, and how they relate to each other is essential to keeping your business running.

Some businesses will only need Contacts, these are typically referred to as B2C businesses–those that sell business to customer. Others will rely more heavily on the Company or Accounts side–those that are B2B (business to business).

Make sure your CRM system can handle the way you do business.

Hierarchical Views

AKA Organisation (or Org) View

In addition to seeing the phone number, email address, and other “hard facts” about your Contacts and Companies, you may also need to see how they relate to each other.

Asking your CRM provider how to record and view the relationships you need to see, from job title to company branch details.

Call History, Emails, and Auditing

In addition to those general details, you will want to see a Contact or Company’s recent history with your company.

This could include recent emails and calls, as well as a history of amendments to their contact information, details of recent queries with customer service, invoices sent out, etc.

Activities and Task Management

Being able to see not only the History of calls and tasks with a particular person, but also any future calls is another one of those core CRM features.

Questions you’ll want to ask about Activities and Task management range from how you assign tasks to other members of your team, whether you can associate costs with them, how to score the conversations, and so on.

Calendars and Scheduling

Running alongside Activities and Tasks is the ability to see all of these within a Calendar. A visual Calendar is a great way to plan your schedule and see what time your colleagues are going to be free.

Tickets

AKA HelpDesk

Having a dedicated record of each customer service request means that you (and your customer) can track the progress of it from start to finish. You can see who has picked it up, how long it took them to respond, how long it has been open, and what the resolution was.

Ideally, you’ll have the ability to record information relevant to your product offers and service processes.

SLAs and Automatic Escalation

AKA Service Level Agreements

But you need more than a place to record the details of the service request. You want your support team to be notified when a customer has response or when they are in danger of leaving a ticket open for too long.

Setting your own SLA levels (i.e. how long is too long for your customer to wait for a response) is a must.

Auto-Emailing

Customer service requests usually involve a fair amount of back-and-forth communication. Most Ticketing systems let you send automated open and close emails. These let your customer know their request has been received (and completed).

You may also want the ability to automatically email progress and updates on the request.

Ad Hoc vs Contract

For those businesses who restrict or invoice the time used on customer service requests, having a system that allows you to do this right from the Ticket is a must.

Make sure you consider whether ALL the time recorded should be chargable or whether some of it should be excluded.

Customer Portal

Instead of relying on emails and phone calls, you may want a system that allows your customers to view, raise, and comment on their Tickets (and other details) via an online portal.

Knowledgebase Library

Similar to a Customer Portal, some businesses like the idea of maintaining a library of how to and/or commonly asked questions.

When integrated with you HelpDesk and/or CRM system, this kind of knowledgebase library can be incredibly powerful.

Projects

Every business is going to manage their projects differently. Make sure you know what process you want to follow when discussing solutions with a potential supplier.

Recording custom information, setting up automation, assigning users, etc.

The benefit of having your project management tools within your CRM system is that all of that rich information is stored right alongside the details of your customers.

Task and Time Management

Task and Time Management when it comes to the larger Project Management discussion is often more than a question of scheduling.

You want to be able to see all the Tasks (and calls and meetings) in a single place. Possibly even a Calendar if scheduling is still high on your radar.

Additionally, you may want some time calculation going on. Things like seeing how much time has been spent on a particular project, how much is remaining, and whether you’ve gone beyond the original estimate.

Cost Aggregation

Some project management teams will want to be able to aggregate the costs associated with different activities. Everything from buying lunch for a customer to the cost of petrol.

If this is something you need or want, make sure to find out if this information can be aggregated at the project level. This way you can get an at-a-glance update of costs.

List Management

AKA Views

Whether you are manually adding your customers (and potential customers) to a list or setting up the criteria so your lists are built automatically, having the ability to manage lists is a must when it comes to marketing.

Campaign Statistics

AKA Tracking Clicks, Click Throughs

The success benchmarks of email marketing are knowing how many emails you sent, how many were opened, how many people clicked on the links in your emails, and if anyone unsubscribed.

You want to able to view this information both at the high Campaign level AND directly on your customer records. This what makes integrated marketing features within a CRM system shine.

Email Builder

Although we all worked very hard on art projects in primary school, it hasn’t necessarily been a priority for all of us since then. And learning to code isn’t exactly the most fun weekend activity…at least not for everyone.

So having some tools available to make it easier to design and build eye catching email templates is important if you want to use your CRM system for email marketing.

Mailing Lists / Subscriptions

In addition to building lists of your customers, you may also want to give them the power to opt in to receive certain kinds of emails.

For example, you might maintain a list of people who have subscribed to your newsletter or who want to receive offers.

Bulk Emailing

If you’re going to be doing a lot of emailing or emailing large groups of people, make sure to ask if there are additional charges for bulk emailing.

Customisation

This isn’t about adding user images or changing colours. Customisation is about so much more than that.

It’s making sure you have the right fields to hold the data you need to gather. That everything is using the names and words your team is familiar with. And that everything sits in a logical order for how your team carries out their day to day tasks.

So make sure to ask your prospective suppliers about what customisation options are available in their systems.

Security Restrictions

A lot of CRM systems offer you the ability to set security restrictions around access to your system and the data within it.

This includes things like IP restrictions or enforcing certain password requirements and setting up 2 Factor Authentication for all users.

You may also want to ask about whether you can set up additional encryption on certain data within your system, things like personal identification numbers.

User Permissions

In addition to considering the security of your data from outside your CRM system, many business want to restrict access to data by a user’s role within the company.

For example, you may not want a junior sales person editing the records of their managers. Or have your customer service team seeing invoices.

Templates

We touched on email templates above when it comes to marketing, but there are lots of ways you can use templates within a CRM system.

From email signatures to automated notifications to follow up responses, there are many ways that email templates can help make your team more efficient AND keep them on brand.

Other templates, like Mail Merge or sales PDFs, will also help with branding, while also giving you polished and professional documents to send out to your customers.

Automation

When it comes to making you and your team more efficient, automation is the key feature in your CRM system.

These tools can include automatically creating and sending emails, scheduling tasks, or updating and creating other records within your system.

Knowing which processes you’d like to streamline and then finding out how your CRM can help is a good way to get started.

GDPR and Data Retention

For those businesses in the EU or trading with companies in the EU, having the right tools within your CRM system to manage your data as per GDPR is essential.

Asking whether your potential provider has the tools is the first step. But also make sure you know what controls you’d like to put in place. And ask specific questions about how these could be implemented.

Emails

This isn’t sending emails from your CRM system. This is making sure that the emails you send “normally” (from Outlook, Gmail, or wherever) are brought into your CRM and linked to the individuals they relate to.

The benefit here is that you get a full and complete history of communication for every single person stored in your CRM system.

But, you will need consider what rules you want to put in place around this. Should everyone’s emails come into your CRM? Should everyone be able to see each others’ emails? Are there certain emails that shouldn’t ever be synced (like with your accoutant)?

Calendars and Tasks

Many people rely on the Calendars and Task lists they maintain outside of their CRM system to organise their day.

And that’s fine…whatever keeps you on task and on time.

But you’ll probably want to find out how to get the activities created in your CRM system onto that Calendar and/or Task list.

Contacts

Contact management is a big part of CRM systems…the central part really. But there will always be people in your business who want to rely on another tool for managing their personal contacts.

If those users also want their personal contacts in your CRM system, you’ll need to ask about setting up a sync.

Make sure you consider what data is being synced across, though, and how secure that external system is. And what else you sync with it. You don’t want your entire CRM contact database stored on someone’s car speed dial after all.

Accounting

Depending on how much of your sales process is being managed within your CRM system, you may want to actually link it up with your accounting system.

Automatically sending invoices and/or sales orders from your CRM to your accounting software means there’s no chance of an invoice slipping through the net.

If the balance and payment status is sent back from accounts to CRM, your sales people are always up to date about who owes what.

Live Chat

Live Chat as a tool is popular with people working on both sales and customer service.

If you use one of these products, you can understand how being able to create Tickets and/or Opportunities straight from a chat is a massive time saver.

Conversation history is carried over, linked up with the relevant contact in your CRM, and then your team can take it from there.

Website / Web forms

This is a great way to gather new leads with a minimum of effort. You put together a great website. Add a form to the page. And anyone who fills in the form is added to your CRM system.

Once there, you may want automated replies sent out as well. Saving you even more time and energy…automated lead nurturing!

Collaboration Tools

Slack. Teams. RingCentral. There are hundreds of collaboration tools on the market. If your business relies on one, you may want to consider whether you’d like to send information to and from your CRM system as well.

But it’s a good idea to have a clear idea of what information you’d like sent across and how often.

Sending Texts (SMS)

In addition to sending out emails, you may also want your CRM system to send out texts to your customers and/or users.

These could be processing notifications, marketing, customer service, you name it.

As with many integrations, it’s important that you have a bit of a plan for how you’d like to use it before speaking to a potential CRM provider. That way you can find out if their integration will really fit your needs.

Business Intellience

AKA Dashboards

Being able to build Dashboards that collate information from all different areas of your business is a great way to get an overview of how things are going.

If this is something you want to use, you’ll want to make sure your CRM system can send data to a tool like ClicData or Klipfolio.

Zapier

As a tool, Zapier is a bit of a swiss army knife. It essentially creates a connection that allows you to send data between two systems. It’s an automatic integration builder.

Many online systems will integrate with it. So if your new CRM system doesn’t have a direct integration with one that you need, you might be able to create one using Zapier.

API and Web Hooks

For systems where there is no existing integration and that need a more complicated connection than Zapier provides, some CRM systems can be set up with an API and/or Web Hook connection.