5 Questions to ask yourself before investing in a CRM Software

In today’s competitive business world, investing in a CRM Software will prove to be a boon for your company, though it doesn’t means that you can sign up for any first CRM tool that you find in the market. Examining the features of the CRM software is an important task, but along with this there are also some important pointers that need to be considered before one can finalize the CRM software.

Every business differs from the other by product, processes or prices, thus, it is important to have a CRM Software which can fit your business model effectively to provide you with optimum results in all your operations simultaneously helping you grow and expand. Being pioneers in providing with

5 Things to consider before investing in a CRM Software

Future Goals 

A CRM won’t be effective if it is considered only as an application to store data and not making any productive use out of it. Data Collection and Maintenance goes hand in hand, where you actually use the data collected in a way that improves your business.

• Providing Better Service to the Customers.
• Will Marketing be able to create more targeted campaigns using the data?
• Is it to get better understanding of the Sales pipeline, Lost Deals, Forecast etc.?
• To help your Employees manage their work more efficiently and in an organized manner
• Data Retention to prevent loss of knowledge.

This will help you to effectively analyze the CRM tool based on your short and long – term business objectives. Even the decision to go completely on Cloud or stay on premise might help you shape your expectations better.

2. How long will it take to implement? 

This answer solely varies from one company to another. The timeline of implementation depends upon the customization required, size of the company and number of users, custom integrations, and integration with third party tool and so on.

If the Marketing, Sales and Service process cycles are fairly simple then amendments of few custom modules will be up and running fairly quickly. However, your main priority over here will be to finalize the business process flow, incorporate them with the features of CRM so that it meets your goals and also it does not take a lot of time to be implemented. Care should be taken over here to not go overboard with your customization because they may tend to stall the project and delay the overall implementation.

3. Does it integrate with my existing tool-set?

The main motive of investing in a CRM tool is to ease the work of the staff. Integration with tools that automate Marketing campaigns, communicate through Social Media platforms, synchronization with Email accounts, auto-ticket logging through emails so that the information would get automatically be input in the CRM without having the need to copy – paste by switching between applications, is something that the TP integration feature of the CRM software should be able to handle with ease.

One important point is the data collectivity and presentation of the reports in the CRM. To ensure that there is no data duplicity and all data has been included to be presented in the reports.

4. What information do I need to collect to find actionable insights?

Reports contributes to an integral part of any software tool. Based on the goals defined, you can determine which reports matter most as per the business process. Investing in Sage CRM tool, will provide a wide range of customizable reports easily available that can help to figure out below concerns –

• Checking up monthly forecast per sales representative.
• Reports providing data based on your current sales funnel.
• TAT details of the tickets logged.
• Examining staff performance.

Thought a lot of reports are customizable and can be extracted according to the department, the whole process of extraction should be simple and the data should be presented in understandable format so that it becomes easy to take decisions.

5. How can I motivate my staff to use a CRM Software?

CRM is a tool that helps in improving customer relationships and not every company needs a complicated, highly customized platform that may lead the user to invest most of his time in just inputting and maintaining the data within CRM. A successful CRM implementation is only when people start using the tool and are able to input the data easily and get output as per various necessities. The user experience should be intuitive. Also, the navigation and the user friendliness of the CRM software need to be tested before it is even finalized. A lot of CRM software do stress on being user friendly but the one that does not have a lot of processes and workflows should be selected. To know how can you manage the change effectively and motivate your employees to adapt to the new system, you can read our blog here.

Sage CRM is a leading CRM software that helps you in turning every customer transaction into customer loyalty. To know more about how can Sage CRM software help you in your industry specific processes, SMS SAGE to 56767 or write to Sage Software Solutions Pvt Ltd at sales@sagesoftware.co.in for a free consultation.