If you pay attention to tech, it’s no secret that customer relationship management (CRM) system software is a remarkably fast-growing market. In fact, CRM recently became the fastest-growing software market in the world.
The market isn’t slowing down anytime soon. As new competitors are coming onto the scene the market is constantly shifting and being disrupted.
Market leaders like Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP are swiftly adapting their products to meet new market demands. But it’s still uncertain who will come out on top.
With the market moving this fast, it’s important to sit down and try to understand what the source of growth is. In this case, CRM companies are taking advantage of many avenues for achieving massive growth. Let’s go ahead and take a look at a few of them.
What Is a CRM System?
Customer management relationship (CRM) systems allow businesses to monitor their working relationship with customers whether that be for sales, customer service, market analysis, or something else that falls into the general niche of connecting businesses to consumers.
From tracking customer engagement with a certain item to utilizing chat software to provide customer support, the best CRM systems can do it all. CRMs manage and automate these tasks from a single place that businesses can utilize as a hub for useful customer information – incoming and outgoing.
More feature-heavy CRM systems have gone so far as to generate leads through automatic email chains or have artificial intelligence talk to customers through the phone prepared to answer every question imaginable.
Pretty much every business has used a CRM system, large or small. Small merchants and massive social networks alike all need a means of communicating with customers. If anything, it’s a form of damage control. And if used to the best of its ability, CRM will almost certainly boost business growth.
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What To Look For When Choosing a CRM System?
The functionality and features of your CRM system can be modified and transformed through apps and integrations as well as developer tweaking.
Popular CRMs grant access to many beneficial features. And you also have the option of experimenting with add-ons to see which suits your business well in the long term.
Other factors play into having a fully operational CRM system as well. Below are some fundamental components of a CRM system that virtually every CRM software should have.
Sales Integration
A huge part of a salesperson’s job involves interacting with their pipeline and various contacts inside their CRM system. A CRM system was originally built exclusively to manage sales, so it is no stranger to this part of the business process.
Taking this into account, most CRM software has extensive features to benefit sellers, but plenty more functionality can be extracted from apps and integrations.
Some awesome solutions have emerged in recent years that serve to amplify a salesperson’s CRM, utilizing its data to ease the difficulty of their day-to-day jobs.
Examples of CRM apps and integrations
Here’s a few notable examples of CRM apps and integrations that can change your sales process for the better:
- Aircall uses CRM integrations to allow salespeople to track, monitor, and review sales calls directly within their CRM of choice. It has an extensive list of features that leverage the power of CRM. The software currently supports Salesforce, Hubspot, and Copper. A tool like this is basically essential for any sales team..
- Use an integration like Leadfeeder to automatically input leads generated from your website into your CRM. This allows your sales reps to reduce manual data entry and focus on productive sales actions that lead to results. Currently, Leadfeeder is available for Salesforce, Hubspot, Pipedrive, and Zoho.
- Proposify allows you to craft attractive sales proposals for your leads and prospects, leveraging your CRM data to enrich the proposals with all the relevant information for the deal. By utilizing this cloud-based solution, sales teams can track their proposals in real-time, monitoring when they are viewed, and accepted.
Marketing Integration
CRM has ultimately led to the convergence of sales and marketing in practice. But these were once two distinct categories. While sales addresses selling items head-on, marketing involves the actions that take place to get customers interested in the first place.
Long gone are the days of totally separate sales and marketing operations, as CRM brings them closer together, and enables these business sectors to work together more fluidly.
The ability to feed leads generated from your marketing cycle directly into your CRM allows for business prospects to be tracked in real-time across departments.
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Apps and integrations for marketing teams in CRM systems
Customer profiles and detailed context-driven data derived from marketing analysis can be used to help the sales team know who they are selling to in order to create more targeted marketing for the future.
There are several apps and integrations that are enhancing the way marketing teams are using CRM to their advantage. Let’s take a look at a few:
- An integration with ActiveCampaign allows you to leverage your CRM data to personalize email campaigns. Using this solution makes tracking your email marketing efforts easier by visualizing the data that matters most. ActiveCampaign even has its own CRM solution that is worth checking out, but they also integrate directly with Salesforce.
- Vidyard gives you the power to deploy and track engagement with your video content across all your marketing channels. With its wide range of CRM integrations, Vidyard allows you to interact directly with your contacts and delight them with your video content.
- If you are a highly analytics-driven marketer, it’s definitely worth having a CRM integration like Bizible on your side. Such a solution offers a more visual understanding of how your marketing campaigns are performing. This can be of great use when it comes to simplifying data like ad spending and channel engagement in an actionable way.
Customer Support
As mentioned, the CRM market has expanded to fulfill more diverse uses. Customer support is one of the more successful of these expansive branches.
Being able to review, respond, and manage support tickets directly in your CRM does well to support the notion that a CRM system is a truly all-inclusive tool.
With a CRM you can automatically collect data from your business interactions so that both you and your clients are enriched with more relevant information for the given concern.
A few notable examples of customer support apps with extensive support for mainstream CRM software are as follows:
- LiveChat uses its support chat data and chats logs to help contextualize your customer’s profiles, ultimately helping your sales and marketing teams have a more personal understanding of your clients.
- Popular support ticket platform Zendesk integrates with Salesforce to allow customer support reps to create, edit, and manage support tickets directly in their CRM.
- Intercom allows you to sync your conversations across all instances of CRM, so different levels of your company can have a firm understanding of your conversations with leads.
Customization
CRM market leaders have found a lot of success using open APIs to allow third-party developers to develop integrations that can leverage the data in a company’s CRM for a variety of different purposes.
By giving integration developers access to CRM data, functionality that surpasses mere sales and marketing can be adopted such as more in-depth automation or connections to some of the most popular business apps like Gmail.
CRM companies like Salesforce host these integrations on a marketplace where they can be easily installed. A CRM tool’s capacity to meet more unique business needs attracts a wider range of industries to find value in these software products.
Cloud vs. On-Premise Solutions
Some businesses choose to build their own CRM software rather than outsourcing them to a cloud entity like Salesforce. In practice, this decision will permit more control over how your software operates as well as the data held in your software.
On the other hand, it’s more difficult to keep an in-house CRM system intact. You’ll need expert developers to come in and build the software and someone to regularly update and maintain the software as well.
Cloud solutions are typically cheaper, especially for small to medium-sized businesses that can’t afford the overhead cost from the jump.
User Experience
Apart from all the apps, you can add to your CRM, you want whatever software you use to look appealing so that customers will actually want to use it. To do this, your CRM – whether your business builds it or somebody else does – needs to be designed with the user in mind.
Aesthetics and navigation are two of the primary concerns of the user experience (UX). Looks are subjective, but the aesthetic of your CRM should be promising and speak to your professional banding.
Good aesthetics will prompt users to stay interested for more than a few seconds. But once you’ve accomplished this, you must think about ease of navigation. As an illustration, if your potential customer is having too much trouble finding their online cart and checking out, they might decide to give up on the endeavor altogether.
GDPR Compliance
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a set of standards requiring a business to protect the personal data and privacy rights of its customers. Although there isn’t a set of apps that can magically ensure users are protected, there are some basic CRM features that will help.
For instance, leading CRM software already has data security wired in. Features like encryption, hacking deterrent, and regular updates make sure that the system is not too vulnerable.
Similarly, most CRM systems permit their users to define roles and access privileges based on who you trust in your company with sensitive data.
Customers themselves have the right to erasure. This means that they can have their personal data removed in a heartbeat if they ever feel the desire.
Conclusion
Finding the right bells and whistles for your CRM system can be a time-consuming task. But it’s what needs to be done if you genuinely want your customers to be satisfied with their experience. But this isn’t the only way to go about meeting that objective.
Trio has many professional software developers on hand with the sole mission of seeing to it that you and your business get what you want.
Our Hubspot developers have been vetted and trained to make a CRM system to fit any of your business needs.
We make sure to work with you so you’re always satisfied with the final product – just like you want your customers to be. And hiring professionals can significantly reduce any risk that might come about when you search for developers elsewhere.
Trio Hubspot developers are acutely familiar with the Hubspot ecosystem. Their skills range from API integration to developing whole websites.
Trio combines software mastery with access to South American developer talent. Meet our elite Argentinean, Chilean, and Brazilian developers for outsourcing excellence.
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