How to Choose the Right CRM Software for Your Startup

So you have been deciding to invest in a CRM Software for your startup. Great! You want to do this because you know and understand that the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool can help your business to collect analyze and retrieve the information associated with your customers. Further, it can help your business to personalize its interactions with your customer, irrespective of how many customers your business has.

It is an obvious fact that in our work environment, we are constantly on the lookout for ways to enhance and optimize our efficiencies and manage our resources better. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is thus an unavoidable and logical option.

An ideal CRM is just about as good as what your goals are, i.e. you need to fully understand and be sure about what problem you are trying to solve by implementing a CRM. This exercise is likely to help you determine which CRM tool will be ideal for your purpose.

But you also need to remember that not all CRM tools are made equal and thus you need to consider that your chosen CRM has the following features before going ahead and using it for your business.

The most important aspect of any CRM is to manage all your contacts. A good CRM will help you with a single page management feature. Information such as contact info, communication history, social media profiles and lead scores should be managed from a single page.

A good CRM will help you eliminate old-school sales scheduling with the help of an online appointment scheduler. It should notify you about your open and booked appointments automatically. It should also help you sync your events with various other calendars like Google calendar.

A good CRM should have Telephony integration for calling from contact pages, inbound and outbound calls, call scripts, recording, voicemail automation and notes.

The CRM you consider should be innovative enough to help you manage your tasks easily. It should provide innovative features such as drag-and-drop option to move your tasks between different sections.

Your CRM should have a social suite for Twitter monitoring, scheduling Tweets and interacting on Facebook, Google Plus and other social media sites.

Your CRM should have Marketing Automation features to help you build smart marketing campaigns in minutes with web popup, personalization, segmentation and auto responders.

Your CRM should provide you with actionable insights about customer activity on your site or app. It should help in analyzing customer interests and web engagement patterns with activity reports, timelines and real-time alerts.

You should be able to access your CRM from where ever you are, or what computer system you are using. It should be a cloud based CRM. You should be able to get your job done in a way that will keep your customers happy.

One of the most common complaints about CRM is that they are too complicated. But there are many simple CRM tools like Agile CRM, Zoho CRM and many others which help small businesses a lot.

The choice of your CRM can decide the way on how your business should grow. Do not let your business sink by opting for a wrong CRM. Carefully consider all the above mentioned features before deciding on the choice of your CRM.

In brief, you should consider a CRM that is an all-in-one solution that combines sales enablement, marketing automation, web engagement and social outreach and is ideally positioned for small and medium businesses. A perfect blend of both the Sales as well as the Marketing Automation processes with a helpdesk automation feature would hit the spot. It should have all the integrations required for SMBs and finally, considering the financial restrictions that a startup is subject to, your choice of CRM should be extremely pocket friendly.