9 CRM Productivity Features You Should Be Using

You choose the best CRM you can find for your business, implement it and let it do its work. Soon, however, a question arises: Are you getting the most from your CRM?

According to Neil Davey of MyCustomer.com, building a CRM strategy is as important as analyzing whether or not the CRM is actually following that strategy. Having clearly defined aims for your CRM is just the first step. Your next step should be to identify the features that will boost your productivity and continuously analyze if these features are influencing your business in any way.

Here are nine such CRM productivity features that you should be using for your business.

Sales Features

One core reason for a business to use a CRM is to increase the sales rep productivity by automating repetitive tasks. This is to ensure that reps concentrate on getting more purchases. Here are few crucial sales features that your CRM should provide.

Contact Management

Adding contacts and clipping contact information is a time-consuming task. Sales reps’ main KPI is to get more revenue. For that, they need to contact more leads and concentrate on their nurturing process to turn those leads into customers. It is imperative that your CRM performs contact management tasks. This includes exporting contacts from Excel files, emails and social media as well as organizing contacts under various categories based on the tags.

Sales Calls

The next important KPI of a sales rep is to make more calls and connect with as many leads as possible. Your CRM should provide an auto dialer that helps reps make more calls and record calls when required. You should also be able to add notes, tag calls and send alerts in case you missed any calls.

Lead Management

Leads are the crux of the entire sales and marketing process. Lead management itself is one feature used by both sales and marketing teams. Your CRM needs to provide a lead management feature. One that includes lead nurturing through emails and newsletters, lead scoring based on tags and notes, lead behavior based on web and email analytics and deals closed based on lead buying patterns and purchase commitment.

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Marketing Features

A marketing team needs to identify and capture more leads. They also need to sync with their sales team for the lead nurturing process and to create a brand image through more social interactions with the users. Your CRM should have these features for your marketing team.

Leads Captured

Leads are first captured and nurtured by the marketing team, then later sent to the sales team to continue the nurturing process. However, it still starts with marketing. Give them the ability to find more leads faster so they can nurture more or perfect their drip emailing process. A CRM with features like customer popups, signup forms and surveys makes it easier. Web analytics also help in capturing new site visitors who can later be turned into leads.

Campaign Management

Marketers need to send a large number of emails every day to leads and customers. There are plenty of reasons: drip emailing, newsletter distribution, press releases and customer interactions. It requires email automation, but with personalization and customization features. Make sure your CRM has customizable campaign management.

Analytics

Marketing strategies are dependent on various email and website analytics. Without this, your marketing team won’t understand why a certain website change is working or how new A/B testing is helping your emails. Having automatic analytics report on email and website engagement is a very important feature that your CRM needs to have.

Social Media Automation

Social media management is another cumbersome task that needs to be automated by your CRM. Your marketing team should concentrate on capturing new leads and customers instead of updating statuses on social media.

Service Features

Service reps are required to answer as many tickets as possible and close them in a day. When a support rep can have 40-50 tickets to answer, that gets tough. Here is where your CRM comes to the rescue.

Tickets Responses

A ticket’s first response plays an important role, hence support reps are always worried about sending out the first response. Reps can waste a lot of time on this. Automation through your CRM, however, should have a canned responses feature. It will not only send replies in real-time, but also allow for customization and personalization.

Ticket Categorization

Even after the first response is sent, resolving the issue remains crucial. Sales reps need to check the tickets and prioritize them based on the urgency. A good CRM makes this process faster and easier. It should allow you to add various tags and SLAs, which will help automate ticket categorization.

When choosing a CRM, make sure it has features that will boost productivity and help your business. Automation is all about getting more out of less. If a CRM doesn’t do that for your business, find a better one. Define your goals and strategize.