SALES CHECKLISTS
12 must have features in a sales CRM
Sales CRM software helps you manage your deal pipeline as you grow your sales team. Use this checklist to evaluate if it has the right features for your needs.
TLDR; Use this checklist if you already know why you need sales CRM software.
Why do you need sales CRM software?
The effectiveness of your sales team directly impacts the success of your business. Knowing which stage your deals are in and what you need to do to close them is key to the effectiveness of your sales team. When you have a small sales team, you can do this with excel/google sheets, to do apps and email. As your business grows , the sales team also grows making it harder to manage your pipeline with these tools.
The right sales CRM software system ensures that you can see what stage each deal is at easily. Now you can decide on steps to take next to close deals. It also tells you if you are on track to meet your sales targets.
Why use a checklist?
- The human brain can remember only 7 things (+/- 2) at any given point of time. When you are doing something, it is better to have a list that has all the steps if the number of things you have to pay remember more than 5–7 items.
- A checklist can eliminate mistakes. Following a checklist reduces the potential for mistakes and errors by ensuring you have a reference.
- A checklist ensures that everything necessary is completed.
- Checklists reduce errors by clearly laying out exactly what needs to be done so that nothing is missed. Evaluating sales pipeline systems is not something that you do routinely and the chances of you missing a critical step is high.
Steps in a evaluation of a sales pipeline system
Understand what you need
CRM systems have tons of features many of which you may not need. Most of them will either provide a demo or a free trial. It is overwhelming to choose a system just based on the a demo or a trial. For example, you may be excited about a new AI (Artificial Intelligence) powered lead scoring feature without having a clear idea about how it would work for you. So, it is important that you understand what you need from a CRM system before you start evaluation.
Contact Management
The primary function of a CRM is to manage customer contacts who will be the source of business opportunities (leads/deals) to sell. You will have to know what will be the identifier used to uniquely identify your contact. For e.g. for most of the businesses, “email id” of the contact would be a good identifier. But some may have to use “phone number’ as all the contacts may not have an email id. The CRM that you choose should allow you to define the identifier that is relevant to your business.
Contact communication
In the course of selling your products/services you will be communicating with your contact. The CRM that you choose should preferably have a built in mechanism (email/phone dialler) to allow you to communicate seamlessly. It should also have a record of the communication for future reference. Even if it does not directly support the communication channel e.g. phone, it should be able to integrate with external systems that record communication details automatically.
Sales Stages
You should have clarity about the various stages of your sales cycle and the CRM should allow you to configure them. For example, if you are selling cars the stages could be
- enquiry
- test drive
- model and variant selection
- advance payment
- welcome journey
- final payment & delivery.
The CRM should show customers and deals at different stages. It should also tell the task that you need to do to move the customer to the next stage.
Tasks
Your sales team will be expected to execute multiple tasks in the process of completing a sale. For example, the sales person has to follow up with a customer for booking a test drive after they have expressed interest. Your CRM should be able to notify the sales person that they need to arrange for a test drive so that the customer is not kept waiting.
Activities
Your sales team will be doing multiple activities to accomplish a task. For example, to complete the task of “Book a test drive” the sales person may have to call up the customer, leave a voice mail, follow up with a reminder for the appointment. The CRM should be able to track and record all these activities done by the sales person. This will help you analyse and to fine tune your selling process.
Operational Reporting
You will be dependent on your CRM to understand the current set of opportunities, their stages and who in your sales team is doing what. The CRM should be able to provide you with operational reports that clearly show you the current state of your pipeline. It should also show you any bottlenecks in your process.
Strategic Reporting
To asses your sales process on a periodic basis, you need strategic data aggregated by cohorts and time periods. The CRM should have this data in the form of reports.
Integrations
Your sales team would be using multiple tools (e.g. telephony service, sms service, order management system) for their daily activities. The CRM software should provide out of the box integrations with popular tools and also provide a way to do any custom integrations.
APIs support
APIs (Application Program Interface) are a standard way for modern software to expose data and features that can be used by other programs. The CRM should expose an API that has good documentation and support. The APIs can be used to build features or processes that are unique to you.
User Management
The CRM systems should allow you to configure your users in the way that represents the structure of your organisation. Your should be able to configure teams, roles etc to control the kind of data and extent of data the users will have access to.
Pricing
The pricing should be aligned with the needs of your business. Broadly, there are 2 types of pricing: Seats based and contact based. If you will have a large sales team then seats based pricing will increase when you grow you team. Similarly if you have a small team but a large contact database, you will incur higher cost, if you choose contact based pricing.
Use this CRM software selection checklist from ListBee.io
