The Best CRM Benefits

CRM helps sales teams get organized, gain insights, and close deals by providing a single source of truth that has the latest information on customers and prospects saved in one place. This means everyone can quickly identify and prioritize leads, providing insights like who has the highest potential to convert, predict future sales, and set realistic targets based on data.

Collecting and viewing all of your data in one place makes it easier to create more personalized customer experiences. A CRM can take customer data from various sources and standardize them. So whether information comes from social media, Google Analytics, business software, apps, CRM technology, or offline channels, each team receives a useful, holistic picture with the information that is relevant to their needs and objectives.

CRM systems can provide insights and recommendations based on all of your customer data — past and present. They can give you detailed analytics on what actions your customers are taking, and which they are likely to take next. But just because one team sees a certain data point as a priority, doesn’t mean it holds the same importance to another. That’s why the best CRMs let each user build customized dashboards to highlight information that is most useful to them. These analytics dashboards can even provide recommendations based on data, helping to translate insights into action.

The ability to instantly message people who take certain steps can be useful to both your customers and your employees. With CRM, you’re able to automatically take certain actions, such as sending personalized emails or notifications, when a customer takes a specific action. Customers benefit, because they instantly receive information that’s personalized to their interests. Meanwhile, automations free up employees to do other, less-repetitive work.

More than two-thirds of customers expect anyone they contact across a company to have the same updated information about their purchase history and past issues. The best customer relationship management systems make this easy for customer service representatives, providing a single view of a customer’s history. This allows reps to get straight to providing support, rather than frustrating customers with questions they have already answered. It also builds brand loyalty by making customers feel heard, and appreciative of a personalized experience.

We’ve already talked about how having a single view of the customer across an organization can help all teams serve customers better, but it also makes collaboration easier within your business. CRMs with built-in collaboration and communication tools like Slack make it easy for every employee to work together, share files simultaneously, and have a single place where they can access the latest information on customers and your business.

The best CRMs work the same way your favorite apps do — anytime, anywhere, on any device. Whether you have employees updating notes on a laptop from a coffee meeting, checking in via mobile from the field, or working from a tablet at home, they should be able to access and contribute information in real-time. A good CRM solution will be always-on and available on iOS and Android-compatible mobile apps.

Choosing a CRM that easily integrates with your existing platforms is essential. The average company uses 1,000 apps — but 70% of them don’t talk to each other. That can hurt a company’s finances and efficiency. Look for a CRM that seamlessly integrates with your existing systems, such as ERP, supply chain, and more. The best CRMs allow your business data to flow freely between your internal apps and external ones, pulling together a single view of the customer and simplifying internal employee administrative work.

Using a CRM will help your business grow. Select a solution that will grow with you. A CRM should have the flexibility to add employees and capabilities as you need them. This is essential because once you select a CRM for your business, you don’t want to have to go through the evaluation process again. That’s why the best CRMs can address current needs and scale as those needs grow.

Trust — including data security, privacy, and transparency — is an essential part of choosing the right CRM system. A CRM stores sensitive customer data and makes sure it is shared with the right teams and people. It’s imperative that your business and customers can feel secure that their data is protected. The best CRMs have powerful security features to protect data from unauthorized access.

This is something we know a lot about, since trust is Salesforce’s number one value. All of our product offerings are built on our multi-tenant cloud architecture, which provides the same core technical resources and security for all of our customers, no matter how big or small. Product and security updates are automatically rolled out to all customers multiple times a year, ensuring their data is kept safe without any action on their end.