When selecting a CRM, companies should prioritize flexibility and customization to ensure it aligns with their sales strategies, enabling efficient tracking of leads, deals, and customer interactions. Additionally, integrating marketing automation within the CRM can significantly streamline the sales process, allowing for targeted campaigns and better engagement. Ultimately, a robust CRM not only aids in managing sales cycles but also fosters long-term customer relationships, making it a vital tool for success.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a software that helps you nurture your leads, manage your customers, and effectively process your business functions such as sales, marketing, and customer service.
Businesses looking for a CRM for sales must essentially opt for the one that best aligns with their sales strategies. Here are a few criteria that businesses must keep in mind when choosing a CRM.
Flexibility and customizability
Every CRM must be built to efficiently harbor different business functions. When a business wants to use a CRM to primarily handle its sales, the CRM platform must help sales representatives in every stage of a sales cycle–from lead capturing to conversion and retention. Users should be able to accurately track different business processes with modules for leads, contacts, deals, accounts, and other activities, all within the CRM platform. This classification additionally helps identify cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.
In the case of business processes that require extended support, users should be able to build custom functions for their CRM. These functions enable them to access data from platforms with different functionalities, like telecommunication, inventory management, and more, in their CRM.
This ease of flexibility and customization that can benefit all business needs makes a CRM a preferred application for managing a sales cycle.
Marketing automation
Deploying marketing automation right from a CRM platform benefits the sales process in several ways.
Lead segmentation: The ability to segment leads within an advanced lead scoring system that can later be identified with a simplified identification process.
Lead nurturing: Leads can then be efficiently nurtured with the help of personalized campaigns for various lead segments, based on their behavior and preferences.
Marketing performance analysis: It is crucial to track the performance of marketing campaigns to understand their impact and, in turn, yield better ROI. Analyzing it right within a CRM platform will drastically improve the productivity of every team involved in the process.
Enhanced collaboration
For sales, a CRM must be well-equipped for enhanced collaboration between a business and its partners and vendors. With the right built-in tools in a CRM, businesses can reinvent business collaboration by effortlessly managing vendor and partner relationships. The platform should enable customers, vendors, and partners with personalized and secured access to relevant modules of the CRM.
Extensibility
A myriad of applications are used to manage a sales cycle. With the CRM at the heart of business operations, every other application should connect with the CRM for a seamless workflow. The CRM must integrate with third-party apps to accommodate any unique scale-based and industry-specific needs.
Lusha, a B2B database, helps sales teams identify and engage with prospects. Its data enrichment capabilities help sales teams optimize their sales process and quickly manage their sales pipeline. Lusha’s advanced capabilities are best leveraged when integrated with a CRM built for sales.
Zoho CRM, a CRM built for sales, helps businesses increase conversion, accelerate sales, and measure sales performance. Its 360-degree view of customers helps sales teams effortlessly streamline their sales processes. It is designed to be flexible, customizable, collaborative, and extensible. Zoho CRM’s extensibility to integrate with Lusha can help sales teams find accurate emails and phone numbers, enriching Zoho CRM with verified contact data for faster, more efficient sales.
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