What does a CRM do?

A good Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) has all the features needed for it to be the brain behind a remote sales team. Individual agents update information on their leads and clients, and the CRM stores all of the data in one place. CRMs facilitate the quick and effortless management of that information, and provide many solutions for increasing customer satisfaction and lead conversion.

CRMs have several parts to them. These include Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Marketing Automation software. These manage the data in the CRM for the sales and marketing processes of remote sales. An SFA should be able to manage contact and account information, track sales from specific geographic territories, control the ‘pipeline’ of how often new leads are fed to sales reps, and store the product and service catalogue for the business. The marketing automation portion of the CRM tracks email marketing, controls campaign and leads management, captures leads from online sources, and automatically responds to inbound emails.

Customer Relationship Managers speed customer support by following individual cases and automatically assigning them to specific sales representatives. They may also store documents that can be retrieved for use by the agent or shared with leads when appropriate by fax or email.

A CRM is also a powerful analytics tool. This software tracks all aspects of the sales process and can quickly produce custom reports on performance. These reports include a record of how many leads were contacted and what ratio converted, how long an individual sales person stays on the phone with their customers, and the total amount of calls a sales team typically makes in a business day.

High customizability is not only provided in the analytics solutions of a CRM. A well engineered Customer Relationship Manager offers customization of any and all forms sales agents use and display of information. These customizations can even happen on a department by department level, not strictly company wide. This allows each department to have access to the information that is most needed to them, which in turn helps the whole sales process to perform better.

Customer Relationship Managers can also have the remote sales team’s dialer software embedded into it. By connecting the power dialer into the CRM, much of the data that needs to be inputted by sales agents are captured by the system automatically. Additionally the CRM will automatically retrieve and display previously captured information on inbound calls.