Customer Relationship Managers are powerful, but they need a supporting cast

Customer Relationship Managers are powerful players in the remote or inside sales world. These software databases record and store all of the important data on each lead and client for a company. They also track and enable all of the processes used to contact those leads, close sales, and keep their clients.

Customer Relationship Manager is often abbreviated to CRM. A company that is only using a Customer Relationship Manager but is not utilizing other telephony software tools is failing to get all it can out of its CRM. Many different telephony software solutions are able to integrate perfectly with a Customer Relationship Manager. Adding a telephony solution will help each sales agent make more contacts, close more sales, and increase revenue.

While there are many kinds of helpful software, the telephone dialer is the flagship of these telephone tools that support a CRM. Phone dialers are available in several variations, though most work on the same principles. Dialers call through a list of lead information automatically and route those calls through to a sales agent. Dialers pull this phone list from the CRM, which is able to generate these lists of leads automatically from forms submitted by the customer on the company’s website or from spreadsheets containing contact information that had been created previously. Without a dialer sales agents would be forced to call through each individual number in the CRM manually. They also would have to suffer through the long list of wrong numbers and busy signals that a dialer would simply avoid routing through to a sales rep.

These two telephony solutions, the CRM and the phone dialer, benefit from other tools available, such as a voice messaging system. This would allow a sales agent to leave prerecorded messages on voicemail machines. Instead of waiting to leave a message of his own he can then move on to the next call while the dialer and CRM continue to leave the message. Email messaging, inbound/outbound call blending, and up to date call analytics are other examples.

When using these software tools to instantly capture leads, route the calls to the agents, and provide the additional features to allow sales agents be more effective at following up more leads are contacted, more sales and closed, and more revenue is produced.