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Choosing the best CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution for your business can feel daunting —?but it doesn’t have to be. To help, we've put together this comprehensive guide on the key factors to consider as you put together your CRM comparison plan.

So whether you're a small business that’s just getting started on your CRM journey, or a large enterprise looking for a more robust solution, read on for everything you should know about choosing the best CRM for your business needs today and tomorrow.

What we’ll cover:

• What is CRM (Customer Relationship Management)?
  
• The best CRM features
  
• The best CRM benefits
  
• The best CRM AI innovations
  
• The best CRM customer support for your team
  
• Choosing the best CRM pricing for your budget
  
• The best CRM for your business
  

Customer relationship management,?or CRM,?helps businesses track, update, and share information to make the most of their interactions with customers and prospects. It’s a way to break down siloes between teams and share the most update-to-date knowledge and insights across a company. CRM uses data and AI to help increase profitability, serve customers, and improve productivity.

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The best CRMs can be used by all of your teams, including sales, marketing, digital commerce, and customer service. The ability to share your data across these groups provides all of your employees with a unified view of your customers, helping improve customer experience and simplify process, and improve profitability. The first step in choosing CRM software is to be clear about what you want to achieve.

Throughout the customer lifecycle, from sales through customer service, it’s essential for every team member to have complete, up-to-date information about your customers. The best customer relationship management tools make it easy for everyone to see information like customer contacts, past purchases, and service inquiries in a single place. A single source of truth makes it easy for teams to find the information they need, without having to track down people in another office, a different time zone, or who might have left the company.

At its core, CRM’s purpose is to help build and track customer relationships. This has become even more essential as the ways we engage with customers have multiplied — calls, email, websites, apps, social media, and more. The best CRM tools can track customer journeys and provide insights. Adding artificial intelligence (AI) to your CRM can provide even more ways to attract new customers, nurture existing ones, win more deals, provide customer support, and build loyalty.

A CRM that provides easy access to data makes everyone in your organization smarter about how to find, win, and support customers. A CRM with robust reporting features will help you figure out where your focus should be and highlight opportunities for improvement. Look for reporting capabilities that offer both at-a-glance views into the health of your business and customization options that let you pinpoint metrics that are most relevant to your needs.

Workflow automation is a way for a CRM to perform repetitive tasks on its own, freeing up employees to do more high-impact work. These workflows automatically spring into action when a specific step is taken by a customer or employee. For instance, your CRM can send out personalized follow-up messages to sales leads after a set number of days, while marketing workflows can deliver custom offer notifications when a prospect creates an account. CRM automation for customer service can even identify and assign a new support case to the right agent, or power self-service support functions like chatbots.

CRM workflows aren’t just for customers, though. Productivity platforms like Slack can automate internal processes, such as sending weekly team reminders, pulling quarterly reports, or creating team request forms.

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The benefits of CRM platforms can impact every aspect of your business, and everyone who interacts with you —?customers, employees, vendors, partners, and more. Not only do the best CRMs help keep customer relationships strong and businesses productive, but they're easy to use and can grow along with your team.

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.

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AI is more than a buzzword. It's become an essential part of most industries — and CRM is no exception. In fact, CRM is an area that’s leading the way. Salesforce’s Einstein is purpose-built for CRM and is just one example of trusted AI that is able to help businesses manage their customer relationships. Here, we’ve put together just a few ways it can help.

Artificial intelligence can take the guesswork out of prioritizing which sales leads to pursue by analyzing prospect and customer data and identifying which leads are most likely to convert. This allows businesses to focus their efforts on the most promising leads, leading to increased sales, productivity, and revenue.

We’ve already mentioned automation a couple of times, but AI can bring another level of productivity to administrative tasks that take up valuable time. That could include scheduling times for customer service to call back or assisting someone who is looking for help on your website. All this can free up sales and customer service representatives to focus on more strategic tasks.

AI can analyze your data to predict customer behavior and identify potential problems. These insights allow businesses to address customer issues and improve customer satisfaction proactively.?They can also help teams project sales results and inventory needs.

AI agents can provide 24/7 customer support, answering questions and resolving issues quickly and efficiently. Always-on customer support can improve customer satisfaction and reduce the cost of customer service.

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Choosing a CRM that provides the customer support you need is an important part of your CRM decision. Levels and types of help can vary — even from the same provider — so it's vital to evaluate and compare the available options. A higher-touch level of interactive support can be beneficial for businesses that are new to using a CRM or have complex requirements. Alternatively, businesses with limited needs or more experienced users might prefer to move forward with more basic services.

There are generally two types of customer support: The first is interactive, which lets you reach out for help with specific questions or issues. The other is training and documentation, which is more of a self-service offering. Many CRMs allow businesses to choose one option or opt in to both.

Most CRM providers offer a toll-free support number and live chat options to speak directly with a customer support specialist. They may also have chat bots that direct you towards the information you need, or provide email addresses where you can reach out for answers on specific topics. Sometimes there is an option to create a case that you can revisit anytime to get a check on how your query is progressing.

Higher-touch offerings include “call me now” features, where you can fill out a form and receive a call back from a product-specific engineer within minutes. Other options include 24/7 help lines. There are even options to have dedicated teams on-call who your employees can reach directly.

Another type of support is one that provides users with CRM courses so they can proactively learn more about the product. These enable them to get a better understanding of the platform and perform their own research before problems arise. This method also lets them learn and become experts at their own pace.

Salesforce offers Trailhead, a free, self-service platform that has helped millions of users learn new skills, earn professional credentials, and connect to mentorship and job opportunities. These types of offerings help employees improve their skills and empower them to solve issues on their own.

Documentation is another helpful way for CRM users to troubleshoot their questions. Help portals or documentation sections on a company’s website can offer detailed descriptions that explain how features work and common questions that arise.

To assess the quality of customer support, you can read reviews and testimonials from existing customers or conduct your research by contacting the support team directly with a specific inquiry. This can give you a firsthand experience of the level of support you can expect, the support team’s responsiveness, and whether the cost of extra support will pay off for your business.

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No matter the size of your company, pricing is always important and will be a big part of your consideration. CRM pricing can vary significantly, and selecting a solution that offers the best value is essential. Here are a few things to consider as you evaluate different pricing structures.

Keep in mind that there may be startup costs involved. Luckily, an online CRM software requires far less effort from your IT team since there’s no installation at the start or as new updates are released. All installation and updates happen in the cloud, removing the need for CRM downtime, freeing up IT for other needs, and getting rid of maintenance work that often needs to take place and be managed on the weekend, overnight, or holidays.

Different pricing models are available depending on the type of CRM option you choose. They include subscriptions, perpetual licenses, and pay-as-you-go. Choose a pricing structure that best aligns with your needs and budget.

Don’t forget to think big. Just because you don’t need certain features or a lot of seats now, doesn’t mean you won’t in the future. Select an option that won’t lock you in to a specific number of users.

Not all CRMs are created equal. Some offer more features and functionality than others. Choose a CRM with the features you need to support your business and, just as importantly, make sure you aren’t forced to pay for features or seats you won’t use.

Even the most user-friendly systems may lead to questions, especially when your team begins using a new tool. The type of support options provided by a CRM vendor is important. If you can’t use your system to the fullest, what’s the point? Choose a vendor that offers a level of support and training that your team is comfortable with, so that your employees can stay on top of the latest features and reach out should questions arise.

The ROI of a CRM can be challenging to calculate, but it’s an important metric to consider. A CRM can generate ROI by leading to more sales, reducing costs, and improving customer satisfaction. By calculating the ROI of a CRM, you can make an informed decision about whether or not it is a worthwhile investment for your business.

When you’re looking for the right solution, it’s good to ask around and find out what’s being said by the people who know CRM best. One way to do this is by reading online review sites to see who is happy with their CRM and which features are most useful.

Another avenue you may want to explore is looking into who is winning awards for best CRM, and why. Awards aren’t everything — but there’s a reason companies win them. Look for repeat winners who can show consistency and staying power, like Salesforce, who's been named IDC’s #1 CRM year after year.

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