In the world of manufacturing, it might be tempting to think you don’t need CRM software. It’s only helpful for the marketing and sales pros, right? After all, you have a lot of things to focus on as a manufacturer – production, distribution, the supply chain. But if a manufacturing CRM isn’t on the list, you’re missing out on a world of opportunity.

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Manufacturing encompasses many areas, and your company – like the inner workings of a clock – has lots of moving parts. It’s true that you can’t run a successful business without focusing on the core elements and related software (ERP, for example). But systems that might seem unnecessary can make a big difference.

And one of the biggest is CRM.

It’s not just for flashy digital marketing firms that handle things like marketing automation or for companies with a mega sales team. That line of thinking is like saying exercise is only important for athletes.

A CRM for manufacturing can help your business get into shape in multiple ways. Let’s see how.

What we’ll cover in this article:

• Benefits
  • 360-Degree Customer View
  • Greater Visibility Into the Sales Pipeline
  • Improved Customer Service
  • Higher Quality Leads
  • Better Sales Projections
  • Intelligent Production Planning
  • Increased Sales
  • Accurate Demand Forecasting
  • Improved Product Quality
  • Supply Chain Visibility
• Pros & Cons
• Features
• Best Manufacturing CRM Software
  • SAP Sales Cloud
  • Oracle CX Sales
  • Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud
  • Dynamics 365 for Sales
  • Sugar Sell

Primary Benefits

Let’s explore the top 8 benefits of manufacturing CRM software:

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1. 360-Degree Customer View

Everyone and their grandma touts having a 360-degree customer view. And for good reason. It means having the ability to gain complete insight into your customer data across people and platforms.

What does this mean at a practical level?

A 360-degree view enhances collaboration across teams.

Once a customer’s profile is in your CRM software, everyone from sales reps to customer service personnel can access the same information. This smooths the handoff from marketing to sales and ensures customers receive personalized experiences every time they interact with your company.

Overview of a contact profile in Oracle Engagement Cloud.

And with complex B2B purchases, it’s likely multiple people are involved in the process. A CRM for manufacturing enables you to track several contacts within a single account and use an org chart to arrange them based on their status and decision-making power.

A 360-degree view provides more consistency.

A pen-and-paper (or spreadsheet) approach doesn’t guarantee any level of accuracy. It would be too easy for marketing to update a lead’s contact info but forget to tell sales. And when a rep calls the lead, they find out it’s the wrong number. Whoops.

Furthermore, by the time someone comes to your help desk with an issue, they’ve already had multiple touchpoints with your business. But if the service agent doesn’t have that historical information readily accessible, they won’t be able to provide a seamless experience.

For example, say the customer wanted to cancel an order but was accidentally charged for it along with their intended purchase. Having that information at hand would give the service rep insight into the situation and enable them to address it accordingly and in a timely manner.

A CRM solves these inconsistencies by centralizing everything in one place. It gives your teams a dashboard of interactions, activities and relevant info, where everyone gets access to the same, current data. When all teams have access to the same CRM data, they are 14% more likely to provide an exceptional customer experience than companies where only some teams use CRM solutions, according to a report.

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2. Greater Visibility Into the Sales Pipeline

Knowing where deals stand in your sales pipeline is critical. But without a CRM, gaining that insight can be a confusing, jumbled process. Not having this visibility is the business version of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

You can certainly use a spreadsheet to track each lead as it travels through your pipeline, but that’s an inefficient approach. It keeps you from scaling, requires too much manual work and doesn’t provide true visibility.

A CRM designed for the manufacturing industry streamlines and simplifies the process.

A variety of pipeline tools and graphs visualize data so it’s easy to understand. They provide summaries of your entire pipeline for the big picture view as well as let you drill into specific accounts. You can see what stage every opportunity is in and how much each deal is worth.

Example of a visual sales pipeline in a CRM.

With CRM software, you also get pipeline automation. You can define rules that when triggered automatically move leads through the various stages you have set up. The system can also send notifications when leads hit certain milestones or transition from one stage to the next.

This way, your pipeline stays up to date, and no one has to play guessing games.

3. Improved Customer Service

One of the main reasons CRM solutions exist is to improve customer service. Retaining customers starts with ensuring consistent satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction plays a major role in revenue generation. Customers will happily pay more to receive a positive experience when interacting with your brand. In fact, 66% of customers are willing to pay more for a great experience, according to a Salesforce report.

And when your customers aren’t satisfied, you need to be proactive in addressing their concerns in order to put your company back in their good graces.

Organizing customer data is one crucial area where CRM software improves customer service. A customer won’t appreciate it if they’re on hold for 10 minutes as your service agent searches high and low for what should be a simple answer.

Say a customer wants to know the history of warranty claims over the last quarter. With a CRM, your customer service rep can look up that information in seconds and quickly relay it. No annoying holds while the agent goes on a wild goose hunt.

CRMs also come with case management. This allows your company to create a ticketing system for tracking, updating and resolving issues. It gives customers a way to bring attention to problems and ensures no case slips through the cracks or gets forgotten.

When it comes to customer service, expectations are high. Shep Hyken, CAO of Shepard Presentations, explains. “The service a customer has is being compared to the best service they received from anyone.”

So even if your company is in a deep B2B vertical, your customers will expect the same level of experience they receive from companies like Amazon. Without a CRM, that becomes a tall order.

4. Higher Quality Leads

Better sales processes means more customers, and more customers equal higher revenue. But improved sales processes also means you have to identify quality leads.

Manufacturing CRM software helps you do just that via lead management. When your sales team tries to find new distributors and/or retailers to partner with, they need to focus on the ones most likely to convert.

As you target leads with marketing campaigns, the CRM tracks their responses and interactions. The system presents this data via tools like lead scoring to show which contacts are worth pursuing based on their likelihood of converting.

Example of how a CRM scores leads to point sales reps to the best contacts.

This lets your sales team hone in on the best opportunities. That makes them more productive and your company more profitable.

5. Better Sales Projections

Accurately predicting what’ll happen in the future is one of the hardest parts of any job – just ask your local weatherman.

Luckily for your sales team, a manufacturing CRM can do most of that work for them. CRMs track every order your customers place so you have a full record of what each customer ordered, when they placed the order and how much it cost.

Using these records and platforms such as business analytics tools, a CRM can generate accurate sales forecasts. Here’s how:

1. It is used to find the buying patterns of each customer, such as peak times and down times.
2. Then it finds the long-term trends, such as year-over-year sales increases or decreases.
3. After compiling and analyzing the data, the system generates accurate sales projections that you can use for future planning.

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6. Intelligent Production Planning

Speaking of future planning, those sales projections help more than just your sales team plan for the year ahead. They also support production planning efforts.

After all, you base what you produce on what you sell. If you don’t have accurate estimations of what you’ll sell, production planning becomes a string of wild shots in the dark.

However, knowing the amounts of each product ordered and when they were ordered lets you create a detailed production plan. Instead of leaving it up to guesswork, you can pinpoint which products you should make, and when.

Those sales projections have a trickle-down effect. By helping production planning they also help budgeting. When you have a detailed production plan laid out for the year, you can properly budget based on the corresponding production costs. And with a proper budget in hand, you can better plan for future hires, equipment upgrades and other line items.

7. Increased Sales

A CRM for manufacturing leads to increased sales. This is thanks again to your sales projections. Having a window into customers’ buying patterns enables you to leverage that data to increase sales.

Historical data reveals the peak order times and downtimes for each customer. And with the CRM data mapped out by big data analytics tools, your team can make informed decisions not only when to sell, but also what to sell.

Your sales team or customer success managers can then use this information in upselling and cross-selling, using the crunched numbers to identify the best times and products for cross-selling and upselling.

For example, a customer’s peak ordering time is a good entry point for both cross-selling and upselling, since the customer’s already in a buying mindset. And if the additional purchase adds value and is relevant, you’re even more likely to boost the sale size.

8. Accurate Demand Forecasting

Product shortage and excess inventory are two opposite ends of the spectrum businesses like to steer clear of. But poor inventory control and lack of forecasting tools can lead you straight to either of these gorges.

Manufacturing CRM software analyzes your sales pipeline to provide you with real-time forecasts. With this data, you get a better understanding of the deals you have and opportunities coming your way. You can leverage it to preemptively plan, schedule and allocate production resources.

Moreover, manufacturers can use these predictive powers at hand to swiftly meet customer demands and get ahead of the competition.

9. Improved Product Quality

Consistently high product quality leads to more customers and an increase in revenue. That’s business 101.

But how do you ensure that? By listening to your customers.

CRM puts you in direct contact with end-users of your product so you can know how they feel about your offerings. This robust feedback mechanism translates into rapid product modifications in accordance with current market needs.

10. Supply Chain Visibility

Finally, manufacturing CRM software helps effectively manage your supply chain. It provides comprehensive insights into inventory management, order processing, operations, warehouse management and distribution chains.

With real-time data to influence supply chain decisions, you can better manage production schedules and maintain material supply. The result? Products move quickly from the manufacturing site to the market.

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Pros and Cons

The benefits we just covered are some of the main perks of adopting a CRM. But that begs the question: how can you know if a CRM is the right choice for your business?

There’s not one right answer. Whether a CRM would help your company depends on a host of factors — particularly your unique needs.

With that in mind, here are some criteria to keep in mind as you evaluate the pros and cons of investing in a manufacturing CRM:

• How are you managing leads, contacts, orders, customer service issues and other CRM activities? If you answered spreadsheets and notepads, a CRM is probably a good idea.
• What’s the potential ROI? As with any software purchase, you need to justify the investment.
• Do you have CRM functionality via an ERP system? If so, does it actually contribute to your operations or is it gathering digital dust on a forgotten virtual shelf?

If you have an ERP in place and it has CRM capabilities, you might be wondering, “Isn’t that enough?”

While it’s true that ERP systems can handle many CRM activities, it’s important to distinguish between traditional ERPs and modern ones. Traditional ERPs are known for being all-in-one solutions. They may come with an add-on here or there, but you generally receive the whole package in one system. They focus on a lot of different business areas, and as such, the vendor may not have time to develop deep CRM features.

However, most modern ERPs are comprised of pick-and-choose modules that can be sold as part of the ERP or as a standalone. The CRM capabilities of these types of ERP are much more comprehensive and effective.

If you’re still using a traditional ERP, you’re likely better off implementing a true CRM and integrating it with your ERP.

However, small businesses in particular can benefit from using the CRM component of their ERP, whether it’s traditional or modern.

David Dozer, CTO of Blaze IT LLC, says, “For most SMBs, this out-of-the-box functionality suits their needs, is significantly more cost-effective than paying for third-party CRM and usually integrates with the ERP seamlessly because it’s already a part of it.”

Key Features

The manufacturing industry is huge and has particular needs. As such, many CRM vendors have solutions tailored for manufacturers. Google “manufacturing CRM” and you’ll see a host of products pop up on the first page.

The majority of CRM systems have core capabilities and features – things like lead management and a database for storing contact info. But manufacturing has some unique demands.

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Here are several key features to look for in your manufacturing CRM:

• CPQ (configure-price-quote) application: This is a must-have if you sell highly customizable products. It includes features such as a product catalog, quote management, automated quote generation and inventory tracking.
• Channel management: Capabilities here range from activity streams to loyalty programs, enabling you to manage relationships with distributors and other partners.
• Forecasting tools: Algorithms can predict future demand so your operations stay on top of inventory needs rather than always being a step behind in the production process. Forecasting also lets you predict sales projections.
• Integration options: You’ll want the ability to connect your CRM with your ERP for a smooth data flow and holistic approach. You may also need CRM CPQ integration if your system doesn’t have built-in CPQ capabilities.
• Business process management (BPM): This feature enables you to build workflows and automate processes for more efficient operations.
• Sales territory management: Manufacturing CRMs offer location-based customer data to make way for market segmentation. Sales managers can monitor reps assigned to specific territories and make adjustments for optimized account planning.
• Dashboard and reports: Custom dashboards and reporting capabilities provide you complete visibility into your network of distributors, suppliers, resellers and customers. You can identify new trends and opportunities, monitor sales goals, analyze team performance and more.

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Best Manufacturing CRM Software

Now that you have a good grip on what to look for in a CRM for manufacturing and how it can help you, let’s dig into our analyst-picked
list of the top five systems you should consider.

SAP Sales Cloud

SAP Sales Cloud is part of the suite of customer experience (CX) solutions from SAP. Suitable for any size business, it accelerates the buying process to help grow business revenue and engage customers.

SAP Sales Cloud offers a sales overview on each account or product.

Top Benefits

• Buying Center: This tool lets you easily track and visualize contact-to-contact and contact-to-employee relationships.
• Influencer Map: Understand influential contacts and employees, the number of total deals and ongoing deals. This score is calculated using important KPIs based on weightage and the influencer’s position.
• AI-Based Lead Scoring and Routing: This feature streamlines lead routing and ensures leads are assigned to the appropriate sales reps. Using a model that’s trained from historical sales data, it finds patterns and key contributors to predict the likelihood of a conversion.
• Imaging Intelligence: You can upload planograms to compare them to pictures of product displays from customer sites and then make adjustments based on differences spotted.
• SAP JAM Collaboration: You can reduce screen switching by bringing internal sales and external contacts together on a single platform. Groups let users strategize, invite customers to join the groups and share content.

Primary Features

• Account Management: Capturing, monitoring, storing and tracking all business information about customers, prospects and partners provides a complete view. It also offers geo-tracking, social media interaction monitoring and an offline mode. All users have the access they need thanks to direct links to accounts, contacts or individual customers in workflow email templates.
• Lead Management: A robust set of capabilities include workflow triggers and rules, automatically assigned activity plans, lead ranking based on multiple criteria, lead import via API, and statutes for pipeline visibility. You can check for duplicate leads, make manual changes, scan business cards, create sales quotes and orders, and more.
• Sales Target Planning: Carry out top-down sales planning from top-level managers to individual team members. Extended features include target plans based on different dimensions such as territory or sales unit, real-time pipeline performance tracking, modifiable plan structures, and integration with Excel to perform the necessary calculations.
• Sales Forecasting: You can create forecasts and estimate future sales based on the value of opportunities or products to be sold. The system lets you update forecasts based on opportunity changes, create aggregate forecasts and use reports for real-time monitoring. The SAP Cloud for Customer Excel add-in allows you to download and edit forecasts.
• Competitor Management: This feature lets you create and maintain competitor information, classify the level of competition, create products and product surveys, and maintain product comparisons for competitor offerings.

Limitations

• Doesn’t offer a free trial.
• Doesn’t offer a native mobile app for Android.

Oracle CX Sales

Oracle CX Sales is a SaaS and self-hosted customer experience platform that offers customer data intelligence and guided experiences for lead capturing and nurturing. It helps create sales plans that align with business goals. Third-party data and real-time market signals provide depth to customer views. The platform fits well for all sizes of companies and types of industries.

Oracle Sales Cloud offers a 360-degree view of the account details.

Top Benefits

• Asset Calendar: With a central place to display appointments, view owners and toggle between different views and an agenda, the sales team can operate more efficiently and prevent double-booking.
• White Space Analysis: Shows a breakdown of potential revenue coming from current opportunities, leads and recommendations based on similar customer purchasing patterns and the Sales Predictor feature.
• Predictive Win Probability: Sales reps can make smart choices about which leads to prioritize with automated predicted win probability, which is based on adaptive intelligence, system learning and other data science capabilities.
• Business Intelligence: Territory teams can leverage analytics to aggregate data for reports and generate hierarchy-based KPIs. It offers 500+ metrics and 100+ prepackaged reports to surface actionable business insights.
• AI-Based Data Collection: A data engine automatically extracts company-level data and signals to help you prioritize and rank target companies and accounts. You also get enriched customer records powered by natural language processing and machine learning, along with a blend of online, offline and third-party sources to create a single customer view. This helps deliver personalized engagements at any point in a customer’s journey.

Primary Features

• Activity Management: Teams can track tasks, follow-ups, appointments and customer calls to provide a consistent experience. It supports creation of auto-generated task templates, overdue items and a list of activities. Features you can leverage include ad-hoc call reports, sales activity tracking, calendar agendas, notes on retail visits, notifications, performance tracking and shareable call reports.
• Territory Management: Using what-if analysis, you can create complex territories based on factors like geography, business units and product lines. You can automatically assign salespeople to accounts, territories, partners and more. Additional features include territory modeling, gap and overlap reports, and alignment previews.
• Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ): The platform helps optimize pricing and discounting while creating proposals configured, priced and quoted for products and services across all sales channels. Features include guided selling, dynamic workflows to support pricing activities, a document designer complete with e-signature, and contract management with automated approval routing. It can integrate with CRM, ERP, web services and B2B commerce systems.
• B2B Commerce: Omnichannel self-service and digital experiences offer flexibility to meet complex needs with features like guided search, merchandising, personalization, promotions, native A/B testing, and buying journeys with integrated commerce and CPQ. You can manage direct-to-consumer and wholesale buying, as well as leverage B2B-specific tools like custom catalogs, approval workflows and contract pricing.
• Reports and Analytics: With over 150 prebuilt reports for role-based organizational use, you have a lot of options. A drag-and-drop editor simplifies admin tasks, and the UI offers different page types that include real-time insights, drill-down dashboards, predictive analytics and more.

Limitations

• Doesn’t support a kanban view of opportunities.
• Doesn’t support Dynamic Choice List on mobile.
• Doesn’t allow updating the unit of measurement for saved products.

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Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud

Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud is a SaaS-deployed manufacturing CRM platform that offers a consolidated view of contracts, a unified view of forecasts and a Service Cloud that centralizes customer activity data. It provides a well-rounded set of features including a partner portal, AI functionality, automation and sales quotes, and works well for businesses of all sizes.

Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud offers a unified view of metrics and specifications.

Top Benefits

• Real-Time Collaboration: With tools like Community Cloud and Salesforce Chatter, the system provides a lot of options to manage internal and external collaboration. You can offer branded sites and partner communities, facilitate knowledge-sharing, stay on top of projects, and centralize collaboration on service and sales activities. It also offers a customizable partner template for manufacturing.
• Partner Portal: Partners can log in through a separate website, see only the data that’s relevant to them and edit permitted information. You can customize portals and configure them to meet functional and security needs, including enabling single sign-on.
• AI-Powered Assistant: Einstein Analytics for Manufacturing gives account teams access to a customizable platform for discovering real-time insights for account health, product penetration, price information, sales agreement progress, forecast performance, customer interactions, demand insights and more. It includes dashboards you can embed and access in Salesforce Lightning.
• Third-Party Integration: Extend what you can do by connecting with Outlook and Google Apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Sheets, and Slides. APIs let you connect external systems and data with the platform.
• Application Marketplace: With convenient access to paid and free application components and solutions across various categories such as finance, sales, marketing, ERP, HR, analytics and more, it’s easy to extend the platform’s capabilities. Developers, partners and customers can build and sell their own applications and pages as well.

Primary Features

• Account-Based Forecasting: With collaboration, forecasting, planning, sales and finance available in real time on a central platform, it’s easier to develop revenue and volume forecasts. It offers email notifications, real-time adjustments, custom fields, suggested next steps, formula customizations and more.
• Sales Quote Management: Create a quote from an opportunity and its products by leveraging standard or customized quote templates from quote records. Any changes to line items in the quote sync with products on the opportunity and vice versa.
• Product and Price Book Management: This set of features lets you manage product schedules, develop custom pricebooks, create a custom collection of products, define payment and delivery cycles, and more. There’s also a base catalog of all the items and services you sell that shows their standard prices.
• Lightning App Builder: Here, you can build applications and custom pages for mobile devices using a library of prebuilt and custom components in a drag-and-drop environment.
• Workflow and Approval Automation: Set up approval automation for any process, such as workflow tasks, automatic email alerts, automatic field updates, task auto-assignment and much more. A drag-and-drop interface simplifies building business processes.

Limitations

• Salesforce Inbox isn’t backed by analytics.
• Mobile browser doesn’t support Lightning App Builder.

Dynamics 365 for Sales

Microsoft’s Dynamic 365 for Sales is a sales automation solution that offers adaptive, prebuilt features to support sales and reporting. Actionable insights help filter inputs and prospects for business needs. With the option to deploy as a standalone product and or as part of the Microsoft 365 suite, it fits well for all sizes of businesses. The platform is optimized for mobile apps as well as desktop applications.

Dynamics 365 for Sales provides a consolidated view of sales.

Top Benefits

• Business Card Scanner: This built-in feature allows capturing prospect and customer information on the go and automatically populates data to save time. Business cards are stored as images in the lead or contact record.
• Power Apps: A suite of applications, services, connectors and data platforms aids building custom applications, including AI-infused chatbots, without writing code. You can store data either in the underlying data platform or in various online and on-premises data sources.
• Microsoft Office 365 Integration: Collaborate on deals across functions and geography with access to tools for email, RFPs, quotes, deal analysis, customer information and document sharing. There’s a chat hub, shared workspaces, integrated access to sales records, document storage, automatic doc sync, personal dashboards, a mobile app and more.
• Power BI Integration: The system works in-hand with Common Data Service applications to provide a self-service analytics solution that automatically refreshes data for a complete, up-to-date view. It’s easy to unify data from different sources with dataflow templates. You can analyze sales data thanks to an integrated package of prebuilt BI dashboards and reports, which provide real-time visualizations.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Integration with this LinkedIn tool lets you sync info to Dynamics 365 for Sales, match leads to LinkedIn profiles and validate contact records, streamlining sales-related tasks. It also has useful icebreaking conversation starters for getting in touch with a contact.

Primary Features

• Quotes, Orders and Invoices Management: Sales reps can create a quote, order or invoice from an opportunity record, with the option to send a draft initially. The module includes the ability to view sales transaction records and expected revenue. It also provides pricing behavior settings. Current pricing, which comes from the product catalog, changes a product’s price across invoices. The prices locked option ensures a product or service remains at the agreed price even if the price changes in the catalog.
• Sales Forecasting: You can define and edit forecast details, download active forecasts to Excel, leverage premade or custom templates, track performance against targets, anticipate sales, and reallocate resources. It includes bottom-up forecasting and workflows that automatically updates statuses based on changes.
• Product and Price List Management: This feature lets you create product bundles or product families of similar products for upselling and cross-selling. It supports discounts, multiple price lists to maintain price structures for different regions, unit groups, descriptions and more. A price calculation tool determines the values for the price fields in an opportunity, quote, order or invoice.
• Workflow Automation: Automate business processes from creating, updating and assigning records to sending emails, reducing time-consuming manual tasks. It has background workflows, which apply automation to resources as well as real-time workflows for immediately viewing results or canceling an operation. It also offers templates, bulk actions and Power Automate, which enables workflows across apps to sync files, receive notifications, collect data and more.

Limitations

• Email finder not supported.

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Sugar Sell

Sugar Sell is a customer relationship management platform for sales professionals that offers reliability and tech support for business growth. It offers SaaS and self-hosted deployment and can be as a standalone solution or as part of the Sugar CX suite of products. It fits well for all sizes of businesses from various domains.

Sugar Sell provides all the information needed for assistance on one dashboard.

Top Benefits

• Customization: When it comes to tweaking the platform, there’s a lot you can customize – the self-service portal, layouts, relationships, fields, job schedulers, sub-panel visibility, user access, mobile app layouts and more.You can leverage a builder to create, deploy and export custom modules.
• Data Intelligence: Thanks to an add-on tool called Sugar Hint, you can automatically gather data from a variety of social, news and business sources for key insights on prospects and customers. On top of that, you get real-time alerts through multiple channels, a history of interactions and insights into finances, accounts and more.
• Revenue Analytics: Sugar Discover, a customer analytics tool, offers a pre-loaded set of metrics, analytics and KPIs that analyze sales and marketing metrics for unexpected changes and emerging trends. It learns normal patterns and relationships between attributes in the data so you gain real-time insights. Complete with an intuitive and interactive data exploration tool for drag-and-drop query creation, filtering, formatting, sharing and collaboration, it’s useful for those without technical know-how.

Primary Features

• Sales Forecasting: A detailed view of the pipeline makes it easy to get real-time updates on performance about individuals, teams and sales quotas. It also predicts best case, likely and worst-case scenarios and offers drill-down capabilities to track team progress. You can export forecast worksheets as well.
• Workflow Automation: A BPM and workflow tool encapsulates complex and multi-step flows to automate and streamline processes. You can design and deploy processes using a graphical tool without coding, as well as get snapshots of ongoing workflows and tasks via configurable dashboards. Monitoring and audit tools help with troubleshooting.
• Reporting and Dashboards: Customizable, real-time dashboards and reports make it easy to monitor accounts, contacts, calls and more. On the report side, the system lets you duplicate, schedule email delivery and export results in a CSV file. There are also target lists based on various criteria such as age group, industry and more.
• Target Management: With this feature, you can manage prospects who aren’t qualified leads. You can convert them into contacts, opportunities and accounts and include them in marketing campaigns, tracking their activity via their record. A list view displays all target records, with search and filter capabilities for locating specific targets.

Limitations

• Can’t import messages larger than 10 MB.
• Doesn’t provide partner relationship management and partner portal capabilities.

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What to Do Now?

We’ve looked at the benefits of CRM for the manufacturing industry, how to determine if your business can benefit from a CRM, what essential features to look for and some of the top solutions available. So what comes next?

We recommend that you start by exploring the main CRM features. This will give you a better idea of what to expect from your average CRM vendor.

From there, you can begin researching potential solutions beyond what we covered here. Our free CRM comparison report lets you compare the top products side by side. You can adjust the requirements to find products that fit your specific manufacturing needs, such as a solution that includes a CPQ module.

Manufacturing involves a lot of moving parts and produces loads of information that require vigilant tracking. Investing in a CRM designed for the manufacturing industry can bring a lot of benefits to your operations and your bottom line.

What top features are you looking for in manufacturing CRM software? Let us know in the comments!