Whether you’re a Fortune 500 powerhouse or a small business looking to make a mark on your industry, you can benefit from CRM software. To get a clear idea of how valuable a sales CRM would be for your business, you need to understand how CRM helps improve sales.

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Sure, a sales CRM gives you things like automation and real-time data. But it can do so much more. Companies are recognizing this, and seeing the value in using CRMs well beyond improved efficiency and customer satisfaction.

With so many organizations, large and small, turning to CRM, you can’t afford to get left behind. Especially considering that a sales CRM contributes to the foundational goal of every business: increasing profits.

Let’s dive in and find out how!

• What Is Sales CRM?
  • Sales CRM vs. Standard CRM
• Primary Benefits
  • Simplify Sales Processes
  • Attract and Pursue the Right Leads
  • Centralize Sales Operations
  • Shorten Your Sales Cycle
  • Identify Problems in Your Sales Process
• How Does Sales CRM Improve Sales Processes?
• Best Sales CRM
  • Salesforce Sales Cloud
  • Dynamic 365 for Sales
  • Creatio
  • SAP Sales Cloud
  • HubSpot Sales
• Evaluation Questions To Ask
• Next Steps

What Is Sales CRM?

Sales CRM is a solution that helps businesses manage, track and engage with prospects and leads on various channels. It’s about organizing data and optimizing sales processes, allowing you to create high-quality customer experiences.

Why should your business use a sales CRM?

How people use CRMs differs from department to department. Support teams (whose primary goal is to resolve customer concerns) might use CRM systems to speed up the resolution process or create self-help portals. Marketing teams that want to engage clients can use the tool to design and track campaigns.

And what’s the goal of sales teams? To close high-quality deals in a quick and easy way.

Sales CRMs help you do exactly that.

They track leads and streamline pipeline management, helping you improve sales processes. The platforms also automate routine tasks like data entry, monitor team performance and provide a 360-degree contact view so salespeople can focus their efforts on creating customer engagement.

Think of it as handing the infinity gauntlet to your sales team, but instead of wiping half the population, half your sales-related hurdles go away.

Here are some of the features you can expect from a sales CRM:

• Contact Management
• Lead Management
• Account Management
• Sales Automation
• Centralized Repository
• Sales Collaboration
• Pipelines
• Sales Forecasting
• Reports and Dashboards

Sales CRM vs. Standard CRM

A regular CRM system manages your company’s interactions with prospects and customers with the end goal of improving and sustaining relationships with your client base. While enhancing sales activities is one of the priorities, it’s not the main one. A standard CRM aims to boost customer relationships on all fronts and helps marketing, customer service and CX teams as well.

On the other hand, a sales CRM primarily focuses on optimizing sales processes and assisting sales reps in performing their day-to-day duties. Its main focus is to help you make more sales. This is not to say that you can’t use a sales CRM for managing other departments. You absolutely can. However, it boils down to your unique business needs to know whether a robust sales CRM or a standard CRM with a sales specialty would be good for you.

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Primary Benefits

Let’s look closer at some of the key benefits and how CRM helps in sales.

1. Simplify Sales Processes

Jotting down notes on a legal pad or tracking lead information in a spreadsheet used to be enough to get the job done. Not anymore. Even if you’re a small business, you can benefit from the powerful tools a sales CRM offers to manage your data.

Contact management is one of the main CRM features that simplify sales processes. It lets you compile and organize all your information in a single location. Your marketing team doesn’t need to dig through piles of paper to find the list of leads a sales rep scribbled at a tradeshow. No matter who needs access to the information, it’s stored in a central database that keeps everything neat and tidy.

View of a sales dashboard in a CRM. Source

Dashboards can aggregate data into visuals like graphs and charts, using which you can monitor your team’s performance with metrics like:

• How many opportunities did your salespeople convert in the first quarter?
• Which sales reps are the most productive?
• How many deals are in the works?
• Which region shows the greatest potential?
• How did your last email marketing campaign perform?

With your data organized, you’ll never have to play the guessing game. Make informed decisions backed by data, which creates a stronger overall strategy for your business.

2. Attract and Pursue the Right Leads

Lead generation is the starting point for the sales cycle — and a sales CRM. After all, you can’t build and maintain connections with customers unless you first find leads.

Similar to buying a car, you don’t just want any leads you can find. You want the right kind of leads.

Marketing and sales align closely on that goal. The marketing department generates leads and coaxes them through the funnel, and then it’s up to the salespeople to convert those opportunities.

Sounds simple enough, but it’s harder to put into practice. You need to make sure you’re collecting leads from your ideal target market. Otherwise, your sales reps are wasting their time.

To illustrate, if your target clients are realtors, there’s no point in bringing in leads who are lawyers. Of course, every target group has a qualified periphery that you shouldn’t overlook. In this example, that may include lenders, developers and interior designers.

Lead management, a central component of a sales CRM, plays a key role in producing high-quality leads. It uses features like lead scoring, categorization and tracking to manage your sales pipeline effectively.

Sales CRMs help manage deals with ease. Source

One of the biggest challenges content marketers face is attracting quality leads. And even after overcoming that ordeal, without proper lead tracking, it’s a waste. Sales CRMs make the essential task of tracking lead progress easier so your sales reps can step in when a lead is primed and ready rather than jumping the gun and missing an opportunity.

Lead ranking lets the sales team know which leads they need to prioritize, so they can plan their schedules accordingly. This leads to better resource allocation since they can target the leads that are most likely to convert.

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3. Centralize Sales Operations

Salespeople have a lot of data to track. Sales CRMs can help the marketing department maximize the data the sales team enters. When marketing has clear insight into what encourages leads to buy and where they tend to duck out in the sales process, they can develop campaigns that are more effective at attracting customers.

Teams can work more effectively with a collaboration app like this one. Source

Without a centralized system that ensures a smooth information flow, it can be difficult to manage this. Sales CRMs act as one-stop solutions where your team can collaborate with existing tools and communication channels in a single organized platform. Your team can access real-time, accurate customer data anywhere on any device.

The platforms help gain visibility into complex sales cycles at a glance and simplify data with visual dashboards. This means you get an instant overview of valuable sales insights at your fingertips.

Sales CRMs also help streamline your processes and keep everyone on the same page thanks to the:

• Calendar Integrations: Get full visibility into call schedules so the sales team takes advantage of availability and avoids double-booking.
• VoIP capabilities: Manage outbound and inbound calls, as well as automatically log call information so sales managers can quickly view the results for each sales rep.
• Templates: Use templates for emails and documents to make work more efficient.

Finally, a sales CRM keeps a running account of customer interactions. No matter where someone is — from a top-of-the-funnel lead to a newly converted customer — your teams can view each contact’s history. It automatically organizes client data and sends alerts to sales reps for following up with leads. This ensures nothing gets lost during the handoff from sales to marketing or any other transition point.

4. Shorten Your Sales Cycle

With all your data in one place, a sales CRM allows for easier access by the sales team, leading to quicker results. The platform lets you schedule follow-up reminders, notifications and alerts so you don’t overlook any leads. With mobile apps and remote access, sales agents can stay on top of customer communication, ensuring they resolve queries quickly.

Sales CRMs automate administrative tasks, drastically reducing human error. With repetitive manual tasks out of the way, your team can focus on having meaningful interactions with prospects. This enables your sales team to build relationships faster and reach out to more leads, shortening your sales cycle.

Since AI is one of the biggest changes for marketing as of late, you can expect to see more lead management features that use internal and external data to optimize lead scoring. AI in data organization gives salespeople relevant client details so they’re always prepared, even on the go.

You can also customize your platform, settings and views so teams can tailor the CRM in a way that makes sense to them. Track leads, improve your overall process efficiency, and save time and money in the long run.

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5. Identify Problems in Your Sales Process

How many leads did your company generate per region last quarter? If you don’t know the answer or don’t have clear insight into performance and results for your key metrics, chances are you need reporting capabilities.

One major advantage of sales CRM is that it keeps your entire organization in the know. It’s one thing for a sales manager to know what the conversion rate is for SQLs, but business leaders need that information in order to accurately shape the company’s strategy.

With CRM in sales, you can analyze and compile information to provide detailed insights into your sales team and identify where it lacks. It provides reporting features so no one’s left in the dark on exactly how you’re doing for each KPI. Real-time reports like sales funnel analysis, conversion reports, forecasted sales and activity overview reports help immensely in analyzing sales performance.

Get a sales activity overview with CRMs. Source

Not only that, it makes generating those reports as simple as making your morning cup of coffee. And if, like your coffee, you’re also particular about reports, you can customize and filter them based on variables like pipeline stages and activity types.

By automating business processes, shortening your sales cycle and providing top-notch sales forecasting and analytics, CRM in sales ensures higher revenue and profitability.

How Does Sales CRM Improve Sales Processes?

Sales CRMs play a vital role in every step of the customer lifecycle. Here’s how the system can help you enhance your sales:

Prospecting Stage

The first step in sales processes, prospecting, involves finding potential customers and seeing if your products and services are a right fit for them.

In this stage, some of the common challenges you face are:

• Finding high-quality leads
• Organizing vast quantities of data

CRM in sales lets you qualify leads and move them along the funnel with the help of:

• Centralized Database: With all your data in one place, you can easily access real-time information at your fingertips. It enables you to keep data organized so you can avoid data inaccuracies and duplication.
• Prospect Qualification: Filter prospects based on their preferences from a large number of people.

Approaching Stage

At this stage, you reach out to prospects and make contact over different communication channels.

Challenges sales reps face here include:

• Getting in touch with prospects
• Approaching them with relevant information
• Personalizing interactions

Here’s how sales CRM can help you:

• Appointment Scheduling: Set up meetings directly from the system using a built-in caller. You can integrate with popular communication platforms such as email, text and social media. Refer to existing info on the database to personalize conversations and make a good impression.
• Notes: The solution allows you to take notes and attach them to the relevant prospect or lead record, helping you create better interactions in the future.

Lead Management Stage

As the name suggests, this step is about managing leads so you can aim for maximum conversions and prevent good leads from slipping through the cracks.

Some challenges you may face are:

• Tracking contacts
• Generating lead insights
• Building relationships with leads

To solve such issues, sales CRM provides capabilities like:

• Lead Tracking: Track leads and monitor where they are in the pipeline with ease.
• Lead Distribution: CRMs can automatically distribute leads to the right sales reps based on factors such as industry and location.
• Dashboards: Visual dashboards, lists and views enable you to make sense of complex data and gain insights from them.
• Scheduled Communication and Follow-Ups: You can schedule communication and set up follow-ups, alerts and reminders, engaging leads on a regular basis.

Sales Presentation Stage

Even the most experienced sales agents can get flustered when making pitches. This is why preparation, ready access to customer details and a quality demo are vital.

Salespeople can encounter challenges like:

• Being underprepared and disorganized
• Not having the right information
• Lacking the latest prospect details

Sales CRMs help during presentations with tools for:

• Mobile Access: Read up on clients and get real-time updates on any device. You can access all the information you need at your fingertips to knock the presentation out of the park.
• Data Organization: Consolidated databases give a quick overview of necessary data. The solution records interaction history that you can refer to for personalizing conversations.
• Notes and appointment scheduling

Handling Objections Stage

During this stage, understanding customer concerns, acknowledging them and addressing issues are key to resolving objections.

Sales CRMs can help you navigate this tricky process with:

• Tags: Categorize the most common objections you face and target them in a strategic way.
• Deal Categorization: The CRM assigns lead scores and prioritizes high-quality leads. If leads with a certain objection have a pattern of not converting, you can focus on other leads to close more sales.

Closing Stage

This is the final stage where you either make a sale or lose out on hours of work.

Challenges that can cause the latter are:

• Not keeping track of timing and tasks
• Missing out on upselling and cross-selling opportunities

You can use sales CRMs in this step for:

• Reminders: Sales CRMs send you alerts so you don’t forget about leads that need your attention. With real-time notifications, you can monitor tasks that need to be done during closing.
• E-Signing Documents: If your potential customers are in different cities, you’ll need CRM integrations to get the documents e-signed. Convert documents into different formats and store them in a repository.
• Email Automation: It’s easier to target existing customers than to find new ones. Email automation features send targeted communication to a specific set of customers who might be interested during new product launches, allowing you to upsell and cross-sell.

Post-Purchase Stage

At this stage, the focus is on understanding buyer trends and past performance so you can retain customers.

Challenges you may face during this step are:

• Analyzing large quantities of data
• Understanding customer patterns
• Monitoring team activities
• Tracking team performance

Sales CRM platforms enable you to create great post-purchase experiences with capabilities like:

• Activity Overview Reports: Monitor your team’s activities, including calls made, emails sent, deals closed, time spent and tasks completed.
• Goal Reports: Create goals and measure sales reps’ performance to ensure you meet revenue targets. Sales CRMs track team performance and pinpoint areas for improvement.
• AI in Analytics: You can get insights into customer behaviors, preferences and trends with AI. It forecasts deals, optimizes lead scoring and greatly enhances the speed and quality of reporting and sales processes.

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Best Sales CRM

As mentioned above, with the right system, your sales team can improve targeting, shorten sales cycles and centralize operations, among other things. Our team of analysts took the current market and solutions into consideration and picked up the following as the best sales CRMs.

For a more detailed analysis, visit our Jumpstart Platform to compare products based on their scores.

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce provides sales-specific capabilities to both B2B and B2C organizations, regardless of their size. It improves sales operations and optimizes customer engagement with pipeline management, workflow automation, sales forecasting and reporting.

Sales reps and managers can track leads, create and measure goals, manage customer accounts, and deliver post-sales services. It comes equipped with a native app for Android and iOS devices for remote access.

Dashboard Module in Salesforce Sales Cloud. Source

Top Benefits

• Personalize Engagement: The Salesforce engage tool allows sales reps to personalize interactions with customers and prospects. With prospect history and real-time alerts, your sales team can make informed, relevant and quick decisions.
• Create Effective Sales Campaigns: You can design targeted, multi-faceted campaigns across channels like emails, telephone, social media and even webinars. Analyze campaign effectiveness with real-time dashboards.
• Optimize Quoting Processes: What a stethoscope is to a doctor, quotes are to a salesman. Salesforce Sales Cloud expedites the quoting process with automatic data population. You can track contracts through the approval process and receive reminders for renewals.
• Leverage AI: You can use AI sales cloud Einstein to analyze historical data and make future predictions. AI chatbots help respond to customer queries, saving service agents’ time and resources.
• Work Remotely: Your reps can have an office they can take wherever they want. Log customer calls, chase leads, view dashboards and more on the go.

Primary Features

• Contact Management: Give sales reps the ammo they need by letting them access crucial customer information like key contacts and interaction history. The platform provides a centralized view and enables you to associate contacts with accounts and opportunities.
• Reports and Dashboards: You can create custom sales forecasting reports without IT support. Use drag-and-drop fields, filters, grouping and charts to get a real-time view of company-centric metrics.
• Automatic Lead Distribution: Define assignment rules that automatically assign leads to relevant sales reps. Salesforce lets you set up pre-defined criteria based on geography, department or other specializations.
• Sales Pipeline Management: Gain complete visibility into your pipeline and leverage AI to guide reps on prioritizing deals. The platform gives insights about different sales stages and organizes opportunities in a Kanban board.
• Goal Management: This feature helps you define objectives and track progress against goals. Set up sales target quotas, add them to individual user records and measure overall performance.

Limitations

• It has data storage limits.
• Customizing capabilities may cost a lot.
• It doesn’t provide native integration with email clients like Gmail or Outlook and requires another Salesforce product to gain this capability.

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Dynamic 365 for Sales

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales assists businesses with boosting their sales teams’ productivity and performance. You can unify data from multiple sources to gain a 360-degree view of customers. Create multidimensional customer profiles, prioritize sales-ready leads and define highly targeted segments.

It further helps increase sales, enrich customer relationships and improve ROI with tools like predictive forecasting, contextual AI, contact management, financial tracking and interactive dashboards. The mobile version is available on iOS, Android and Windows phones.

Sales Forecasts in Dynamics 365 for Sales. Source

Top Benefits

• Enhance Sales Cycles: Track and analyze pipeline changes and use AI to prioritize leads that are most likely to convert. You can create milestone-based individual or team-level contests to encourage collaboration, healthy competition and participation.
• Generate Interactive Playbooks: Ensure team members are following your organization’s best practices. Guide them on how to respond in case of emergencies.
• Personalize Customer Relationships: Get recommendations on how to move sales forward based on customer interaction data, profiles and insights and ways to secure a warm introduction. You can personalize sales documents using embedded Office 365 tools.
• Manage Leads With AI: Score, qualify and prioritize leads with more chances of converting into opportunities. Capture sales activity insights, track pipeline progress and identify stuck deals.
• Get Contact Recommendations: The solution integrates with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and provides information about name, company, industry, location and years of experience. It uses these details to offer recommendations similar to your target leads.

Primary Features

• Accounts and Contacts Management: Create, edit and get a unified view of contacts along with opportunities, deals and history. Manually add contacts or import them from other systems. You can also associate multiple contacts with one account.
• Dashboards and Reports: Make data-driven decisions and gain actionable insights through charts and graphs. You can also use interactive charts to visualize relationships and build a hierarchy between contacts.
• Lead Management: Dynamic 365 for Sales provides information about qualified and disqualified leads. Use predictive lead scoring to prioritize leads. The solution lets you quickly scan business cards and automatically populates names, job titles and email addresses.
• Activity Management: Get a quick overview and track all activities like calls, appointments, tasks and emails. The platform shows who created which activity and automatically timestamps them.
• Document Repository: Dynamics 365 Sales Professional allows you to store documents on Microsoft SharePoint. You can manage different document types like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. The platform scores a perfect 100 for its document-sharing capabilities, according to our Jumpstart Platform data.

Limitations

• Current connector apps such as Mailchimp and DocuSign don’t work as expected.
• Multiple windows and tabs may confuse new users.
• Too many session breaks may disturb workflow.

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Creatio

One of the best sales CRM in the market, Creatio simplifies marketing, sales and service efforts for seamless operations. It offers mobile access for Android and iOS devices so you can update and add contacts, make calls, and send SMS messages. Key features include contact and lead management, pipelines, dashboards, analytics, and opportunity management.

Contacts Tab in Creatio.

Top Benefits

• Evaluate Sales Efficiency: You can use forecasting to filter and compare sales indicators across time periods. Monitor how effectively sales reps meet their sales quotas and targets.
• Track Website Behavior: Creatio lets you track and identify lead generation channels. Monitor marketing campaigns and view details like pages visited, time spent on the site and website paths.
• Easily Manage Emails: Use email templates to deliver personalized communication to various segments. You can integrate with popular email service providers and track deliveries, open rates, spam and unsubscribers with bulk email analytics.
• Improve Communication: Group customers according to industry, revenue, priority or based on their choice. Dynamic segments let you filter all accounts you haven’t contacted for over a month.
• Save Time: Automate various business activities and reduce sales teams’ workload. You can use a drag-and-drop case designer and reference processes to modify and create new automated internal processes.

Primary Features

• Account Management: Get a 360-degree customer view and access all contacts and accounts from a single database. You can create contact records, view interaction histories and see contacts on a map.
• Customizable Reports and Dashboards: Track current KPIs and get a complete picture of team performance with real-time reports. Creatio lets you visualize statistics through charts and lists using drag-and-drop tools.
• AI in Lead Conversion: The “predictive score” feature lets you assess the probability of successful lead conversions on a scale of 1 to 100. Generate sales insights and identify which deals are likely to get stuck in the pipeline.
• Order Generation: Create orders with ready-to-use templates and invoice clients from a single window. You can track order documents, communications, deliveries and payments.
• Target Management: Track day-to-day operations and overall performance to analyze employee productivity. Set individual, team or company sales targets and monitor important indicators like the average number of activities per day.

Limitations

• It doesn’t provide a built-in telephonic caller.
• Functionality can be slow and has a learning curve.

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SAP Sales Cloud

SAP Sales Cloud helps businesses improve their sales-centric processes like lead management, contract handling, invoicing, forecasting and more. Sales managers can get complete visibility into individual performances.

Mobile accessibility lets you view and edit data on the go. It also provides configurable role-based access permissions. Other capabilities include sales force automation, predictive analytics and customizations.

Team Forecast Tab on SAP Sales Cloud.

Top Benefits

• Leverage Predictive Analytics: SAP Sales Cloud’s embedded AI performs continuous correlation analysis to uncover opportunity win rate, links in seller behavior and other critical metrics. Sales managers can easily and accurately forecast outcomes.
• Share Documents and Reports: Set authorizations for folders, easily migrate documents and create permissions to provide access to content. You can export reports as Excel, CSV or PDF and send files through email or chat.
• Integrate With Multiple Apps: The platform offers integrations with SAP ERP, SAP S/4HANA, Gmail and MS Outlook. This helps ensure a seamless communication flow so team members don’t have to switch between platforms and risk losing progress.
• Customize Platform and Processes: Tailor the look and feel of the system to reflect your company’s colors. Use the theme builder tool to create business-specific themes. You can customize settings, views and dashboards so it fits your unique business needs.
• Easily Handle Contracts: The solution allows you to create contracts manually or use templates by auto-populating necessary fields. Manage contracts, associated specifications and additional agreements. You can attach electronic versions and photocopies of contracts and keep track of contract details and amendments history.

Primary Features

• Appointment Scheduling: You can use the calendar to see your customer’s schedules and colleagues’ appointments. Define visiting hours for an account and request clients to select a time and date within those hours.
• Document Management: Store documents in a centralized database with role-based access. Sort them by ascending or descending order, version, title and date.
• Opportunity Management: Use standard statuses or create custom statuses to identify where opportunities are in the pipeline. CRMs have sales cycles and phases where you need to perform specific activities between an opportunity’s start and closing dates.
• Territory Management: Assign accounts or employees with specific roles to multiple territories. You can define data access based on territory hierarchy and design workflows that automatically assign sales reps to territories.
• Custom Reports: Create and edit reports and assign them to specific business roles. Design question-and-answer survey reports to gain valuable insights into customer preferences.

Limitations

• It lacks basic integrations such as campaign tools, LinkedIn and Outlook.
• The support team isn’t very responsive.
• The mobile app doesn’t have a user-friendly interface.

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HubSpot Sales

HubSpot Sales is a customizable solution that helps businesses capture more leads and nurture prospects with capabilities like sales automation, pipeline management, quote generation and sales engagement tools.

Other offerings include communication management, standardized email templates, custom dashboards and automated reminders. You can also add modules and integrate them with third-party apps via the app marketplace.

Pipeline Management in Hubspot Sales. Source

Top Benefits

• Gain Pipeline Visibility: Get a real-time view of your sales pipeline through visual dashboards. Monitor sales activity, productivity and performance across various stages.
• Work Anywhere: Access contacts, identify leads, scan business cards, create tasks and more while on the move. The mobile app is available for both Android and iOS devices.
• Get Real-Time Notifications: Receive instant alerts when a prospect or lead opens your email, revisits your website, views documents or books meetings. This helps keep track of customer interactions and enables salespeople to quickly resolve queries.
• Visualize Data Better: Use pie, bar, column, areas, line and summary charts to understand large quantities of data. Sales reps can use interactive visualizations to quickly get accurate data, saving time and reducing errors.
• Easily Manage Activities: You can automatically log activities when you set up meetings or calls. View all activities in one place, log tasks through mobile apps and group activities by contacts.

Primary Features

• Sales Automation: HubSpot Sales ensures prospects don’t slip through the cracks with tools like automated sales emails and follow-ups. You can enroll 50 prospects in a sequence at one time.
• Goal Management: Assign goals on an individual, team or pipeline level. You can track goal progress and edit goals to set different targets every month.
• Reporting Capabilities: The HubSpot Sales dashboard has five default reports that provide a sales process overview. Email reports keep track of click, open, bounce and delivery rates. You can customize reports to analyze conversion rates between different customer lifecycle stages.
• Account Management: The solution can automatically associate companies with contacts. Import account details from other CRM systems and get a unified view of accounts with opportunities, tickets, bills and notes.
• Lead Scoring: Collect customer data and automatically qualify leads. You can create lead scoring criteria based on data from form submissions, CTA clicks and email interactions. The predictive score optimizes itself over time and allows you to target leads better.

Limitations

• It doesn’t support automatic order creation.
• Managing data and notes can be challenging due to duplicate copies, and merging is time-consuming.
• Gmail plugin features break quite often and require reinstallation.

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Evaluation Questions To Ask

A sales CRM is powerful. But it’s only useful if you can use it in a way that meets your requirements.

To that end, here are some questions you should keep in mind as you search for the right sales CRM for your company:

What’s the type of CRM you need? There are three types of CRMs in the market — collaborative, operational and analytical. Collaborative CRMs are useful for businesses with multiple locations, operational CRMs help you stay organized and analytical CRMs are for large companies with vast amounts of data. Check out our article Types of CRM Software for more information on which CRM type would be the best for you.

How scalable is the solution? Your goal is to grow your business, so picking a CRM that can’t keep up will backfire eventually. Investing in a new solution isn’t cheap — do your business a favor and make sure you don’t have to do it multiple times because of poor planning.

Is cloud or on-premise deployment better for your company? This depends on a variety of factors, including whether you’re replacing a current CRM, the level of accessibility you need and how much customization you want.

Does it provide mobile accessibility? This feature enables you to work remotely or on the go. Some CRMs in sales let you update data even when offline.

Is it user-friendly? No point investing in a sales CRM that makes everyone’s life harder. Look for intuitive user interfaces and simple design that helps everyone get up to speed quickly and fade into the background so users can focus on their work.

Will it play well with your other business tools? CRM integration with systems like ERP and business intelligence will give you a more robust solution. So make sure you’ll be able to integrate it with key platforms and other tools such as email.

What’s the overall price tag? This can be deceptive. Watch for things like advanced features you need but that cost extra, plans that don’t include upgrades without additional costs and charges for exceeding your storage limits (for cloud solutions).

How customizable is it? Many sales CRMs come with templates and filters that can help you tailor the platform to your unique needs. Identify which customizations would make your sales process easier and be the most beneficial for your team.

How will you move your current data into the new system? Unless you don’t have a sales CRM, you’ll need to ensure that you can load all your existing data automatically because no one has time to spend days on manual entry.

How does your vendor support you? What data safety and privacy measures do they have in place? How quickly do they resolve your queries? Do they offer an industry-specific solution?

Is the solution best-of-breed or part of a larger suite? Getting a sales CRM that’s integrated into the suite may be valuable. But with a vendor that specializes in CRM, you’ll likely get deeper knowledge and enhanced functionality since they can focus their entire effort on a single product.

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Next Steps

The right sales CRM is like a rocket that can blast your sales sky high. It improves productivity, gives you a 360-degree view, increases revenue, helps retain loyal customers and more.

Your journey to implementation starts with finding the right product for your needs. To help you out, we put together a free CRM comparison report that lets you evaluate vendors. With reviews, ratings and pricing, you can more easily determine which sales CRMs are a suitable fit for your business.

How would a sales CRM help optimize operations at your company? Let us know in the comments!