When your company is on its way to expansion, a CRM solution is a great tool that helps your business drive results, improve productivity, and stay competitive.
CRM is an integrated suite of cloud applications that collects and stores all essential data. It provides a centralized platform for organizations to drive a more customer-centric approach by managing customer interactions and prioritizing activities, enhancing the overall experience.
Leading companies who fully utilize CRM reported
● 52% rise in delivered proposals, quotes, or RFP responses with 11% more quotes resulting in orders
● 32% more overall team attainment of sales quota and 24% higher individual quota attainment
● 23% increase in lead conversion
All companies, despite the size and industry, benefit from a fully integrated CRM. To state, here are a few benefits of a CRM solution.
● Improve Customer Relationship
● Integrate Sales and Marketing Better
● Track Results
● Exert more control over sales
● Enable Customer-centric Processes
ROI of an Effective CRM
29% Increase in sales
34% Increase in team Productivity
$8.7 average return for every dollar spent
8-14% amount of sales cycle shortened with the data accessibility
Now that when a CRM has innumerable benefits, why do we need a custom CRM?
Customized CRM can help your business’s public image and yield better benefits through return on investment or cost reduction. We have penned down a few reasons to build custom CRM software for business benefits of a custom CRM to help you understand its significance better.
● Integrate all apps into a single solution
● Cut -costs with custom CRM application
● Total control over software maintenance and upgrades
● Custom back-end and front-end development
● Enhanced productivity
● Scalable Ecosystem
Hence even with various off-the-shelf CRM solutions available, unique businesses demand unique solutions. There is no one-size-fits-all. Here is a guide to building your Custom CRM.
How to Build a Custom CRM?
● Understand your Business Needs
● Decide the Key Features
● Create an MVP
● Design
● Finish Development
● Test and Launch
● Optimize
Understand your Business Needs
The ready-to-use solutions are designed generically, and studying them is the most primary task. Evaluate the functionalities and list the ones that suit your business needs. Further, consider requirements from every department of the office depending upon their usability of the CRM.
It is imperative to list down the most fundamental goals and requirements to develop an effective custom CRM. Here are a few things to start with:
Commercial goals – market strategy and goals
Legal restrictions – privacy policy and data security
Quality requirements – work speed, security, integration with existing database
The next crucial thing is to consider the purpose of the CRM. Are you developing one for the Marketing team, Sales team, or customer service? You can build your CRM to cater to all the teams, but it is essential to address the requirements first.
Marketing |Sales| Service
Pipeline Management
Workflow Management
Documentation Automation
Monitor Campaign effectiveness
Engagement and influencers
Manage Brand reputation
Publish social content
Visitor Tracking
Better collaboration
Intercept buying signals
Customer collaboration
Enriched Insights
Measure customer satisfaction
Pin down your expectations from the custom CRM. It could be Operational, Analytics, or Collaborative. The expectations are not restricted to 1, it could be more, but it is essential to decide on these points first.
Operational – dedicated to simplifying organizations processes
Analytical – dedicated to collect data and provided actionable insights
Collaborative – dedicated to enhancing company-wide communication and information sharing.
If you have already experienced a CRM platform, recall the challenges, the monotonous tasks your teams had to perform manually, and assess how they can be solved with your custom CRM solution.
Decide the Key Features
Now that you are well aware of the expectations from the software, you can decide upon the features that you’d want in the app. The main motive is to create custom software to be able to leverage the unique set of features that align with your organization’s needs.
Here is a list of few Must-have CRM features to get you started
● Add contacts
● Set reminders
● Edit calendar
● Manage tasks
● Generate reports
Design
Do not underestimate the importance of a good design. Always visualize the end-users in mind and how the strategy will help your organization. It is more important to create a design that is more effective than aesthetic. The marketing/sales/ customer service platform will all be different as they all need different functionalities.
Create an MVP
Developing a minimum viable product is the best way to test your custom CRM and optimize it further.
Finish development
Once you have finalized and got the required approvals for your design, you can hand over the task to your development team and finally proceed with the programming. Translate your MVP into the plan of development action. Consider the feedback from MVP and implement the upgrade in the final stage. You have a framework in place — now, it’s time to flesh it out. You need to set complex deliverables and have a project roadmap for this stage.
Do not miss out on considering a mobile application.
Nearly half of the people access the CRM systems on smartphones. In terms of work performance, an increase of 15% in employees’ productivity was noticed due to mobile CRM – ForceManager
Test and Launch
The next step is to conduct Q/A and ensure that your application is free from defects and bugs. Testing is an important step. Once you are sure that the application is running smoothly and confident about its launch, you have to introduce the system into your company’s workflow smoothly — carrying out any sort of database integration you’ll need to get things off the ground. You also have to install your new CRM on all your company devices.
And perhaps most importantly, you need to teach your staff how to use the system. You have to have a solid training infrastructure to ensure that your employees effectively use your CRM.
Optimize
Businesses are constantly evolving irrespective of the industry. And in most cases, there is always some friction in accepting some changes. Although it is challenging, it is equally essential to optimize your CRM as per your organization’s needs. The benefit of having the best CRM software is that it provides complete control over development and can customize it whenever required. Constantly evaluate the performance against your set goals, and fill in the gap when needed.
Sales and marketing cost 15%-35% of total corporate costs, so making an effort to automate for enhanced efficiency is imperative. Sales increased from 10% to 30% due to advanced CRM technology ” according to Harvard Business Review.
Do you want to evaluate the ROI of your CRM software? Here are a few questions you can ask to determine your ROI
● Have your sales increased?
● Are opportunities converting into sales quicker?
● Has your conversion rate increased?
● Is your team more productive?
● Do you have better visibility over the activities performed in the organization?
● Are you getting more collaborative inputs?
● Is your sales team more focused?
● Did you cut monotonous tasks?
● Can you track your leads’ origin and optimize your strategy?
● Are you identifying and selling to more new customers?
Conclusion
If you are not satisfied with your answers to the ROI questionnaire, maybe it’s time to reconsider your current CRM and upgrade to one that suits your business complex needs better.
Implementing a custom CRM solution is imperative in modern Business, but it is essential to be specific and build software that suits your Business needs right. Evaluate your options and choose carefully.
