What is a CRM and how can it help your business?

Let’s start at the beginning. A CRM is designed to hold the information about several contacts you have within the business.

Think of your contacts within your phone, this is similar to a CRM as you might have the birthday, email or other information saved against that contact. The result of this enables you can to setup reminders for birthdays, easily call your favourite resturant or just email your friend that information from your phone. This is exactly the same within business.

There are many different CRM’s available like Zoho, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Hubspot to name a few.

Important and features that you’ll find within a CRM

There are many things that a business wants to keep track of. Some of these are below:

• Leads
• Business information
• Contacts within those businesses
• Suppliers

For instance you could then hold specific information like these:

• Address
• Contact information including telephone, email, social media and more
• Types of business
• Visibility of conversations over email
• Review how many calls have been between each your users and the individual
• Interactions with these individuals within social media

There are many features within a CRM that you can use. I’ve listed below some that our customers love.

• Opportunity tracking to allow you to build a picture of your current pipeline and help you forecast
• Tasks that can be set with reminders to call your contacts
• Telephone integrations with your VOIP phones
• Automation that can save you time by automatically sending email to your clients that could be reminders or set reminders for yourself
• Integration with emails to see past conversations with your and other users
• Reporting across all data within the system
• Multiple views and layouts to see the data how you want

Why Zoho CRM?

Zoho CRM is one product that allows you to view all this information in a cloud first system. This means you can view, create and update on your phone or computer anytime and anywhere in the world. This allows businesses like yours to work from home or on the road and more.

Within Zoho CRM you can view all leads that have come through any number of sources from website forms, social media, email campaigns and more.

If you would like to read more about Zoho CRM specifically, read our CRM product page.

The main purpose of the CRM is to save you time, keep all your data in place and help you make business decisions based on the information you have.

We’ll be publishing more blogs where we’ll be exploring more around reporting and what BI, analytics and AI can offer to help your business achieve it’s goals.