CRM Requirement Checklist for Businesses

What Are The Must Include Items for CRM Requirements Checklist? A Complete List

CRM development is a lengthy, time-taking, and costly process. Whether you are looking for Salesforce implementation or any other CRM implementation services, each one requires substantial resources.

Therefore, it becomes quite essential for a business – that is looking for CRM implementation & integration services – to have a proper understanding of all the factors that play a vital role in CRM selection.

The selection of the wrong CRM can lead to futile time, cost, and resources. Whereas, the selection of the right CRM helps companies enhance business revenue, growth, sales process, the productivity of a team, and efficiency.

Before we move ahead and discuss the must include items in your CRM requirements checklist, let us first understand how having all these factors will benefit you.

The Benefits of Selecting the Right CRM for Business

CRM, evident to its name, is a solution that enables businesses to strengthen their relationship with customers. Whether you are a small-scale business or a large enterprise-level business, the selection of the right CRM brings a plethora of advantages for you.

With the guidance of the right CRM implementation companies, businesses can improve their various aspects viz. sales, marketing, human resources, inventory, manufacturing, supply chain, etc., in case you are a manufacturing business.

Here are a few advantages of CRM development that a business can leverage by including all features in their CRM requirement gathering checklist –

  • Better customer services
  • Improved sales
  • Enhanced customer retention
  • Detailed analytics
  • Higher productivity & efficiency
  • Centralized database of information
  • Managed communications with the prospects
  • Improved customer segmentation
  • Automated sales reports
  • More precise sales forecasting
  • Improved segmentation of customers
  • Creation of in-depth & visually rich sales reports
  • Scaling up of sales & marketing process

Here are some numbers that show the importance of having the right CRM for a business.

  • 29% increase in sales, post CRM implementation & integration
  • 34% in sales team productivity
  • $8.71 is an average return for every dollar spent on a CRM.
  • 8 to 14% of the sales cycles are shortened & improved CRM data accessibility.

CRM Requirements Checklist That Will Elevate Your CRM Development Experience

Whether you are looking for Salesforce CRM companies or any CRM implementation services provider, before you approach them, make sure you are aware of the following CRM requirements, which will help you finalize the details.

Contact Management

A great CRM system can manage everything that comes under the umbrella of contact management, such as the collection and storage of the data of prospects, leads, and customers. The holistic data storage enables businesses to act on future strategies efficiently.

Through contact management, business users can manage appointments with leads, colleagues, vendors, prospects, and contacts.

Things you can do with the help of contact management –

  • Import bulk data from legacy CRM or spreadsheet to the new one.
  • Easy tracking of past interaction
  • Easily attach relevant files
  • View vital information about a contact like their likelihood to convert, their potential, etc.
  • Easy tracking of customers request via case management module

Client Interaction Tracking

Maintaining interaction is utterly essential for any business and what’s more important than this is managing all the interactions and keeping proper track of each interaction.

The right CRM implementation company can help you leverage this feature, and it will become easy for you to track invoices, purchase history, order status, etc., and many other interactions related to each client.

Here are a few important tools/features of CRM that help you track & manage client interaction:

  • Account management
  • Payment management
  • Interaction management
  • Filtered views
  • Customer segmentation

Database Management

For a big enterprise that deals with billions and zillion of data on a daily basis, it becomes daunting to collect, manage, and process such a humongous amount of data every day.

CRM streamlines this problem of businesses. Its data management capacity is impeccable. CRM enables the centralization of data and links it across the different departments in an organization which leads to easy data accessibility.

The database management capabilities of a CRM include maintaining clear, up-to-date records, avoiding data duplicity, maintaining records comprehensively, linking between databases, and offering mastery over master data.

Marketing Campaign Management

CRM is backed by the power of automation. This advanced functionality of CRM enables companies to efficiently track their marketing activities and marketing campaigns’ performance microscopically.

It offers a company the facility to launch a bunch of email marketing campaigns along with event-based marketing. It saves ample time for a business while it deals with thousands of contacts at different stages.

Following are the major things that a business can do along with marketing management:

  • Campaign designing
  • Autoresponders
  • Triggered email
  • Campaign analysis
  • Competitor tracking
  • Batch email marketing
  • Email tracking
  • Customer targeting
  • Campaign delivery

Lead Management

Every business wants a solution through which it can generate more leads and manage them as per its priorities. With CRM integration & implementation, both the tasks can be easily achievable.

Most of the solutions, such as Salesforce CRM, come with a web form where it can capture & store leads directly in the system and distribute the leads to the respective sales reps based on the pre-defined criteria.

Here are a few important things that CRM streamlines with respect to lead management – lead generation, lead capture, lead distribution, lead follow-up, and pipeline tracking.

Sales Automation

Another important feature of CRM that you should include in your CRM requirements checklist is the sales automation functionality. The sales automation functionality of CRM helps the sales team to manage opportunities and improve collaboration among them.

Through sales automation, a CRM system can help businesses with opportunity management, sales collaboration, territory management, quoting, and profit/loss analysis.

Workflow Automation

CRM brings workflow automation with it. With an advanced platform like Salesforce CRM integration services, one can leverage the outstanding functionalities such as sending a reminder of a scheduled sales call, notifications of new leads, etc. There are many tools in CRM that enable workflow automation. These tools are group calendar, task scheduling & tracking, performance tracking, social CRM, employees records, etc.

BI & Reporting

A good CRM is compact with features like business intelligence that helps businesses in monitoring & measuring customer service factors precisely. Through advanced reporting facilities, a business can get in-depth insight on customer satisfaction, customer retention, and customer experience.

While selecting the CRM, check out these reporting & BI-centric features – sales intelligence, activity dashboard, sales forecasting, sales reporting, business intelligence, and revenue cycle modeling.

Mobile Support

With the advent of technological evolution, the life of CRM users has become easier. This evolution has introduced us to mobile CRM, a functionality that enables users to work on CRM through an app on the go.

All you need is a stable internet connection and a smartphone. The mobile CRM is a must-have feature that you should include in your CRM checklist.

Mobile CRM enables seamless communication between company & clients through SMS messaging, calls, etc.

Security

Security is the foremost concern for any business when they hire a CRM implementation company. The CRM system comes with sturdy security measures where it creates & maintains the log of all the admin & user actions.

It is one of the most important CRM features that one must include in the CRM requirement checklist. While you are on the quest of CRM selection, make sure the platform which you are planning to purchase has strong security measures.

Activity audit trail, time tracking, records protection, data backups, etc., are some of the security-related features that your CRM must have integrated.

In a business, multiple users have to access the CRM system. Make sure that your system is capable to satiate different & customizable user roles, and they can access the platform as per their requirement keeping all security protocols intact.

While selecting the CRM, make sure your CRM has the two most important security features are role-based access and data encryption.

However, with Salesforce CRM implementation, you not only can these two but also many other security features.

CloudMasonry

CloudMasonry is a leading provider of Salesforce consulting services for large and small organizations across the US. We leverage our experience with cloud-based systems to help companies discover more significant value in their digital investments. With experience that spans across all major industries, CloudMasonry combines deep enterprise consulting experience with a collaborative approach to project delivery.

iTechArt Group

iTechArt Group has more than ten years of experience in delivering customer-centric and next-gen Salesforce solutions. Their team comprises 80+ certified Salesforce Consultants, Architects, and Developers who have the necessary skills to dive into your Salesforce implementation needs. They provide a full range of Salesforce consulting services from consulting on implementation, migrating the existing solution to Salesforce or integration with third-party tools, configuration and customization, audit services, custom development, staff augmentation, full support, and managed services.

TechForce Services

TechForce Services is an Australian-based Salesforce consulting company with quality Salesforce services from migrations, integrations, analytics, and staff augmentation. They combine their cross-cloud consulting experience and industry-specific solutions and offer end-to-end digital transformation strategy, consulting, interactive, technology, and operations services across the core verticals of Education, Financial Services, and Government sectors.

Manras Technologies

Manras is a Summit (Platinum) partner, who has won the APAC Partner of the Year award for 2021. We have diverse experience in multiple industries like Real Estate, Hi-Tech, Manufacturing, Insurance, non-profits, logistics, travel, Healthcare, etc.

Stratiform

Stratiform is here to show you there’s a better way. Personal, face-to-face long-term partners that speak your language. They align your business with Salesforce, allowing for growth and the change the future will bring.

CloudKettle

CloudKettle is a Salesforce Gold Partner, Google Premier Partner, and Marketo Silver Partner. We have a decade of experience improving clients’ ROI from Salesforce and tools like Google Analytics, Marketo, Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, and LeanData. The brains behind BANT+C and CloudKettle SafeGuard.

Conclusion

We hope that this post will prove helpful to you. Keep this CRM requirements checklist with you when you are off to finalize the CRM. These points will really come in handy.

For more detail, you can hire Salesforce CRM companies or any other CRM consulting company. The professional guidance will help you make a well-informed and insightful decision.


Girdhari Lal Sharma
Digital Marketing Specialist of Fexle Services