Beginners Guide to Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, as the name itself describes its purpose, it can be referred as the software or tools to manage the relationship with current and prospective customers or clients.

In short, CRM is the best bet that helps you understand your customers, clients and your own team.

Types of CRM

• Conversation CRM

The Conversation CRMs are the smartest team email Apps which will turn the messy inboxes across the company into an organized place which eventually helps you in staying in touch with the most important people.

• Leads and Deals CRM

This is one of the most popular types of CRM, where the leads and deals are under the spotlight. This App helps you trace things from first interaction to the finalized deal between you and your contact.

It proves to be very crucial for working together in the sales team.

• Contact CRM

Sometimes the bonds with humans (customers or clients) count most, especially for the sales and this when the contact-centric CRM is what you will need. They are often the simplest and most affordable CRM tools.

• Marketing CRM

If you have a marketing CRM, then you can expect the tool do things automatically for you like sending emails, tagging, or notifying about certain information etc. These Apps tend to be expensive but can help you close the next sale faster.

Terms in CRM

• Contact

Similar to the contacts in your address book, the CRM’s contacts contain personal information of the customers and clients alongside the company you work with or other organizational information.

• Lead

Leads in CRM are the people you want to pay attention to or the ones who seem to do business with your company in the future.

• Opportunity

When the leads turn out to be really interested in your product or service, then they are an opportunity, and to which you will likely want to list the info and track it in the CRM.

• Quote

When your lead turns into an opportunity and you are close to making a deal, then you will have to quote them a price and the product or service they will get for it.

• Deal

When everything has worked out and you sold the products or perhaps say it didn’t work really well and the opportunity fell through, then you will need to track both the profit and loss through deals, which let you figure out the count of won or lost deals.

• Profiles

These would be the people who use the CRM App inside your own company, where each has a particular set of permissions and instructions and only an HR can edit the details on the team profiles.

• Campaign

You will manage your marketing work through campaigns. Each campaign lists the contacts and companies that stand crucial to the marketing campaigns.

• Tag

Like any other tags, this tag also gives you a way to add extra information to a contact, deal or a company. This will eventually help you sort things easily through CRM.

• Activity

This is typically something that happened in the App such as new deals, opportunities or even a message. The Activity usually refers to a Facebook-like news feed that helps to look over things easily.

How much will it cost?

The pricing of CRMs varies with their features and design. If the price of the CRM is your greatest concern, then the free CRM App is the best bet and there are many available with different features and abilities that fit your business.

And, if you are ready to shed your pocket, then you can buy a fully featured CRM for your business, which will cost you around $5 to $75 per month.

How to choose the best for your needs?

As discussed above, there are four main types of CRMs that focus on different features of customer relationship management. Realize your CRM needs and figure out the type of CRM you will need to satisfy them, when completely analyzed, move on to find the best one for your purpose.

And, if you are up to using a paid CRM tool, look on to the reviews and ratings of the customers for that particular CRM tool you would like to buy to know if it is worth it or not.

So, that’s it about CRM that a beginner would need to know in order to start using it.