Picking the Best CRM Software for You- An Insider’s Opinion
By You will encounter many surprises when starting up your own company, as I learned from my own experience. Some of them are welcome, some of them are simply overwhelming. The best thing you can do for the growth of your company is to remove as much of the guesswork as possible, I discovered. One way to do that is to keep your leads organized.
The success of your company is reliant on one thing- sales. As such, it is of utmost importance that you grant yourself every opportunity possible to make a sale. CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, software is an effective way of tracking and keeping your leads organized. When picking a Customer Relationship Management solution, you must examine several factors, which we will outline here.
First, are you looking for an all in one solution? Sometimes it is sufficient enough to use a spreadsheet to track your leads. However, unless you are a one man show, such a solution is likely to be too cumbersome. Also, using spreadsheets can make it hard to keep leads up to date.
Next, ask yourself how you will be working. Will you be confined to an office? Will you need access to your leads while you are on the road? Will others need to access lead information if you are gone?
Will you need powerful tools in your Customer Relationship Management software? Some offer tools such as built-in emailing and scheduling that can be invaluable to your company’s productivity.
Are you looking for a Customer Relationship Management software solution that allows you, as a manager, to track the progress of your employees?
Sage ACT and GoldMine provide many tools that you need to run a successful business. Unfortunately, neither is overly intuitive and both have rather long learning curves. Sage ACT in particular has several downfalls to it. First, you must either set up a cumbersome server to house all of your lead information if you wish to easily share this information with your fellow employees. Then you will also need an IT group to make sure you have everything properly set up and to fix any problems you may encounter. The whole package can be a big mess. Second, the user interface is really hard to follow. It is a difficult process to just find the lead you are looking for.
As I grew my company, I learned most everything about all of the Customer Relationship Management solutions out there. One, however, was was much more suitable for my company than the rest. Blitz Lead Manager offers all of the features of any other Customer Relationship Management in an easy to use and highly intuitive package.
Like any other Customer Relationship Management, Blitz allows you to track the progress of your leads as you make progress. However, it even takes it one step further by keeping you alerted to the status of hot leads and, more importantly, reminds you to stay in contact with a neglected lead so that you capitalize on every opportunity. It also has all of the powerful features you would come to expect from a Customer Relationship Management software, all in an easy to use package. It allows for emailing, with the ability to use templates and attachments; The scheduler allows you to add events to your calendar, and the calendars of your coworkers, with automatic email reminders and the ability to sync events with your Outlook; The “My Blitz” page quickly shows you pertinent information regarding your leads and upcoming events; Campaigns make organizing your leads simple and easy; The Lead Quick Search feature makes locating a specific lead easier than the competitors. Customer Relationship Management also makes it easy to import your leads from a lead generation company, such as Hoover, Sales Genie, and Reference USA, by allowing you to import an Excel spreadsheet. All of this over a secure SSL connection. As you can see, Blitz has a lot going for it.
What really makes Blitz the top performing Customer Relationship Management software is that it is a purely web-based solution. What does that mean exactly? Several things. First, it means your leads are accessible from anywhere you can access the internet. Second, your data is tended for automatically, without your intervention. Your information is backed up daily automatically by Double A Solutions, the developer of Blitz Lead Manager. A web-based application also means compatibility across all platforms, including Windows, Mac, and Linux. Last, a web-based solution like Blitz means you have absolutely no software to install and maintain, which further means you will not need an entire IT team devoted to making sure it is running properly.
When looking for a Customer Relationship Management software, it is important to consider all of your company’s needs. For me, the choice was obvious. I went with the software that gave the most and required the least. I chose Blitz.