Veloxity – Best Overall Customizable CRM

Don’t misinterpret us thinking we are partial to our own product by placing Veloxity on top of our list. But the fact is Veloxity’s state-of-the-art functionalities and unique configuration options make it comparable to none in the market. 

Fusing the simplicity of an entry-level CRM with the robustness of an enterprise-grade system, Veloxity has become the best CRM platform that can suit businesses of all sizes and specifications. 

Its customizable reports and charts, intuitive dashboards, robust rules automation engines, cutting-edge marketing automation and configurable sales stages, and homepage make it stand out from the pack and be on top of the competition. 

Plus, Veloxity’s native mobile application allows users to visualize sales pipeline and metrics, identify nearby prospects, and deliver proactive customer service even on the go!  

With no code and fewer clicks, you can make the system adapt to your business regardless of your technical capabilities of business size and sell smarter, better, and faster. 

Features of Veloxity CRM

Some of the many impressive features of this CRM include:

• Easy to implement and operate
• Supports integration with Gmail and Outbox to enable users to track messages with their leads and contacts straight from the CRM system timeline
• Supports multi-group membership for every user of a business
• Allows users to customize contact data views, build charts, tables, etc., as per their convenience only with drag and drop
• Allows users to extend the existing data model by adding different custom sections to any data type.
• Offers round the clock customer support

Pipedrive CRM- Best for Pipeline Visualization

If you are searching for a deal-driven CRM system that can help organize and track interactions with customers and offers complete control over schedules besides synchronizing them across devices, Pipedrive can be your pick. 

Though Pipedrive doesn’t come with a free plan for a lifetime like Veloxity, which is indeed a disadvantage, its top-notch customizable features make it worth the investment. 

More impressively, Pipedrive comes with an intuitive dashboard to let you visualize each stage of your sales process and identify, track and extract insights from actionable data to generate more sales. 

Features of Pipedrive CRM solution

• Robust native mobile application plus email and calls synchronization
• Pipedrive allows users to configure their sales pipeline stages, adding as many fields as they require. 
• It allows users to turn off features they don’t require only with a single click to help optimize their sales process and boost pipeline visibility. 
• Supports customizable reports to help you dive deep into your business matrices and evaluate your performance against your set benchmarks and goals. 

Salesforce: Best for Growing Businesses

Do you need a CRM that can grow with your business and make it broaden its reach even faster? Salesforce CRM can be your pick. 

Though Salesforce is a bit expensive, charging around $25/user/month to $300/user/month depending on the plan you choose, it offers best-in-class CRM options, from basic to customized, enabling users to keep data recorded in the basic program as they configure features and upgrade.  

Features of Salesforce CRM

• Salesforce CRM offers real-time visibility of your sales pipeline and helps you drive pipeline accuracy using KPIs and quick filters.
• Employs AI-based predictive analytics to offer precise sales forecasts and let users make adjustments depending on the KPIs that suit their company specifications.
• Salesforce supports customizable reporting and allows users to make changes in the charts in the reports.
• It comes with a mobile app to help users close more deals and collaborate with teammates from anywhere. 
• Supports a simple drag-and-drop feature to automate your sales process in Process Builder. 

Apptivo: Best for Report Customization

Do you have to deal with multiple business functions and make them run optimally from a single platform? Apptivo can be your ultimate choice. From CRM to automatic invoice generation and project management, integrating all software your business is built around into a single system, Apptivo makes it effortless for your team to close deals faster. 

Though the UI seems a bit outdated, the jaw-dropping customization facilities make it worth your investment.

Features of Apptivo

• Budget-friendly, and easy-to-implement, and use
• Apptivo CRM supports integration with a wide range of systems, including G Suite, Slack, and Office 365.
• It’s an all-in-one native mobile application that frees users from juggling between isolated software and track progress right from their pockets.
• Supports pipeline and report customization and visualization

Nutshell: Best for Sales Team Management

Nutshell is a market-leading CRM and email marketing tool that helps you convert more sales leads into wins with fewer efforts and time. It enables sales reps and managers to work more productively, offering complete control over the sales pipeline and notification customization.

One downside that makes users think twice about investing in Nutshell CRM is that it doesn’t offer a free plan and live chat facility. So if live chat and free edition mostly drive your buying decision, you better opt for Veloxity or Apptivo. 

Features of Nutshell CRM

• Supports custom pipelines and reports to help you get an insight into your sales performance in no time.
• Supports email marketing and sales automation
• It doesn’t require any prior knowledge or technical capabilities to implement 
• Business card scanner integrated into the Nutshell CRM mobile application to facilitate data entry.
• Integrable with third-party software, including Gmail, Slack, Office 365, QuickBooks, Zendesk, and Zapier.

In this post, we’ll explore each type of CRM further to help you understand which type of software is best suited for your business needs.

Collaborative CRM

Collaborative CRMs focus on sharing customer information and behaviour to various teams in your organization for the purpose of lowering marketing costs, increasing sales, and improving customer satisfaction. 

It is also known as a “Strategic CRM”, as it sheds more light on business–customer engagement and communication. 

What Are the Features and Benefits of a Collaborative CRM?

Interactions

Your CRM starts collecting customer data the moment their contact information is added to the system. It records all touch-points, emails, conversations, and purchases. Sales and marketing teams can find all this information straight from the CRM, thus improving intra-office communication. The data can also be tracked and analyzed to find trends and marketing opportunities.

Data Management 

All documents shared within the process are available for reference among the team members. From proposals to contracts to other technical documents, the collaborative CRM system stores them all within the customer’s profile.

Relationship Management

As part of the lead management process, the CRM segments the leads into various groups based on their search behaviour, demographics, or lead score. This information helps sales reps focus on the leads that are most likely to buy.

The collaborative CRM benefits the business in the following ways:

• It ensures your team members are all on the same page.
• Customer feedback gives the company the upper hand when managing clients’ expectations.
• All your client data is collected and stored under one roof, and as soon as new leads are made, they are automatically assigned a sales rep.

Analytical CRM

Besides the standard data collection, an Analytical CRM organizes and analyzes data about your customers. Such information is instrumental in business decisions, especially in sales and customer service.

What Are the Features and Benefits of Analytical CRM?

Data Mining 

When setting up customer accounts, your contact data, such as a person’s age, level of education, gender, location, etc., give you vast amounts of information from which to analyze sales trends, address customer pain points, and target new customers.

Custom Charting

View your data with customizable charts that make sense to your organization and retrieve the information you need with advanced search options. 

Sales Forecasting 

Analytical CRM software learns the probability of closing over time as more and more data is added to the CRM. Accurate forecasting helps decision-makers manage their sales teams more effectively.

Analytical CRM helps companies make smarter business decisions based on customer behaviour and engagement. In essence, it simplifies your sales strategy and makes deliberate efforts to focus on processes that offer a shorter ROI.

Operational CRM

An operational CRM maps out the sales and marketing processes with specific timelines and expectations. The outcome is a pre-meditated procedure that the CRM can control, making business development easy to manage.

What Are the Features and Benefits of Operational CRM?

Sales Stages 

Administrators choose what should be done at each sales stage. Once the sales team has completed every task in a specific stage, they are automatically moved to the next stage.

Marketing Automation 

Marketing automation makes it easy for organizations to create hyper-targeted campaigns to different lead segments based on their demographics. Decision-makers can take the collected data and turn it into actionable and automated tasks that teams no longer have to manually oversee.  

In short, operational CRMs reduce the time spent on repetitive data-entry tasks and can streamline the sales process with lead assignment rules and user-defined sales stages. 

Which CRM Is Best For My Business?

Are you looking for a CRM but aren’t sure which type is the most suitable for your business? We highly recommend browsing the most popular CRM software products on the market and exploring the various features available. Many CRMs available today are equipped with operational, analytical, and collaborative tools, much like Veloxity. Check out our features or get started with our free trial today!     

Because of this, many organizations are moving to a collaborative model, which allows multiple departments to communicate with their customers. There are several options available out there for a collaborative CRM tool. The best software, however, allows for easy sharing of data between departments.

In this post, we’ll discuss the important features of a collaborative CRM so that you know what to look for when finding the best CRM for your organization.

What is a Collaborative CRM

Collaborative CRM, also known as strategic CRM, is a type of CRM software that allows different organizations associated with the customer service of a business to maintain seamless communication. 

Teams including sales, marketing, customer service, technical support team, distributors, or vendors mainly use a collaborative CRM system to consolidate, organize, and categorize client data in a centralized database system and share them among themselves to get acquainted with the latest updates about customer interactions.

Thus it excludes information silos and leverages interaction channels (website, live chat, social media, etc.), document management, and communications to improve and augment your prospecting efforts for boosting customer satisfaction. 

Collaborative CRM solutions are made up of two components described briefly below:

• Interaction Management: The interaction management process records your interaction history, tracking communication channels within your business so your team can get a 360-degree view of your prospects, leads, and present customers to optimize interactions based on customer preferences, identify the most effective channels for lead generation and determine customer pain points better. 
• Channel Management: Channel management is the process of improving customer satisfaction across the channels the customers prefer to be interacted with and improving customer experience using advanced technologies including Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, automation, and data analytics. So your sales, marketing, or service team can extract actionable insights from the data flowing in your business, and you can route leads to the right sales reps and assign them duties for rationalizing their activities in a particular communication channel.

Features of a Collaborative CRM

Some of the many jaw-dropping features and functionalities of a collaborative CRM include:

• Effective Communication: One of the surpassing features of a collaborative CRM is, it ensures your salespeople are on a single pane and streamline communications when they interact with the prospects and sales leads via multiple channels. 
• Online Self-Service: Another notable feature is that it reduces operational costs and enables your sales team to work more conveniently.

The Benefits of Collaborative CRM Software: How a Collaborative CRM Helps Your Business Grow

Helps Employees Work More Efficiently

When most CRM systems promise to facilitate cross-departmental collaboration, only a few actually ensures it. Thanks to various state-of-the-art collaborative CRMs that enable team members of different departments in a company to share files and collaborate in real-time. And the more seamless the cross-departmental communication is, the more productive the employees can be. Foster Customer Satisfaction

As the data input by a team is readily available to other departments, it becomes effortless for them to deliver proactive and effective customer service, maintaining a workflow routine more efficiently. Collaborative CRM software also helps automate sales, marketing, and many repetitive and customer service tasks to enable your sales and service team to improve customer satisfaction. 

Customer Retention

Besides nurturing the incoming leads, retaining the existing customers is equally significant for a business to thrive. Thankfully, collaborative CRM empowers you to organize each customer’s data in unique holistic profiles using data augmentation. So you can get equipped with the latest client information and offer your leads and clients more personalized customer service. Plus, a CRM triggers the sales reps to follow up customer emails regularly, reach out to clients who have not been interacted with for a long time, and use segmentation filters and tagging to ensure the hyper-targeted emails can reach the right client just at the time — a sure-fire approach to acquire and retain customers and reduce churn.

Increases Revenues 

One of the leading causes most B2B businesses now turn to collaborative CRMs is that they help business owners generate more revenue and boost ROI, enabling the sales reps to nurture leads and turn them into loyal customers. More impressively, Collaborative CRM software consolidates data from the customer database and helps your sales team cross-sell/up-sell to the clients smartly.

Pipeline Visualization

Gone are the days of relying on static sales pipelines, digging through hundreds of spreadsheets, and continuous drill-downs. Thanks to a collaborative CRM that makes your sales pipeline more visible through offering customizable reports. It allows you to view the big deals in your pipeline and the revenue you have generated in each sale stage and helps your sales reps track significant communications and figure out where they left off. So you can prioritize your deals more efficiently and route your future sales efforts in the right direction, creating a benchmark to scale those efforts. 
Are you all set to leverage the power of a collaborative CRM to make your business grow like never before and be on top of competition? Try out Veloxity – one of the world’s most trusted CRM solutions with best-in-class features and powerful collaboration tools that can help your team collaborate in real-time, shara insights and close more deals successfully from anywhere.

Before you choose a CRM and a version that suits your budget, make a list of the features each department needs. The cheapest version of a software may be lacking the essential tools your company requires to make implementation worth it. On the other hand, you don’t want to pay for a version that comes with features your team will never use. 

Does your company need email marketing software? How detailed do you really need your reports to be? Answering these types of questions before you start shopping will give you a better sense of what CRM product is best for your company.

Popular CRM System Prices

Veloxity

Least expensive edition: $0

Most expensive edition: $94/user/month

Add-ons:

• Marketing Automation $400/1000 contacts/month

Zoho CRM

Least expensive edition: $14/user/month (Zoho Bigin for small business starts at $0)

Most expensive edition: $52/user/month

Add-ons:

• Upgrading to Zoho One for $37/user/month for all employees or $90/user/month for any number of users gives you Zoho’s full feature package (sales, marketing, support, HR, productivity, finance, and more)

Hubspot

Least expensive edition: $45/month for 2 users

Most expensive edition: $1,200/month for 10 users

Add-ons: 

• Users can upgrade to product bundles to combine marketing, sales, customer service, CMS, and operations. Prices range from $45/mo to $4000/mo.
• Gmail: $0 to $12/month
• Slack: $0 to $12.50/month
• Mailchimp: $0 to $14.99/month

Salesforce

Least expensive edition: $25/user/month

Most expensive edition: $300/user/month

Add-ons:

• Appointment assistant: $25/user/month
• Billing: $75/user/month
• Pardot (marketing automation): $1,250/month up to 10,000 contacts

Hidden Costs

CRM software is priced per user per month (not exactly hidden, but not transparent either), but the prices you see listed are automatically set to the annual payment option. If you only want to pay a month at a time, the price jumps. 

Other Hidden Costs:

• Account setup fees
• Tax
• Add-ons
• Dedicated customer service
• Training
• Adding more users than your version permits

Implementation Expenses

One of the biggest mistakes that new users make is underestimating how long it can take to implement a CRM to the point of successful adoption. 

As we said earlier, take your time exploring your options and sitting with the heads of departments to nail down a list of precisely what you’re looking for. Getting to the bottom of what you need from your CRM will cut down your setup time and make sure your free demo won’t be wasted.

Data

Is your customer data already ready to go? Probably not. A regular data audit should already be part of your business process, but if you’re using a CRM for the first time, you might be holding on to paper files or dealing with a disorganized information system that consists of post-it notes, saved email attachments, and various spreadsheets. 

How long will it take to locate, restore, clean up, and file your data? It depends on how many customers you have, how organized you are, and how much dead data you’ve been holding on to. Needless to say, preparing your data for your transfer is an important step and one that shouldn’t be rushed.

Customization & Set Up

Importing your data is one thing. But now you need to set up your CRM. As you can imagine, this is a huge time expense. But don’t rush it because proper automation setup is crucial to your customers’ continued loyalty. The more workflows you set up, the longer it’ll take. And as we said, time is money. 

Training

This is where adoption failure can happen. If your team doesn’t feel comfortable using the software, they just won’t use it. To avoid this costly problem, give your team members plenty of time to learn the various CRM features that they’ll be using every day. 

Keep in mind that training is not only a time expense. For example, Salesforce training can cost well over $1000 for instructor-led courses. If you’re looking to save money by taking a self-paced online course, expect to pay between $400–$600.

Training your team is a worthy investment if you want your staff to make the most out of your CRM software.

How Veloxity Can Help

Veloxity’s easy-to-follow price plans and long list of training manuals are designed for easy integration. Our customer service teams are ready to answer your questions or to help you with any questions you have about setting up and using your cloud CRM. Start your free trial today!

• Improper training is one of the main reasons for low CRM adoption—which is the last thing you want. While some sales and support staff might learn their way around the CRM without training, there will also be users who need plenty of help getting started.
• The improper use or adoption of your software can be a wasted monthly expense while not solving any of the issues that led to you implementing the software in the first place.
• All future employees can easily be trained by your certified staff, which will lower your employee onboarding costs.

What to Look For In CRM Software Training

Whether you’re looking for in-person or online training, you should stick to a CRM course that offers real-world examples and/or tests to help students get the hands-on practice they need for future scenarios. 

Not all CRM training costs the same. For example, Hubspot has several online certification courses, ebooks, and lessons for absolutely free, whereas Salesforce platform certification can cost anywhere from $400 to $2000.

Where to Find CRM Training Courses

LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn offers a variety of online CRM courses for administrators, marketers, and sales teams. Your staff won’t be certified by the end of the course, but they will get the skills they need to maximize your CRM. Popular LinkedIn courses include: 

• Salesforce for sales managers
• Salesforce for administrators
• SAP Business One essential training
• Learning Zoho CRM
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 basics

Coursera

Coursera is a massive open online course (MOOC) provider with courses in just about every subject. There are many CRM, sales, and marketing courses available on Coursera today, but the most popular CRM courses are in Salesforce and Hubspot.

Certstaffix

This training website offers a wide variety of courses, from photoshop to Python. You’ll find a wide range of Salesforce certifications, both teacher-led and self-paced. Training centers are located all across the US.

Direct CRM Training

You don’t have to look far to find CRM courses. You can find online video tutorials and helpful guides straight from your customer relationship management provider. We highly recommend that your staff are thoroughly trained on how to use the CRM, and video tutorials are often sufficient for smaller CRMs that require less integration time. 

For example, Veloxity has a large database of helpful training videos and tutorials to help you and your staff get started with setting up the software, using your email templates, importing your data, creating rules, and more.

Teacher-Led In-Person Training

CRM certification training courses are for companies and individuals alike. An individual can improve their chances of employment by completing certain CRM certification. 

In-person CRM training has many benefits. Group training speeds up adoption time and gives employees effective hands-on training. On the other hand, teacher-led training is also more costly for your organization.

Teacher-Led Virtual Training

Thanks to the ongoing pandemic, companies have had to restructure the way they train their employees. Many businesses have found solutions to continue their daily operations in a virtual and remote climate. 

If your employees are still working from home, a teacher-led virtual course will not only save you on transportation costs, it’ll also maintain your employees’ health and safety. 

Self-Paced Learning

Self-paced learning gives your staff members the freedom to select their own schedule and learn at their own pace. As long as your reps are connected to the internet, they can learn from anywhere at any time and schedule lessons when it won’t interfere with their other work priorities.

Start Learning Today

When it comes to learning your CRM software, there’s no shortage of solutions. Whether online or in a classroom, you can expect to find certification courses and training videos on just about anything related to your CRM. Start your Veloxity CRM software training today!

As a business owner, you have probably heard of a Customer Relationship Manager or CRM. But who should use a CRM? Is it suitable for all business types and sizes? 

Every business, big or small, and profit or non-profit, can benefit from using CRM software to improve their sales, customer relationships, sales pipeline, and operational efficiencies. 

In this post, we will discuss who should use a CRM and the CRM features that support various business operations.

What Does a CRM Do?

A CRM can consolidate all essential data about the interactions, engagements, and transactions of a business with its prospects, leads, and present customers in a centralized repository, collecting from multiple touchpoints, like email, social media live chat, website, etc. 

The term CRM refers to a software database system that comes with robust contact management, lead management, marketing automation, and the list goes on. It gathers customer-centric data in unique holistic profiles, provides you with a 360-degree view of your customers, their purchase behavior, history, demographics, etc., to help you offer more proactive service. So your support, sales, and marketing team can stay connected and maintain a long-lasting relationship with the customers throughout the entire customer lifecycle, nurture leads better, and streamline processes that, in return, boost business profitability – the ultimate goal of all businesses. 

Let dig deep into the key features of a quality CRM:

• Reportings: A quality CRM solution comes with customizable reports to enable users to view and visualize statistics business matrices and sales pipelines in a highly engaging perspective.
• Sales Analytics: When it comes to CRM reporting, sales analytics is one of the most valuable features to put the light on. You can gather both structured and unstructured data about the efficacy of your past sales campaigns from all over your business – social media, website traffic, polls, and more in a single place. So you can analyze them better and devise powerful strategies for your next sales campaign – all using the same CRM platform. 
• Marketing Campaign Management: Almost all CRM software comes with automated workflows to help you track marketing efforts and performance, manage campaigns better and fine-tune marketing strategies to bring more clients to the business and turn them into sales. 
• Sales Forecasting: A CRM employs AI/Ml-based predictive models to offer users accurate sales forecasting to set a benchmark to scale whether their sales and marketing efforts can really translate into deals or they need to be re-scrutinized. The business owners can also use this data to route their future sales efforts in the right direction. 

Who Should Use a CRM?

Though different CRM solutions have been in the market since 1987, their use has skyrocketed during the last decade. The outcome is, while the CRM market size is worth approximately 47.6 billion dollars in 2021, it is forecast to reach around 96.39 billion dollars in 2027, growing at a CAGR of 11.1%. 

But who should use a CRM? Let’s get into it:

• A Company with a Sales Team: A CRM is an indispensable part of any business with a sales team. Tracking customer history and behavioral patterns to sell more products and crack more deals becomes effortless when they have a quality CRM into action. 
• A Business that Runs on Marketing: As we have already stated, a CRM can help a CRM automate most of your marketing and email campaign tasks. You can also craft hyper-personalized messages using a CRM’s built-in email template builders, send targeted emails using segmentation filters and tagging, and schedule mailouts to ensure the right email can reach the right customer at the right time. 
• A Company that Needs to Create Invoices on a Large Scale: Another reason businesses switch to a CRM from legacy systems is it can automate the invoice generation process, minimizing errors associated with the manual process. 

The types of businesses that use CRM tools daily include:

• Retail industries
• Banks and financial institutions
• Insurance companies
• Hotels
• Healthcare organizations
• Pharmaceutical and life science industries
• Agricultural businesses and more

Why Use a CRM

Gone are the days of navigating between multiple applications to complete tasks manually. With a CRM into play, your team can get essential information at their fingertips, improving your business ROI dramatically. The few of many benefits of a CRM system include: 

• Better Customer Retention: Besides helping you bring more leads and nurture them efficiently, a CRM platform can also play a major role in keeping your present customers happy as high customer turnover can badly affect your company’s productivity. For instance, a CRM can trigger your team to reach out to the customers who have not been contacted for a while, follow up customer emails, and remind them of the upcoming appointments – all that a business needs for customer retention. 
• Simplified Cross-departmental Collaboration: Another jaw-dropping benefit of a cloud-based CRM is that it facilitates cross-departmental collaboration by allowing your staff to dig deep into reports and analytics from anywhere. Thanks to CRMs that have enabled users to share files in real-time among different departments of a company. So data input by a team is easily accessible by others, making it effortless for each department to work more productively. For example, with Veloxity CRM, sending messages (and GIFs!) to other CRM users from right within the native mobile app has become easier like never before. And for prompt action, a notification bell triggers the receiving user upon a message arrival!
• Integration with Third-party Services: A CRM can seamlessly integrate with the services your company uses to run optimally, making it easier for your team to get data gathered by multiple systems using a single platform- your CRM software. For instance, Veloxity supports integration with Outlook and Google to sync email conversations with all of your CRM contacts and track them straight from your CRM timeline. 

Meet Veloxity- one of the most trusted and widely-used CRM that suits every business of every size and brings marketing, support service, sales, and analytics together to let you focus on your customers and grow like never before. 

But if you’re not sure how to implement an effective CRM system, we’ll take you through the process of selecting your CRM software, organizing your data, and setting up your account. 

What Is CRM Implementation?

In the most simplest terms, the CRM implementation process is preparing your organization for setting up and using your CRM software, including transferring all your customer data. The best CRM software products today are designed to have out-of-the-box solutions that are ready to go when you are.

However, preparation and planning are needed for a successful implementation. Taking care to properly roll out each step of the boarding process will help your team maximize the software’s features and ensure everyone is on the same page. It also prevents you from losing customer data or wasting your time transferring unnecessary data.

How Can You Tell When It’s Ready to Implement a CRM?

You know it’s time to start using a CRM if:

• Your team struggles to find the documents you’re looking for.
• You can’t seem to stay on top of customer communication.
• Your sales process isn’t streamlined or your team members can’t seem to agree on the correct process.
• Your company is expanding and your business needs are becoming more complex.

The Importance of a CRM Implementation Process

The implementation process helps you:

• Determine which CRM product meets your needs
• Organize your data
• Decide the various roles your team will play; and
• Migrate your customer data effectively

Crucial Steps for Successful CRM Implementation

Let’s go over the steps of getting started with your CRM software.

#1: Find Out Your Business Needs

It’s time to start asking yourself the right questions to determine what problems you’re hoping a CRM will solve. Why do you need a CRM? What teams will be using it? Where is all your current data and how will implementing a CRM help your business’ processes? 

What is your current sales process and how will a CRM improve upon it? Do you want your CRM to offer marketing automation? Do you want to clean up your customer service and customer relationship practices with better management tools?

The more questions you ask yourself, the better equipped you are to find the right CRM product. Rather than looking for a CRM with the shiniest features, focus on finding one that can help solve your problems and meet your business needs.

#2: Clean Up Your Data Before Transferring

It’s time to organize your customer data before you move it to your CRM. Whether your info is spread across Excel files, post-it notes, or paper folders, you could probably use this time to reassess your data and find out what you’re missing, what’s outdated, and what you don’t need.

This information audit is the perfect time to establish a streamlined data entry strategy and to avoid cluttering your CRM with unnecessary client information. 

We recommend performing regular data audits every year to avoid expensive costs associated with bad or obsolete data. With a CRM like Veloxity, all your customer information is easily accessed from a single location, making all future audits easier for your team.

#3: Transfer Your Data

Now it’s time to move your files and customer information into your CRM. Your data or project manager will ensure that your customer information is correctly added to the correct fields. With Veloxity CRM, your customer information will forever be accessible right at your fingertips, thanks to our built-in advanced search capabilities.

#4: Set Up Rules Automation and Integrations

Now you can start customizing your interface. To start, we recommend setting up automated lead assignment rules so that all new leads are automatically assigned to territories or even specific users. Our lead assignment rule builder lets you create your own rules with custom fields to better align with your sales cycle.

Using Veloxity’s self-defined sales stages, you get to decide what steps each sales rep needs to complete in order to move on to the next stage. With our customizable sales stages, you’ll be empowering Veloxity’s AI to learn the probability of closing a deal based on historical data. This, of course, maximizes your forecasting accuracy.

Now you can integrate your existing third-party apps like Gmail and Outlook into your CRM to encourage adoption and simplify your operations.  

#5: Train Your Staff

Let’s go over the implementation process so far. First, you’ve assessed your business needs and decided what tools you require from a CRM. With that information, you’ve selected a CRM product that can help you achieve your company goals. 

Next, your team has organized and prepared your client information for the data transfer. Then, you or your project/data manager has overseen the process of moving all the data to the CRM. 

Finally, you’ve customized your interface by setting up automation and integrating your existing products like Outlook and Gmail.

Now it’s time to introduce your sales team and staff to the CRM. Depending on which CRM product you choose, you may have to schedule in-house training with a qualified representative or conduct a virtual training session online. Veloxity’s Help and Learning Center is always available to help you and your staff with video tutorials, FAQs, and other resources.

Start Your CRM Implementation Process Today

Are you ready to choose your customer relationship management software? Try Veloxity for FREE today and find out how easy it is to implement our CRM.

With a CRM workflow, your team can spend more time nurturing leads, following up with customers, and closing deals. Workflows speed up task assignments, which therefore increases your team’s productivity and reduces the margin of error. It’s easy to see that streamlining these processes can help your team reach their sales quotas and increase your company’s ROI.

Let’s take a look at some examples of CRM workflow processes:

Email Automation

Automation simplifies your email marketing efforts by eliminating the need to manually follow up with customers. 

With a CRM, your entire email campaign can be automated with rules. Trigger an email whenever a lead:

• Signs up for your newsletter
• Visits a particular website
• Leaves a product in their shopping cart
• Buys your product
• Has a birthday
• Clicks on a particular link on your site
• Reaches out to customer service
• Engages with your social media account

As you can see, the possibilities are endless. Email automation can boost your customer’s engagement with your brand wherever they are in the pipeline. And by automating your emails, you’ll guarantee that no client or opportunity falls through the cracks. With Veloxity, you can create an unlimited number of emails using our professional email templates.

Lead Workflows

There are many different types of lead workflows you can set up. For example, if you want to score your leads before they’re assigned to your sales reps, you can create a set of rules based on various factors, such as the pages they visited on your site, what made them sign up (newsletter, ebook, etc.), how often they visited your site, their social media engagement with your brand, etc.

Based on their lead score, you set up task workflows to trigger simultaneous actions or prioritize the leads that are most likely to buy.

Sales Workflow

Let’s say you have a big sales team. Your reps might be spread throughout different territories, and some of your sales reps might have a strong record for pulling in leads and closing deals from specific sectors or demographic groups. 

You want to assign new contacts to the sales reps and regions that are most likely to turn leads into customers.

How do you do that?

Let’s look at Veloxity’s lead assignment rules and as an example:

A lead signs up for a free trial of your product. The information they enter into your CRM triggers an assignment rule, and one of your sales reps is sent an alert. The sales rep is given a series of tasks to complete before the contact is moved to the next sales stage. 

For example, a high-quality B2B lead signs up for a free trial period of your property maintenance services. They’re located in the Midwest and specialize in luxury short-term property rentals. Based on their industry and location, they’re automatically assigned a sales rep who has had previous success with similar clients. 

At the same time, the sales rep is assigned particular tasks to complete before the contact can be moved to the next sales stage. Reminders can automatically be scheduled to keep sales reps on schedule, and once the sales rep has met all the predefined requirements, the lead is automatically moved to the next sales stage which then triggers another set of tasks.

Customer Support Workflows

Customer relationship management software helps you maintain your relationship with your existing clients, not just the ones you’re trying to convert. Let’s say you want to know how your customers feel about your brand, your service, or your product. 

Here’s popular customer support workflow:

One of your clients has recently reached out to customer support. Once the support call or chat has ended, the client receives a prompt to fill out a survey. Based on the results of their feedback, a task is triggered. 

If they’re satisfied with your customer service, they’ll receive a discount code in their inbox. They may also be asked to leave a review on your site, which will most likely be positive.

If the client isn’t happy, one of your customer relationship managers will get an alert and a follow-up call will be scheduled to address the customer’s pain points. The client may also receive an email with a huge discount of your products to thank them for their honest feedback. Using your CRM, you’ll have the data you’ll need to investigate their issue and pinpoint areas of improvement.

CRM Workflows Improve Your Business Processes

There’s no shortage of rule automations you can use to improve your business at any given point in the customer’s lifecycle. CRM workflows are not only designed to keep your clients happy. They can also be used to improve your internal processes, such as communication between departments and sharing of responsibilities.
To find out more about how to set up rules on your Veloxity CRM, check out our helpful eGuide.

• Automated lead assignment rules
• Lead scoring and tracking
• Landing page builder
• Lead segmentation
• Activity tracking
• Social media campaign builder and interactions tracker

• Email template builder
• A/B testing and analytics
• Third-party email integration (Outlook, Gmail, MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc.)

#2: Sales

The second step of the cycle is the transactional or sales stage. By now, your prospects have turned into leads. They’ve researched your product, compared your brand to your competitors, read customer reviews and articles, and are genuinely interested in buying. 

Depending on what you sell, this stage can be quite long. Generally, B2B customers take a while to get to this point. If you’ve made it this far, your sales reps can use data from your CRM’s customizable sales stages to more accurately predict the probability of closing, and therefore focus their efforts on the leads that are most likely to buy.

CRM Tools for More Sales

• Visual sales pipeline
• Interactive drag-and-drop tools
• Contact management

• Self-defined sales stages
• Automation
• Sales forecasting
• Analytics and reporting
• Quote Management and Creation

#3: Orders

You’ve officially closed a deal. Now you need to focus on delivering the product. Today’s customers want to be able to track their product shipments and feel confident that their order will arrive on time. 

CRM tools keep all your product information under one roof to ensure successful and seamless order fulfillment. A CRM can help you stay on top of your inventory and delivery and communicate effectively with your warehouse and distribution team. 

CRM Tools for Product Management

• Product and product bundle management
• Warehouse management
• Packing and distribution management

#4: Customer Service

Whether you’re an emerging technology company selling the latest B2C products or you supply the latest B2B software as a service, you want to make sure your clients are always satisfied. With a CRM software, your sales and customer service teams can anticipate a client’s needs and quickly resolve issues on the first call. 

Great client care isn’t just about putting out fires. You also want your clients to feel that their continued patronage is appreciated. The customer service stage of the CRM process is also a chance for your team to upsell your products, encourage customer referrals and turn your clients into brand ambassadors.

One of the best ways to maintain excellent customer service is by tracking and logging your customer interactions all in one place. For example, Veloxity’s activity timeline shows your team a complete communication history of all your contacts, including leads.

CRM Tools for Better Customer Service

• Help desk and ticketing
• Live chat or AI chatbot 
• Customer portal
• Activity timeline
• Third-party email integration

Find a CRM That Delivers the Tools You Need 

A great customer relationship management software is loaded with tools to help your customer through the lifecycle. It’s also designed to help your sales teams and customer service reps improve customer satisfaction and maintain your customer’s positive relationship with your brand.

If you’re looking for a software product that can simplify your sales processes and keep your customer data organized, check out Veloxity CRM. Our wide range of sales, marketing, and analytics tools can help you attract high-quality leads, convert more customers, and improve client satisfaction. Start your free trial today!

A CRM system allows a company to build a stronger bond with its consumers, service users, employees, suppliers, and partners.

A CRM manages your customer data all in one location. Both traditional and Salesforce CRMs feature configurable dashboards that show everything your team needs to know about your customer: communication history, sales stages, customer support issues, and more.

You already know that if your company is going to last, you’ll need a long-term strategy. Your CRM helps you forecast sales and anticipate customer issues.

What Are Some of the Advantages of a Traditional CRM?

Both Salesforce and traditional CRM systems help you keep track of all of your customers and their needs with contact management tools. You can utilize your analytics to learn more about your sales processes and customer experiences to develop smarter marketing campaigns. 

A traditional CRM has several benefits and advantages, including:

Improved Contact Handling

With a unified contact monitoring system, every call, email, and touchpoint from every contact, lead, and customer is accessible from your contact management tools.

When you can keep track of your customer communication history you’ll be helping all departments – sales, customer care teams, and marketing managers – provide better customer experiences.

Collaboration Between Teams

Data silos make collaboration impossible. Traditional CRM software helps sales reps, marketing managers, and client care reps work together to close more deals and resolve customer inquiries and complaints. 

On the other hand, if you want to maximize your company’s marketing efforts, you might want to consider using a social CRM like Salesforce. Social CRMs are equipped with social media marketing software and platform integrations to leverage your customer’s social interactions for more intelligent and targeted marketing campaigns.

More Accurate Sales Forecasting

The more customer data you have, the smarter your CRM gets. For example, Veloxity’s AI learns the probability of closing a deal based on your sales stage data, which improves your forecasting accuracy over time.

When you use a non-traditional CRM like Salesforce, you’ll have the tools to accurately predict lead behaviour from the moment of data capture. Because traditional CRMs don’t typically incorporate a customer’s social interactions with your company, you won’t be able to use this data to improve your marketing campaigns.

Salesforce CRM

Salesforce CRM is a massive software program with a seemingly endless amount of applications for a total end-to-end business solution. Its features—especially its marketing software—go well beyond the scope of traditional CRM software.

Salesforce CRM provides an environment for two-way communication between your customers and your team. Using Salesforce marketing software, you can provide your customers with an enriched experience across various social media channels, while leveraging customer behaviour to fine-tune your campaigns and customer service.  

What Are the Advantages of Salesforce CRM?

All-in-One Solution

As we mentioned earlier, Salesforce is a massive software with solutions for just about every major business process, such as:

• Marketing
• Customer service
• Ecommerce
• Third-party integrations
• App development
• Workplace wellness
• Employee training

Marketing Integrations

As a social CRM, Salesforce’s marketing solutions can take your social media engagement to the next level. 

• Built-in Slack integration
• Personalized mobile interactions
• Advertising studio
• Social media engagement across all channels
• Email marketing
• Google Analytics
• B2B marketing automation

Cloud-Based Software as a Service

Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM software is speedy and simple to set up and use because it doesn’t require time-consuming installation, in-person software updates, or dedicated server rooms.

Salesforce and other SaaS CRMs reduce IT expenditures and take care of automatic software updates without any user intervention.

Single Source of Truth

Every business process is connected. Each team member is working from the same data and can see changes in real-time, thus eliminating data silos. Each department—from sales to customer service to marketing to IT—are working from one platform, which improves intra-office communication and collaboration. 

Scalable Platform

We’ve made Salesforce sound like a highly complex platform with many moving parts—but it doesn’t have to be. If you run a small business, you may not need half the features that Salesforce offers. 

Salesforce is a scalable platform with solutions for all business types and sizes. You can easily upgrade your version or add more functionality whenever your business needs it.

The Verdict: Salesforce CRM Does More

Salesforce is one of the most well-known CRM products on the market today, and it’s no question that it offers way more than a traditional CRM. It can significantly expand your customer outreach through social media integrations and other business solutions. 

If you want to boost customer engagement and use customer interactions to create intelligent marketing campaigns, Salesforce CRM may be the solution your company needs.