When it comes to CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, there is a clear winner across all industries: Salesforce. However, with the increase of smaller, privately owned tech companies, the elite CRM program might not fit into the marketing budget right away. Because of this, some companies may forgo having a CRM platform completely, relying on old-school ways of tracking their customer information. Not only is this inefficient, but it also causes companies to miss out on important predictive analytics that could potentially lead to more profitability.
As a marketing coordinator for one of South Florida’s Top Three cybersecurity experts, 4it, I understand this dilemma all too well. My department doesn’t have the same budget that a larger company has access to, but we acknowledged that we needed a CRM platform that will allow us to market effectively to potential and current B2B clients. As a company, we found a handful of CRM tools that were not only affordable but robust in features. Because of this process, I realized that other tech marketers might have a difficult time figuring out what features of a CRM would be most helpful to their department. Luckily, I’ve narrowed it down to six must-have features!
- Easy to Use: You want all the employees using the program to be able to navigate it with ease
- Easy to Read Dashboard/Analytics: You also want your employees to be able to visually see and understand dashboard analytics such as cost per leads
- Reliable and Secure: You definitely want to invest in a program that is less likely to get hacked into and also doesn’t crash every other day
- Customizable: Every business is different in its needs, whether it be custom information fields or dashboard metrics, it is important that you can customize
- Mobile: Most of your employees are on the go, the CRM should be able to travel with them for easily managing leads
- Scalable: If your company grows in sales and marketing team members, your CRM should be able to keep up with the new additions
