Nany enterprise organizations live and die by their customer relationship management software. However, it is not just a massive corporations that can benefit from a CRM implementation. CRM used to seem out of reach for many small businesses, who may have felt that it was not worth the extra cost or effort to move their customer list out of excel. But the proliferation of cloud based subscription models and pay per use pricing has made many CRMs more accessible than ever before. Customer Relationship Management solutions are seemingly a dime a dozen. However, in reality, there are many differences between various CRM solutions and not at all of them may be a fit for your business. If we ask the right questions it will  help us to determine if our current CRM is right for us or not or if we need to re-examine the perfect CRM solution for our organization.

We can consider the following questions when determining the effectiveness of our current CRM:

Is your CRM is just a CRM or all-in-one CRM?

 If our goal is to simply track and manage our contacts then we may not need to look further. On the other hand, we may be missing out on huge opportunities for increasing sales. Considering an all-in-one CRM it could enable the sales department, marketing automation and reliable customer service to bring our sales to the next level. While determining if CRM is right for us or not, consider sales enablement to go beyond the contact management to help our sales team to succeed by providing everything necessary before, during and after the customer interactions. If we look for the advanced features such as deals management to crack deal stages and milestones, telephony integration, appointment scheduling, project management or gamification of our sales process which encourage collaboration or friendly competition to increase the sales.

Is your CRM powerful yet affordable?

 It is possible and it is very important question for our CRM solution provider in order to help us determine that if the CRM is right for our organization or not. A powerful CRM may include the next level features such as 360 degree contact views with customers that include all angles of contact data such as conversations or web activity, timelines with chronological views of contact interactions, google calendar synchronization etc and then it will include automation for case and consistency.

However, powerful features can come at a high cost, so we have to be ensured that if it is affordable to fit with our organization’s needs or not.

How good is your customer support? Will you be there for me when I need you?

We can have the best CRM with the most robust dashboard and analytics. The perfect CRM customer support should include the most CRM support anywhere and anytime. Having options to contact via smartphone, email, live chat or web will allow us to report the issue as it happens and get resolution as soon as possible.

Is your CRM market tested and trusted by customers?

 Finally, we have to make sure that our CRM solution has a track record that we have approved of before deciding to continue moving forward with them. We have to take a look what their customers are saying on their website. Doing research and finding the perfect CRM solution can save us a great deal of aggravation.