Do you need to automate your sales, marketing, and customer support process? If so, the CRM (Customer Relationships Management) system is an effective tool that can help you achieve your business goals faster and manage the processes with fewer efforts. Based on the researches of Salesforce, adopting a CRM can help companies increase:
- lead conversion rates by 30%
- sales productivity by 25%
- and customer satisfaction by 35%.
Nowadays, there is a huge amount of ready-made CRM systems on the market. They have a complex set of features, the ability to integrate with other software systems, and even to customize the system to a certain extent. However, even with such a wide range of capabilities such systems can’t fully meet your needs, adapt perfectly to your sales funnel and specific business processes. Instead, the out-of-the-box solution can have some standard features that you don’t need but have to pay for.
That’s why it is better to create a custom CRM system – designed specifically for your business. RexSoft prepared for you short recommendations that will help you succeed in the custom software development process.
1/ SET CLEAR BUSINESS GOALS
This step may seem too simple and obvious but the devil is in the details. Without having strict goals and expectations it will be hard to create a useful system and measure its effectiveness in the future.
Think thoroughly about the business problems you want to solve. It will help you to choose right the general CRM type and the particular modules of your focus.
Traditional software of this type includes 4 modules: sales, marketing, order management, and customer support.
The most popular CRM types are:
- strategic CRM, that is perfect to collect data about your customers and create forecasts on this basis
- operational CRM, that will help you automate your internal daily business processes
- analytical CRM, that will provide you with a deep analysis of your sales and marketing processes and help you define the best ways to engage and support customers
- collaborative CRM system, that is perfect for managing both internal and external processes. For example, if you have some external partners, such a system a single place to collaborate and communicate.
The great benefit of custom CRM is the ability to combine the different types of systems and include all the necessary modules. That’s how you can achieve greater business effectiveness of the software.
2/ DEFINE THE CORE FUNCTIONALITY
When creating a custom CRM system, it is very important to consider WHO will use it. Keeping your strategic goals in mind, combined with the needs of your end-users, will help you create great functionality for your system.
Start with asking your sales, marketing, and customer service teams about their desired functionality. That will help to prioritize the features and focus the development process on the most important ones.
Here is a list of standard CRM functionality as an example:
- Lead management
- Contact management
- Email management
- Reporting and analytics
- Marketing-related features
- Analytics and Forecasting
- Document management
- Quotes / proposal management, etc.
3/ TAKE INTO ACCOUNT YOUR FUTURE GROWTH
Probably one of the biggest and most common mistakes is to create a CRM for current needs only. You should always keep in mind that your business will grow, and the number of your employees and customers will increase. How can you make sure that the system that works well for 100 people will still work uninterruptedly for 1000 and more people?
Well, you should leave a reliable basis for future scaling at the initial steps of the software development. Discuss the ability to create a scalable architecture with your software development partner.
4/ CHOOSE THE RIGHT TECH PARTNER
To be frank, the creation of custom CRM is quite a challenging process. But it’s worth the gamble if you have a reliable software development team that will do his best to deliver you a great solution.
When choosing a software development partner pay attention to:
- his experience – it will be great if your partner has already developed a number of CRM systems
- his portfolio and client reviews (especially on trusted ratings such as Clutch, Extract.co, Good Firms, etc.)
- his tech stack and readiness to pick the most optimal one specifically for your project
- his business expertise – to create an effective CRM or any other business software it is not enough just to be a great technology implementer. Your partner should dive deep into your business logic. Don’t hesitate to answer if your partner will provide you with business analysis and consultations.
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RexSoft is a CRM development company with 9+ years of experience in custom CRM development. So if you need to develop a quality CRM system that will meet your business needs perfectly, we’d love to collaborate!