A Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) allows organizations to manage customer data effectively at every stage, from lead generation to closing sales and customer support.
CRM platforms have rapidly become essential for almost every industry. The current global market revenue for CRMs is US$49.6 billion — which speaks to the popularity of these platforms.
However, while the growing necessity of a CRM has resulted in plenty of options to choose from, it can still be a struggle to find the perfect solution for your business. Some options may lack the features you need, while others have too many features that you don’t need to pay extra for.
What’s the solution? A customizable CRM solution. A CRM focusing on customization allows you to build the perfect platform for your specific needs without anything you won’t use and the flexibility to grow alongside your business.
This type of solution can go far in accommodating your specific needs and integrating the other platforms you depend on, all without breaking the bank. Keep reading to learn more about how a customized CRM can help your business now and in the future.
Understanding the Value of Customizable CRMs
Why is it essential to find a customizable CRM rather than choosing any off-the-shelf CRM? There are a few important reasons why you need to prioritize customization, which include:
- Ensure your existing processes are accommodated and enhanced, rather than hindered.
- Integrate the rest of your tech stack with your CRM to minimize hopping between systems to enhance productivity.
- Only pay for the features and functionalities you need.
Ultimately, the value of a customizable CRM is enhancing existing workflows without spending more than necessary. Once implemented, you’ll help close more sales, improve the customer experience, and avoid high operational costs.
The Benefits of Customizable CRM Software
After adopting a customizable CRM, you’ll experience impactful benefits throughout your organization, from closing more sales to providing a better customer experience. Let’s discuss some of the top benefits you’ll experience after adopting the right CRM.
Next-level Level Contact Management
Contact management is the primary purpose of any CRM, which can enhance sales, marketing, customer support, and customer retention. The better your teams can stay on top of customer contacts, the more effective they are at the given process.
For example, a sales rep can quickly review previous sales calls before closing the deal to ensure they understand the customer’s needs. Or, a customer service representative can review recent contact attempts to avoid making the customer repeat themselves.
Customization also allows your teams to provide new levels of personalization with every email, text, or call to improve the overall customer experience.
Automated Workflows Where You Need Them
Automation is a powerful tool to increase the productivity of every employee in your workforce. CRM automation helps your teams replace manual, tedious tasks with automated workflows. Depending on the workflow, you can entirely eliminate the need for human involvement or make the worker’s involvement minimal.
A CRM like Fireberry allows your employees to create specific rules for workflows, and when those rules are met, a follow-up action takes place automatically. This flexibility allows your employees to continually explore new ways to further customize the platform for their needs.
It’s also important to highlight that a customizable CRM doesn’t always mean it will have automated workflows. Make sure to understand if a prospective CRM has automation capabilities before signing up.
Integrations with Your Current and Future Tech Stack
Your teams will most likely rely on other systems to carry out their responsibilities. However, a truly adaptable CRM will allow you to integrate these systems, so your employees don’t need to open a new piece of software to carry out the given task.
For example, if some of your administrative tasks are handled in Google Sheets, but your sales teams need that information before contacting a customer, an integration with Google Sheets can make that data available directly within the CRM.
Additionally, ensure that your chosen CRM has plenty of integrations available so you’ll have additional options as your business grows. A CRM undergoing continuous development can also integrate new technologies that may become necessary in the future.
Choosing the Right Fully Customizable CRM Solution
How can you find and customize CRM that works for your business? There are several leading CRMs for small and medium-sized businesses that provide numerous benefits that help increase operational efficiency.
Yet, finding the right solution can still be challenging. You can hone in on the perfect option by following the below steps:
- Understand your specific needs: What processes do you need to accommodate with the new CRM? What other IT systems do your customer-facing teams use? What is your overall budget? It’s crucial to have a strong understanding of what you need before you start looking.
- Ask for recommendations from business partners (optional): If you partner with other businesses or know other business owners, ask for recommendations. Discover what CRM they use and if they’d recommend it for your needs. Recommendations aren’t the final stop, but they can help point you in the right direction.
- Request a demo of the platform: Schedule a call with a sales representative to see the CRM in action. Before the call, remember exactly the capabilities you need so you can ask the right questions to determine if the platform fits your requirements.
- Consider how it will fit into existing processes: Now that you have a specific platform in mind, how will your teams use it? Have a rough idea of what core processes will look like in the new system, such as moving leads through the conversion process.
It can take time to find the right platform for your business. Still, it’s well worth taking the time to discover the perfect CRM that will accommodate your existing systems and processes to boost efficiency and productivity.
Advantages of Customizing vs Building Your Own CRM
CRM customization has come a long way in recent years, giving organizations with strict requirements a new option instead of building their own CRM. Before the more recent customizable CRMs, many businesses had to develop their own to have a solution capable of accommodating their needs.
Building your own CRM is significantly expensive and can take a lot of time before being usable. And once deployed, it will need to be maintained and improved. At the very least, companies will need to hire developers and quality assurance teams to develop a usable CRM.
Fortunately, there are now CRMs that don't require any coding to create a solution customized to your organization’s specific needs. With these solutions, you’ll be able to integrate the rest of your tech stack while providing each team with the capability to customize the CRM based on their specific needs and processes.
Additionally, choosing a customized solution over building your own leverages the expertise of an entire development team, engineers, and QA testers rather than hiring a software development department.
Team Up With Fireberry for an Adaptable and Customizable CRM
Finding the right CRM may take some time, but it’s well worth the effort to make sure you find the perfect customizable CRM solution for your organization. Otherwise, you run the risk of using an insufficient CRM that hinders processes and causes confusion, creating more problems than it solves.
Customizable CRMs like Fireberry are designed with the flexibility and integrations to enhance workflows, operation efficiency, and customer experience. Fireberry can merge right in with your existing systems and process to involve several aspects of your organization.
Are you ready to learn more about how Fireberry can help your business? Contact us today and we’ll show you what a customizable CRM can do for your company.
