7 Underrated CRM Features that Impact Your Bottom Line

While standard CRM features like sales forecasting, pipeline management, and automation bring lots of value to businesses, many less popular, yet highly effective CRM features get overlooked. In this article, we will go over seven underrated CRM features that users tend to neglect the most.

Particularly for sales-oriented businesses, CRM systems can be a real lifesaver. Monitoring and automatically updating your sales pipeline and being able to cross communicate with team members regardless of geographical boundaries is already worth the investment. However, you can get a lot more convenience, and productivity boosts if you utilize all of the CRM capabilities. After all, these features of CRM are already included in your subscription, so you might as well make the most out of them.

1. Mobile app

Most market-leading CRM vendors like Pipedrive and Vcita have developed a smartphone app. These apps can accomplish close to any task that you need while being on the go. With a mobile CRM you can:

• Examine prospects: Search and find information on your contacts in case there is an urgent need. Also, sales reps can scan a prospect’s details right before they have a meeting or a call with a lead. This will help deliver high-quality, personalized service and increase the chance of closing a deal.
• Add updates, notes, comments, files, etc.: The ability to fill in important information while it’s still fresh in your mind will help minimize errors and increase overall effectiveness. Plus, it’s much less likely that you’ll forget to update something one you get to your desk, which may take several hours.
• Review your tasks: It’s easy to get lost in the sea of work. Being able to review pending tasks from your phone can help you plan the workday accordingly, without forgetting about anything.
• Add new contacts: If you’ve just encountered a lead, you don’t have to lose time. Just add them to your pipeline along with all related information. You can do this quickly with your smartphones without missing out on any important contact-related data.

Out of the advanced CRM features list, the mobile app is certainly the one with the highest convenience score. If you haven’t already, download and start using it.

2. Voice notes

Probably one of the least used CRM features, voice notes, go hand in hand with the mobile app. As you finish an important conversation with a lead or prospect, there may be a lot of information that needs to be added to the CRM. While taking paper notes is useful, sometimes you don’t have a choice but to remember a number of points without being able to write them down.

However, the problem is that with every passing minute, there is a high chance that you may forget important details. This gets even harder if you have a couple of back-to-back meetings. Here is where voice notes step in. With the help of your smartphone app, you can add or update the given contact’s information with a voice message with all the information without losing any time and minimizing chances for error.

3. Tagging

Another one of the under-used CRM features, tags, are a quick and efficient way to label groups, team members, contacts, projects, leads, emails, and opportunities in a CRM system. They are very effective at organizing groups of contacts or projects by some shared distinction like geographic location, role at the company, temporary usage of an item or equipment, etc.

Depending on your contacts and industry, you can use tags differently. For instance, if the given company operates in the construction industry, you can create tags like “Manager, worker, engineer.” For general cases, you can label contacts as “C-level, influencer, very important.”

Also, you can tag leads as “hot, warm, cold” making it easier to understand who you need to focus on immediately. Likewise, an organization can be tagged based on its reputation and size with “fortune 500, startup, enterprise,” etc. Depending on the case, some contacts may qualify for multiple tags, which makes it easy to find the right person in various situations quickly.

Tagging is an excellent way to quickly share information with everyone viewing a record on a given task, especially when you have multiple sales reps talking to the same person. Start doing this, and you’ll inevitably notice an improvement in processes.

4. Start and end dates on tasks

Although seemingly insignificant, these features of CRM have many use cases. When faced with time-sensitive situations, setting a start day on a task can help team members set more realistic expectations. Rather than waiting for a task to become past due and try to finish it ASAP, start dates add a sense of urgency to a given task, and accelerating its completion.

End dates are very similar to deadlines, but with a few tweaks. Depending on the task, the dates may be adjusted. For instance, if during the lead nurturing process, you find that the contact will be unavailable for a week, you can extend the end date. Also, nobody knows the workload of a given team member better than they do. When a task has both a start and end date, the person who accepts the task mutually agrees that the timeline is realistic. If it’s not, you can work together to adjust one of them.

5. Following tasks

Some matters demand increased attention, even if you’re not the one solving them. For example, you may assign the task to fix damaged water pipes in your facility to one of your managers. This manager will have to talk to the landlord, find a plumber team, and oversee the completion. Now, imagine you haven’t heard from you manager for a few days and the pipes aren’t fixed yet. Was the task started? What stage is it in? Is there a problem?

You will know all the answers instantly if you follow this task in your CRM. When following a task you’ll automatically get notified when the manager updates the status or details of the task, links the task to someone else, tags or comments on the task, or attaches a file to it.

6. Synchronization

Another one of the under-used advanced CRM features, synchronization, can bring many benefits to your organization. Besides making the most obvious integrations with marketing, sales, and help desk, your CRM can be synchronized with your enterprise resource planning to create a single, fully automated inquiry management process for all clients.

Also, when synching the CRM system with emails and calendars, there will be no need for double entry of information any longer. Finally, you should integrate your CRM solution with social media profiles. Even if you’re not very active on social media, you’ll still be able to listen to customer conversations on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, which will help you stay aware of your online reputation.

7. Project categories

In the modern world, most businesses offer more than one product or service. This not only helps close more deals but also boosts customer retention and fulfills market demands. If you’re like that, then one of the standard CRM features, project categories, is for you. If you’re using your CRM to manage more than one business, create a project category for each of your businesses. This will help you monitor the allocation of resources while being able to find cross-sale opportunities.

Conclusion

Just like with your business, when developing your CRM strategy, there is always room for improvement. Modern customers subconsciously demand special attention to details that are easy to miss, which can result in a lost deal. Using all the CRM capabilities described above will help you substantially improve your teams’ processes, productivity, and efficiency, and cater your contacts with the highest quality service.