What is CRM ? Do I need a CRM ?

After providing CRM to various organization, we found out that CRM, has different meaning for different people.

We have devised simple checklist for you to find out with simple ‘Yes/No‘ questions

Do you have a way to communicate with your users for new announcement, products, information sharing ?
Before starting your follow up, is there an automatic way to get a list for today’s follow for each person in your company?
If yes, does it tell you what your last communication with that would-be client/lead was ?
Does your mail follow-up system (if it exists), integrate with your calendar ?
Is there a single window track to track ALL documents related to particular client ?
Are the documents & their modification history available for ready reference in single screen ?
Can you send quotations from your system to client ?
Can you track if quotations were sent to client through that system ?
Can you see consolidated to-do list in the system ?
Can you categorize leads as qualified / opportunities ?
Can you see reports of leads/conversion/opportunities ?

If you answered ‘Yes’ to most of the question, you don’t need a CRM.

You may stop reading the benefits CRM provides, and can continue browsing other information on our site.

However, if you answered ‘No’ to most of the questions, CRM is your answer to above questions.

We use vTiger, an open source CRM for custom implementation of our CRM solutions.

Various CRM features provided out of the box are as follows:

Lead Management
- Manage leads end to end from creating leads through converting them into opportunities
- Import leads from sources like web forms, events, seminars, calls and direct mail
- Track lead status as per sales process
- Single click conversion of leads to sales opportunities, accounts, and contacts
Opportunity Management
- Track all sales opportunities end-to-end
- Associate opportunities with accounts, contacts, activities, and other modules to have a better visibility on the opportunities
- Export opportunities to spreadsheet to analyze the sales pipeline and quickly identify the bottle-necks if any
Account Management:
- Track all accounts and related contacts, opportunities, cases, and other details from a single system
- Setup parent-child relationships between accounts, their departments and subsidiaries
- Import accounts from external applications or databases
- Export accounts to spreadsheet software to analyze the buying patterns and accordingly set up loyalty programs
- Attach customer-specific documents to accounts for a quick reference in future

Contact Management:
- Track all contacts and related opportunities, cases, activities, and other details from a single database
- Create the hierarchy of contacts within a company to have a better coordination while dealing with customers
- Import contacts from external sources and other applications
- Export contacts to spreadsheet for further analysis
Activity Management:
- Add all important customer-related emails in CRM for quick reference in future
- Store all the details of customer meetings and calls
- Manage daily tasks so CRM users have a streamlined sales process
Dashboards:
- Sales pipeline analysis by stage
- Monthly sales pipeline analysis
- Sales opportunities by lead source
- Drill-down the dashboards by time and opportunity stage

Security Management
- Define team roles as per your company structure
- Control the access to modules according to the user’s role
- Archive the login history of each user for better auditing
- Record all changes made on a per-user basis
Project Management
- Define multiple projects and track them through single window
- Define multiple project tasks, assign and track those separately
- Define and track project milestones
Marketing Automation
- Manage campaigns
- Email Marketing
- Mass Mailing

Customer Support & Service
- Log and manage ticket till closure
- Service call management
- Build and maintain a knowledge base for internal/external use
- Provide customer self service portal and allow them to track updates on tickets
Inventory Management
1. Manage Product Catalog
2. Manage Price Books
3. Vendor Management
4. Automated Inventory Control on issuance of Invoices against products
Product Customization
- Create custom fields/pick lists as per your requirements
- Change the look and feel of the user interface
- Customize tabs using drag & drop so that modules that are not relevant to sales process can be hidden
- Add new data entities to be tracked from within the system