Small and Medium businesses, like the big organizations, are using technology to manage all the company’s relationships with the help of some of the most advanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools. These are the tools that help in contact management, productivity, and sales management.

But the CRM system these days can do much more than organizing contacts and act as a digital Rolodex. But, all you need is the right set of features so that can help you boost your business performance.

Here are some of the features that you should consider for an efficient CRM system.

1. Automation of Workflow: Seek the software that allows you to set up custom rules and provides salesforce automation. This will help you and your team to become more productive. The rules in the CRM application will help you to perform action-based triggers on events such as a present response sent as a reply to a message, the CRM application will automatically report them to the supervisor to generate performance reports.   
2. Customization: All businesses differ from one another, so there is not a CRM application that perfectly suits a business. Therefore, the application that is able to meet the unique needs of your business through customization is said to be the best.

There are some CRM applications that allow you to choose which features you require for your business. In fact, some of the CRM applications provide more advanced options through API.

3. Third-Party Integration: You can save a lot of time and money when you connect your CRM software to other applications that you use for the business. CRM solutions that provide third-party integrations can be the best choice for you.
4. Customer Service: The CRM software applications can help you get new customers and retain old customers by providing excellent customer service. Some of the capabilities that will allow your sales representatives and customer support team needs can be a comprehensive view of the customers that shows everything about the customer, communication tracking, and generates logs of all the incidents, purchase history, and website visits.
5. Tracking Employees: These can be the best ways to track employee activities. It is recommended to choose the CRM tool that gives own accounts to the employees. This helps them to track their hours, sales, meetings, goals, and other important numbers. The tool should also give the managers access to these accounts and dashboards that show employee details in terms of goals, completed tasks, and other productivity metrics. All these features are helpful in carrying out employee performance reviews and incentives.
6. Social Media: Your marketing team will save a lot of time if your CRM application has built-in social media monitoring features. For instance, Salesforce has tools to perform social media tasks that can track what the people are saying about your business through the social listing, know who your customers are, and have a tap on almost every social media channel and customize your social media strategy accordingly.
7. Real-Time Data: Including real-time data as part of CRM has recently come into practice since 2017. Modern CRM systems can pull data from devices and applications to help businesses make informed decisions.
8. Lead Management: This feature will help you identify your leads and the actions they have taken in their sales cycle. CRM system’s lead management process will let you score your leads and filter them off to a different member of your team. Selected leads are then converted into prospective customers.
9. Reporting: Some CRM has reporting features that generate the results of your sales and marketing efforts together. The reporting feature comes in a standard format with almost all the CRM applications. These reports can give the number of leads that the business gets at a certain period, sales generated at a certain amount of time, or the number of outbound calls that are being made by the team.

• CRM Analytics: You can get insights into customer data which can be highly important for business. These insights will help you make better decisions. Analytics can give you insights into the products, services, marketing, and overall communications that you carry out with your customers.
• Email: It can be highly confusing and overwhelming to track emails from the inbox. This can be difficult when you have to address every sales email at the right time. Therefore, an email feature helps you to keep your sales representatives organized and productive.
• Sales Forecasting: A CRM application that has this feature can help you predict your future sales and make decisions accordingly.

If you find most of these features in a single CRM application, it can help you save a lot of time, money, and effort. So choose the one that best suits your business and watch it accelerate your business like never before.