One of the best investments any business owner can make is in their customers. And a good way to do that is through Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

CRM tools provide businesses with a centralised location where they can collect, store and view all their customer data.

They could include basic information such as phone numbers and email addresses, insights into their preferences, and where they are in the customer journey each moment. Making way for a more tailored response to customer needs and wants.

This allows teams to collaborate and access real-time updates to ensure every communication is informed, clear and relevant.

So now that we know what it does, here’s an interesting fact – you get an average ROI of $8.71 for every dollar spent on CRM. Cool, huh?

But there’s more, CRMs can generate data-driven leads based on past purchase behaviour, personal details, and similar product usage. As a result, implementing CRM tools can increase your conversion rates by up to 300%. The story doesn’t end here, as we’ve compiled five reasons for using CRM tools:

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1. Improved customer service

You can use a CRM to manage all of your contacts, gather important customer information and make it easily accessible to everyone in your company. This will ensure that employees have all the information they need about a customer and can tailor their services accordingly.

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2. Increased sales

CRM tools enable you to automate key tasks, streamline sales processes, and analyse your sales data in one central location. As a result, your team meets their targets faster, reducing production costs and increasing sales revenue.

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3. Enhanced customer retention

Once the hard part of obtaining and converting leads is complete, it’s essential that you work on ongoing customer retention. You can use CRM tools for automated ticketing, customer support to help you pinpoint problems and quickly resolve them.

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4. Detailed analytics

CRM tools enable you to organise data to actionable items and easily understood metrics. This helps you refine campaigns, identify potential problems and find an accurate solution effortlessly.

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5. Collaboration simplified

By providing a common platform for the free exchange of information and collaboration, CRM fosters a positive team culture and improves communication among employees. As it is always up to date, CRMs enable your teammates to see records to make decisions easily. This shared record also allows everyone in your team to work together resulting in improved productivity.

Hopefully, we’ve piqued your interest enough to make you want to know more. Worry not as we still have a list of the top five tools to help you get started:

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ClickUp

ClickUp helps teams manage projects easily by providing communication tools, task assignments, statuses, alerts, and task toolbars all in one platform.

Designed to manage simple and complex tasks, it provides a single app for planning, organising, collaborating and time tracking across teams.

It also gives you access to a number of features, including docs, chats, calendars, reminders, tasks, and goals.

And with the ability to save one day a week, a free forever plan (up to 100 MB) and unlimited members it ranks on top of our CRM list.

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Asana

With Asana, you can manage, collaborate, communicate, and organise your projects efficiently.

It is a web-based service that can handle multiple projects at once and is suitable for any company.

Asana is intended for use by organisations and small teams, but personal use and solo projects are also possible.

It offers a free version that allows up to 15 users. One limitation, however, is that Asana cannot track the amount of time spent on tasks, meaning that you might be needing to implement another tool for it.

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Hubspot

HubSpot CRM is one of the most innovative CRMs out there. Initially free, but with a range of premium subscription plans starting at $50 per user per month, it’s a pretty decent fit for small and midsize businesses (SMBs).

The free plan also includes more than 90 customisable dashboard templates that you can choose from.

Besides analysing chat and email conversations in the team inbox, it also produces reports on how quickly problems are solved and how effectively messages are distributed.
Other great features include a meeting scheduler and simple automation tools. Despite limiting full access to two users, the plan still allows an unlimited number of administrators and users to access certain tasks and reports.

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Pipedrive

Pipedrive CRM streamlines the sales process by generating more leads and organising your sales in one place. The tool can also eliminate inefficient admin tasks. Freeing up a lot of time for you.

With advanced features, it can help your team build multiple sales pipelines, manage leads, track communications, and generate customised sales reports.

However, it lacks an inbound email sending feature, so you’ll have to use another platform to communicate with your sales prospects on a regular basis.

With a 14-day free trial and monthly plans beginning at $18.25, you can give this one a shot.

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monday.com

Using monday.com, you’ll be able to manage your prospects using a highly visual interface.
Teams can use its simple, intuitive Work OS to define workflows, respond to changing requirements, achieve transparency, collaborate with each other, and eliminate monotonous manual tasks.

The free version, however, has limited features including a CRM board. There are more features available with the paid packages, which include a number of features for managing projects and teams.

Conclusion

As a business grows, there are many challenges and CRM tools are a great solution to face these hurdles head-on. It lets you manage leads, projects, and prospects effectively. With its ability to help teams collaborate, CRM systems can easily provide an added benefit to organisations planning to grow and build as a team resulting in enhanced productivity, collaboration, and customer retention.

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