While there are many sales tools out there, a customer relationship management (CRM) system is increasingly common to manage sales processes and customer relationships. The key to choosing the right one is to pinpoint the CRM that your whole organization will actually use to effectively track and deliver best in class experiences for current and future prospects. No matter which CRM system you implement, here’s a list of some of the latest features that CRMs deliver that make an investment into CRM worth it.

Automation of your sales processes

CRMs are capable of guiding your sales team towards desired outcomes with new enhanced branching logic within your sales processes. It also increases impact through automation of business processes and enforcement of business rules across all devices.

Easy information sharing across teams

It helps in coordinating your activities, contacting leads, building sales pitches and customer follow up. A CRM that integrates with email also provides confidence about where data is coming from and how it's shared.

Better allocation of team resources

The latest CRM updates allow you to view how your team resources are allocated. This helps you in making intelligent decisions about how best to deploy your resources. For example, you have the information at your fingertips if you’re faced with the decision of following up on leads or following up with current clients.

Use of sales hierarchies

It helps you manage and report on your sales data in a way that maps to your business. The hierarchical visualizations and roll-ups bring real-time territory and forecasting data to your fingertips.

Enable collaboration

This features allows for improved sales synergies. Collaboration tools facilitate cross-team collaboration with marketing such as providing input into campaigns and targeting or collaborating with other members on the sales team to encourage team selling to land bigger accounts.

Improve field sales

CRM for mobile increases field sales productivity with flexible, role tailored dashboards and analytics, personalized home pages and the ability to navigate by hierarchy.

Monitor your important contacts

The hottest trend with the latest CRMs allow sales to keep track of changes on social media sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and others to notify you with any important changes that have occurred recently.

Manage multi-channel sales campaigns

It helps you streamline your targeted sales campaign creation and improve segmentation with graphical email editing, A/B and split testing, integrated offers, and approval workflows.

Keep you alert with notifications and reminders

The latest CRM tools deliver notifications and reminders about your important contacts and prospects so that you don’t lose contact and miss out on that next big sale.

Optimum routing with GPS on CRM apps

GPS enabled CRM apps can help you identify prospects in your area and takes you right to the prospect’s door. It comes with maps for directions and contact information to set up a meeting.

If fully implemented and used, these tools can take the effectiveness of your sales team to a whole new level. Utilizing CRM on a regular basis provides your sales team’s productivity a huge boost. It offers your team a competitive advantage by increasing sales, reducing production costs, and increasing market share. The relevance of CRM for sales may not be immediately recognizable to some of your reps, but there are several benefits that will help them build stronger customer relationships.

So, what do you wish your CRM system could do for your customer relationships? Or what’s on your CRM wish list?