When you start to get to the point in your business where contact management systems are not a nicety, but a necessity, you will quickly begin to realize that there are many options to choose from. If you want to successfully grow your business, managing your contacts effectively is one of the most important tasks at hand.
If your sales and marketing team can’t quickly find, assess, and contact your potential buyers and customers to capitalize on opportunities while they’re hot, your business will not only fail to grow, it will soon begin to fail.
Features to look for in your contact management systems
Before we start listing the best contact management systems on the market today, let’s take a look at what you should get out of the box with the best contact management systems and what features you should look for to expand their capabilities:
All good contact management systems should include the ability to store your prospects’ and customers’ information, including email addresses, names, addresses, phone numbers, social media profiles, etc. It’s important that your contact list be easy to search and retrieve for the parts of your business that need the information and need it quickly.
You should also have the ability to set up calendars and notifications so that no event or task is missed. Each of your contacts should be added to the relevant events or tasks and the appropriate people in your company should be notified to take action. This can be helpful when it’s time to renew contracts or remind you to follow up with cold but qualified leads.
Notepads are another great feature of the top contact management systems out there, giving your employees or interns the ability to take notes on clients and client profiles from meetings, calls, etc. . Helpful information, like the best time to contact a potential customer or the names of their children, will help other sellers pick up where the first contact left off.
The ability to share files is crucial for cross-office cohesion, allowing your sales team to share a file with the marketing team, etc. This is essential for companies dealing with any number of files, contracts, proposals, or other personal documentation that is critical for a member of the company to have in front of them in the blink of an eye.
Just as blog subsets and categories are easy to extract due to tags, it’s also helpful to have the ability to tag your customers and prospect profiles. You can pull an entire geographic area at once, a certain type of customer, a demographic group, etc. Simply tag your profiles appropriately and when you click the tag, they’ll all be neat, tidy and ready for contact.
Top Contact Management Systems of 2014
To make sure that not only your customers and prospects are up to date, but also your contact management systems, here is a list of the best contact management systems to grow your business in 2014:
**Sales force. By integrating social, mobile, and collaboration tools, Salesforce remains a major player in the contact management software game, offering its consistent standard features and a unique group and task organizer called Chatter.
Easy to use as social profiles are right next to the contact information of all your customers and prospects. With Salesforce, look for a price range of around $60-$300 per month if you want the added functionality of your CRM.
** Mild infusion. This is a great contact management system for anyone who also needs eCommerce and marketing automation tools. A single interface that does it all with appointment and contact management, your lead capture and nurturing processes will never be more organized. The inconvenient? It can be complicated to use, as well as expensive. Your initial cost would be $199-$379 per month
**NetSuiteCRM+. If you need to create orders, keep track of your projects and manage the partners involved, this system offers you all that and more. With sales forecasting tools, metrics and opportunity management software, advanced reporting and analytics (in addition to the standard contact management features), this is the best choice for many large companies. Cost? $199 to $499 per month
**Hatchbuck. For small and midsize businesses that need sales and marketing software that takes CRM and email marketing automation to the next level of cohesion, this is a great way for your sales and marketing teams to stay on the same page. . You’ll also spend a fair amount of cash for this system; from $99 to $299.
The truth of the matter is that most small businesses are looking for a simple system to keep track of their customers so they can better serve them and build relationships with them.
Many of the features offered by these contact management systems may not be used enough or at all to justify the costs. These systems also do not provide an integrated strategy that will help with customer retention.