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When selecting CRM software for your business, consider these essential customer relationship management tools and functions.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software can track leads, monitor customer relationships, maintain contact lists and much more. Most CRM software offers an extensive list of features, but prioritizing the ones you really need versus the ones that are just nice to have can determine whether your implementation is a success or a flop. Below, we’ll explore 20 common CRM features, as well as outline steps to take during your search to make sure you stay focused on the ones that matter to your team.
CRM software helps businesses manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. It also helps streamline sales and marketing processes and improve customer service. The best CRM software can:
Most businesses don’t need all the features on this list, but all businesses will need at least some. When creating your shortlist of needs in a CRM, consider whether any of these features should be included.
Many top CRMs include sales pipeline management functions that give representatives a complete view of the sales process. With this feature, reps can track deals from start to finish, even when juggling multiple deals at once. This helps them manage their time better and focus on converting the most promising leads.
Additional sales pipeline management features include:
Many CRM solutions offer thousands of plug-ins and app integrations that boost functionality. Add-ons and application programming interface (API) connections let you connect your CRM to essential business software and freely share data. “Integration reduces silos, accelerates workflows and gives sales reps the full picture, enabling them to deliver a better customer experience,” explained Christian Wettre, SVP and GM at SugarCRM.
Watch for the following essential integrations in any CRM software you consider:
Wettre emphasized the importance of ERP and other software integrations. “Seamless integration with enterprise resource planning systems is a must, especially for B2B [business-to-business] sellers managing complex operations,” Wettre advised. “It ensures sales teams have real-time access to inventory, order history and billing data. Other critical integrations include marketing platforms, customer support tools and productivity software like email and calendars.”
Many businesses have difficulty with financial tracking — discerning how much money comes in and what business activities generate the most revenue. Modern CRMs often include revenue-tracking tools that allow business owners to monitor real-time data, such as sales sources, sales team and representative performance and overall profitability. Comprehensive revenue analytics and reporting features help entrepreneurs improve business decision-making.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have moved well beyond buzzword status — they are now core components of competitive CRM platforms. [Check out our review of Salesforce to see how this leading platform integrates AI tools] CRM-based AI and ML tools can provide the following functions:
Protecting your bottom line from data breaches is a top priority. However, sometimes hackers aren’t your biggest threat — internal bad actors are. CRMs enable you to assign specific roles to each staff member and restrict access to sensitive information based on their responsibilities. Role specificity ensures team members only see what they absolutely must see to do their job, making your existing cybersecurity plan more effective.
At many small and medium-sized businesses, teams work from different databases with varying information, creating confusion. In contrast, the best CRMs centralize vast amounts of data, including customers’ contact details, purchase history and email campaign responses. Changes are made in real time for everyone to see.
In addition to storing data, CRM tools help you analyze data and benefit from greater insights into customers, marketplaces and business performance. Better still, most CRMs now integrate with third-party software to collect and analyze data from various sources, including web forms, customer surveys and social media activity.
CRMs should offer a complete view of each customer’s history, tracking everything from the first time they appeared in your system to the first sale and beyond. When sales or customer service reps engage with a client, they should have access to a summary of every interaction, purchase and incident to understand the client’s perspective better.
Helpful customer service customizations include:
These functions will help your team respond faster, maintain a consistent approach and resolve issues more efficiently.
Customers communicate via multiple channels, including email, phone and social media. Many CRMs let you track all inbound and outbound customer communications — regardless of channel — and attach the information to each customer’s record.
Tying customer communication data to workflow automations reduces the chances of missing sales opportunities or overlooking follow-ups with prospective buyers.
For businesses operating internationally or planning global expansion, many CRM systems offer multilanguage capabilities and support for payments in various currencies. Rather than having teams in different regions rely on separate systems that create information silos, a centralized CRM gives leadership complete visibility into performance across every territory.
Repetitive tasks like data entry, sending emails and setting follow-up reminders eat into your sales team’s time. Manual processes also invite human error, leading to missed selling opportunities and unhappy customers.
Fortunately, many CRMs include workflow automation tools, email templates and smart notification features that automate repetitive tasks, reduce human error and boost productivity. Look for CRM solutions with low-code or no-code automation tools that make it easy to set, adjust and cancel workflows — without requiring a dedicated IT team to manage them.
Nikolaus Kimla, founder and CEO of AI-driven CRM platform Pipeliner, stressed that process visualization and workflow automation are key to improving customer relationships. “These two features enable businesses to manage customer interactions more efficiently, ensuring that no important steps are overlooked and relationships remain consistent,” Kimla explained. “When your CRM shares data with other apps, reps and everyone in the business [have] a complete view of customer interactions so they can enhance their relationship management.”
Jessica Andrews, senior director of product marketing at Muck Rack, agreed that automations enhance customer relationships, even if automation can feel impersonal. “[If] it’s done right, automation can reduce the unproductive but necessary [tasks] that take up a lot of time but don’t provide your customers with any value,” Andrews noted. “Consider automating re-kindling emails that you send to customers you haven’t reached out to in a while. Your CRM will be working in the background to surface customers that want to re-connect.”
CRMs shine as communication tools for workplace collaboration and information sharing. Communication and innovation are enhanced when teams and colleagues across the business share real-time insights, opinions and experiences while handling the same accurate, up-to-date information.
Ensure your CRM includes integrations with popular communication tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams or Google Chat to promote seamless collaboration across departments.
CRMs gather data from multiple sources, including sales, marketing and customer service teams. This data informs customized reports that show how you’re performing as a company and at departmental, team and individual levels. CRM reports can act as decision-support systems to help business owners make better data-driven choices.
You can run customized CRM reports on sales team calls, customer inquiry response times and email campaign click-through rates, to name a few examples. You can also measure customer satisfaction levels, track pipeline velocity and identify which parts of the sales funnel need the most attention — giving you a clearer picture of where revenue opportunities may be slipping through the cracks.
Forecasting tools project your business’s growth and opportunities based on your sales and marketing activity. A CRM with strong forecasting capabilities can help you avoid overcommitting on inventory and give you a clearer picture of how your campaigns and strategies will affect revenue over time.
Many CRMs include lead-tracking features that help you follow potential customers and target consumers who are more apt to buy. This feature is particularly important because your sales team may be juggling hundreds of leads at different stages of the customer journey. CRMs keep your sales team focused so they don’t lose track of where each deal is.
Look for a CRM solution that can analyze leads and identify the most qualified ones showing genuine interest in your product. You can then use that data to build personalized marketing campaigns designed to move those prospects toward a purchase.
Keeping documents organized is essential to a smooth sales process. A CRM with built-in document management lets you store digital paperwork and key information in one central location, often integrating with cloud storage platforms like Google Drive or Dropbox. Your sales and marketing teams can quickly access what they need without jumping between multiple systems or browser tabs.
Contact management is a crucial CRM feature. The best CRM platforms let you manage all prospects and contacts in a central location. They also support quick contact segmentation, making it easier to search for and connect with specific target audiences.
Contact management means gathering and maintaining detailed client data within each contact’s record to sharpen your marketing strategy. That depth of information helps foster stronger customer relationships, since you can tailor every interaction based on the person’s expectations, history, and preferences.
Layla Sawyer, the email and editorial coordinator at Verandah Brands, an Australian interior design firm, said contact management was a major motivator when the company chose its CRM tech stack. “The features you should keep an eye out for when you’re looking for a CRM should be contact management, automated follow-ups and segmentation,” Sawyer explained. “These will all be quintessential for building stronger customer relationships.”
Sawyer noted that Yabby, one of Verandah’s brands, uses Pipedrive to manage its sales pipeline, helping it track interactions and tailor communications. [Read our Pipedrive CRM review to learn more]
Lead management is another crucial CRM feature that helps sales teams follow up with potential customers based on several factors, including demographic, financial and psychographic data.
Lead management improves a sales team’s efficiency and productivity by using lead scoring to focus on warmer prospects who are more likely to turn into customers.
A high-functioning mobile app is no longer a nice-to-have — it’s a baseline expectation for most modern CRM buyers. Businesses want tools that give their teams full access to customer data, task management, and communication features regardless of where they’re working.
Mobile CRM solutions are increasingly valuable for remote workforces and businesses that use cloud-based systems.
In addition to traditional relationship-management features, robust CRM solutions allow users to manage entire sales campaigns. These CRMs let you plan, execute and evaluate sales campaigns from a central user interface your entire team can access.
Campaign management features include digital campaign return on investment data, scheduling tools, analytics reports and more. After your campaign, you can combine campaign-management tools with your CRM’s reporting features to generate numerous customer data points. This data can help you make informed decisions about future sales and marketing efforts.
CRMs are built around one core purpose: managing customer relationships. That makes customer satisfaction monitoring one of the most directly valuable features a platform can offer. Many CRMs let users track customer cases, log support interactions, and view satisfaction scores in real time. By keeping a close eye on these signals, you can identify friction points early, improve the overall customer experience, and build stronger retention processes going forward.
A CRM with the right features can transform how your team sells and serves customers. A CRM with the wrong ones becomes expensive shelfware. Before you request a single demo, work through the steps below to define what your business needs.
Start by documenting how leads, deals and customer questions move through your business right now. Where do contacts get stored? Who follows up, and how? Where do things fall through the cracks? Your answers will show you which problems a CRM needs to solve, which keeps you from shopping for features in the abstract.
Pay attention to the tools your team already lives in. Andrews said a CRM has to adapt to those habits, not the other way around.
“For example, incorporating a Gmail inbox in a CRM is important because, for many users, that’s where they spend their time. Your CRM should meet you where you spend your time without disrupting your preferred way of working,” Andrews explained.
The people who will use your CRM every day know where the current process breaks down. Ask your sales reps, customer service staff and marketers what slows them down, which tasks they repeat constantly and what information they wish they could see at a glance. A short survey or a 30-minute group conversation can give you more insight than any vendor’s feature list.
This step also builds buy-in, which matters as much as functionality. Wettre warned that skipping end-user input can leave you with a system that doesn’t match real workflows. Team members who help choose the tool are more likely to use it once it’s in place.
This step is the most important one. Most CRMs offer far more features than any single team will use, and the 20 features above can make everything sound essential. Your job is to separate what you need from what simply sounds impressive.
Take the findings from Steps 1 and 2 and run each feature you’re considering through these questions:
Then sort every feature into one of three buckets: must-have, nice-to-have or not needed. Your must-have list should be short enough that you can compare vendors against it line by line. This is where many buyers go wrong.
“One of the biggest challenges is over-prioritizing features you aren’t sure you’ll use,” Sawyer said. “When you look at a new tool, you can easily get lost in all of the impressive features. But, when all is said and done and you’ve paid for the platform, you probably won’t end up using them.”
To avoid this problem, Sawyer’s own team narrowed its list to three priorities: contact management, automated follow-ups and segmentation.
Your first CRM doesn’t have to be your forever CRM, and it shouldn’t try to be. Sandy Meier, head of client success at Contentellect, recommends starting with a lean option and adding capabilities as your needs become clear.
“For growing smaller businesses like ours, I would recommend starting simple with something like HubSpot’s free tier offer, which has all your core functionality without overwhelming your teams with too many bells and whistles,” Meier said. “Then, as you grow, you can add more features strategically rather than just paying for unused capabilities from day one.”
When you evaluate vendors, ask how easily you can upgrade, add users or turn on advanced features later. A CRM that scales with you gives you room to grow without forcing a costly migration. [Read our review of HubSpot CRM to learn more.]
A CRM that doesn’t connect to your existing software creates extra work and data silos. List the systems your CRM must connect with, such as your email platform, calendar, accounting software, marketing automation tools or ERP system. Then verify that each vendor on your list supports those integrations natively or through a reliable connector.
Wettre noted that this is especially important for B2B sellers managing complex operations, where sales teams need real-time access to inventory, order history and billing data. Treat any required integration that a vendor can’t support as a dealbreaker.
Wettre cautioned that many companies underestimate the importance of user experience when choosing a CRM, and a poor experience often leads to disappointing adoption. Don’t rely on a vendor demo alone. Sign up for a free trial or sandbox, then have the people from Step 2 work through two or three of their everyday tasks, such as logging a call, moving a deal to the next stage or building a report.
Have each tester rate how intuitive the tasks felt, and compare those scores against your must-have list. A platform that checks every box on paper but frustrates your team in practice isn’t the right fit.
Source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.
