How Customization Can Help Your Sales CRM Solution Work for You

Every business is unique, right from the vision, and business model to systems, processes, and customer experience design. Businesses particularly like their systems to be custom build as per their needs. Although not many of them have the wherewithal to build solutions in-house and generally go for a third-party tool with an expectation to get a customizable solution that can be tailored as per their specific workflows. By customizing a CRM solution, a company can configure the system to match its sales processes, terminology, and unique requirements.

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In the first part of the article, we take a look at an essential use case that teams prefer to customize in their CRM solution.

Custom Fields: The solution should have the ability to create custom fields with desired attribute types like text, integer, string enum, etc. This will help teams capture specific data related to the sales process, such as product or service details, pricing, deal amount, category, and others.

Automated Workflows: Custom workflows are essential to automate tasks and actions within the sales process, such as assigning tasks to team members, sending email notifications, and updating lead status. Teams should have the flexibility to create workflows as per their specific needs.

Notifications: The system should have the capability to create custom notifications and alerts for events such as new leads, missed follow-ups, or upcoming meetings.
Depth of customization can be gauged by granular customization like the duration of the notification bar to be visible, how long before the event should users be notified, and the message the notification should have to prompt users.

Templates: Sales teams should be able to create custom templates for emails, quotations, and other collaterals or documents, ensuring consistent branding and messaging across all communications. Features like merging email to personalize communications with any of the lead details, scheduling triggers, and ejecting contacts who have engaged are some of the core use cases most sales teams need.

Use Role & Permissions: As team sizes grow, it becomes paramount to maintain data sanctity and security. Sales solutions should have the ability to create custom user roles and permissions to control access to specific data and functionality within the system, ensuring that team members only have access to the information and features they need. Deeper level customizations include the ability to restrict field level views, restricting some fields are viewed only for users,

Integrations: There should be an ability to integrate with other tools and systems used by the sales team, such as marketing automation software, and customer support platforms. Integrations help orchestrate the sales process without any interruption in the flow. While standard integrations are offered by most top-tier solutions, it's the custom integrations with internal tools or other custom apps most solution providers find it tough to provide.

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Reports & Dashboards: After Integrations, custom reports is another area where even top-notch sales CRM solution fails to deliver the goods. Getting customized reports and dashboards to provide insights into the sales process relevant to all sales teams. Customizing reports by region, product line, or other relevant categories. Ability to add filters on all data attributes, control role-based access, and personalized reports to show only relevant data for users. Some teams require deeper-level data like field edits, lead state changes, First Response time (FRT), and other metrics.

Data Model: Data model customization is highly important and can become a make-or-break decision during a sale. Most popular sales CRM solutions offer the ability to add new custom data objects and field types like a standard field, custom field, identity field, and system field. As part of the standard solution, most sales CRM solutions offer standard objects like Account-Contact Lead-Opportunity. On top of this ability to create custom objects and fields helps teams customize their solution appropriately.

Customizations are not simple to implement and this has been one of the key pain areas for every customer and no less for software solution providers. Software solution providers face challenges in catering to a high extent of customizations as they are limited at times by system capabilities, resource-intensive work, and also cost overruns while as width and depth of requirements do not pause. Businesses should have clarity as to why they need customizations, what their use cases are, also baking in their future needs, and lastly how it can really benefit them. We take a look at the top objective of why businesses aim for a high level of customization in their sales solution.

Improved Efficiency: Customization of each aspect of the sales solution only helps reduce manual tasks, automating processes and dependency on other tools like spreadsheets, internal trackers, or other apps used as a workaround. This definitely helps teams build a complete solution taking care of the granular features which affect the end users the most.

Increased Productivity: With deep customizations in a sales CRM solution, users find working on the CRM solution seamless. With little friction in using the solution, reducing manual tasks to capture details or update leads in the solution, the productivity of users to a new level

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Better Data Management: A customized CRM solution enables businesses to capture and manage data that is most important to them. It ensures that all data is accurately entered into the system, tracked, and analyzed. Using a custom data model, teams can build custom fields, and reports, and create derived attributes to manage the process better.

Enhanced Customer Experience: With a customized solution, teams see an increase in efficiency and productivity running automated sales processes. More targeted and personalized experiences can be aimed at customers at scale. Businesses can segment their customers based on various criteria such as buying behavior, preferences, and demographics. This allows sales reps to personalize their communications with customers, leading to a better customer experience.

Customizing a sales CRM solution is crucial because it allows businesses to tailor the software to their unique needs, streamline sales processes, and improve productivity and efficiency. It leads to a better customer experience and enables businesses to make data-driven decisions. For the consideration of sales leaders, it is important that they qualify prospective solutions for the depth dn width of customizations they are capable of handling. This will ensure a sustainable long-term solution that teams can leverage to build a scalable sales CRM solution.

Chakra Sales is a modern sales solution tailored to make sales execution for early & growth-stage teams frictionless. With a quick and easy setup, easy to operate for users, and a powerful solution connecting all tools used for sales like WhatsApp, Telephony, Email, Facebook forms,  Landing page forms, and automating tasks to reduce manual tasks. Chakra Sales becomes the only solution the sales team uses for their operations. Over 100+ early to growth-stage companies/startups/SMBs use Chakra sales to better manage their sales process.