Here’s something you can take to the bank. You can only be as successful as you are organized. Read that again… and again. In other words, you must get organized if you want to succeed in sales and in life. As Dr. Jordan Peterson says, “Clean your room, Bucko.”
If you desire for your sales organization to blow up — in a good way — then it’s time to start paying your bills on time, organizing your desktop, organizing your calendar and daily activities, and you guessed it, get a CRM with the right features and keep it organized!
So today I’m sharing the best CRM features to help get your sales team on the same page and crushing their numbers.
RELATED: The Best Sales Stack
Note: These CRM features (and my recommended CRMs) are hand-picked for SDRs specifically, but they work for all levels in the org chart — from SDR to AE to Sales Director to VP of Sales to CSO.
I break the features up into mush-have CRM features, nice-to-have features, and don’t-need features. After all, there’s no reason for a small startup to have advanced API integrations. I’ve seen so many organizations paying tens of thousands every year for CRM features they never use. My hot take is to keep it simple… at least to start.
The main point I want to drive home is that your CRM matters. It matters a lot. It’s the filter through which you connect and interact with your prospects and customers/clients. The cleaner the filter, the more deals you’ll capture, and the longer those closed accounts will remain happy customers.
Pro Tip: Look for a CRM that works well in your industry. Setting up and maintaining a seamless workflow is critical to your teams’ success.
With that, let’s dive right into the must-have CRM features.
Must-have CRM Features
Easy to Use — First and foremost, your CRM must be easy to use and intuitive if you want employee adoption. If you go with a powerful-but-complex CRM like Hubspot, your SDRs might be pulling their hair out trying to complete basic tasks. On the other end of the spectrum, CRMs like Nutshell and Pipedrive are much cheaper and easier to use, though they lack advanced customizations.
Contact Management — The very purpose of a CRM is to track customer/client interactions through the sales cycle and beyond, through their lifetime journey with your company. Every CRM does this, and if it doesn’t, don’t even consider it as an option. You need to know exactly how many touches — and the type of touches — your prospects and customers are getting at all times.
RELATED: The Rule of 7 In Cold Calling
Outbound Dialing — What good is a sales CRM if you can’t make calls directly in it? You’ll want to look for built-in calling, SMS, and Zoom integrations. Some even offer predictive dialers with their premium plans. Not every CRM offers these features, but it’s necessary for growing sales teams. Having the ability to call directly from your CRM can save loads of time and headaches.
Sales Activity Tracking — You can’t improve what you can’t measure. And you can’t measure what you don’t track. Most CRMs offer this feature on their base plan, and it’s absolutely necessary. You want to see in a simple dashboard who’s hitting their quotas and who’s not. From there you can make necessary management and training adjustments. Knowledge is power!
Visual Pipeline and Dashboard — You should know at all times exactly how much potential revenue, in dollars, sits in your pipeline. This should be displayed in your dashboard, depicted as pie charts, bar graphs, and other visual elements. This will give you the intel needed to scale or throttle/improve your team. And let’s be honest, people are visual creatures — it’s a nice dopamine hit to see those numbers increase from morning to afternoon.
Sales Analytics and Reporting — Get a CRM that pulls all of your numbers into a cohesive report. Sales activities, meetings booked, deals opened, proposals sent, deals closed, etc. You’ll want to track and pull reports on all of it. Note that many of the cheaper CRMs don’t offer this, or if they do it’s a premium offering.
Sales Forecasting — Sales forecasting is crucial to your success. You must plan ahead, and forecasting allows you to do that. Many of the big business decisions you’ll make will hinge on your forecasts. So it’s important these forecasts are accurate and up-to-date. Thankfully most good CRMs offer this feature built right into the dashboard.
RELATED: Track and Measure Your Pillar KPIs
Nice-to-have CRM Features:
If you’re a smaller to medium-sized business with less than $1M in annual revenue, you can probably do without these features. On the other hand, if you’re growing fast and scaling your team, then these CRM features suddenly turn into must-haves. But only you know your needs. Take a sober look at the size and trajectory of your org, and decide from there.
With that said, the following features are nice to have, but often not necessary.
- Range of AI features
- Lead scoring
- Gamifying sales features
- Social media integrations
- Advanced integrations
- Document storage and management
- Project management
- Extensive customizations
Don’t-need CRM Features
You may need them down the line as your business or sales team grows, but chances are you can do without these features for now:
- Chatbots
- Open API integration
- Automated workflows
- Competitive intelligence
- Omnichannel customer support
Popular CRM Picks
- Pipedrive – Great basic CRM with user-friendly features
- Hubspot – Loads of capabilities, but not user-friendly or affordable
- GoHighLevel – An all-in-one sales CRM and marketing platform.
- Salesforce – A powerful and pricey CRM with 25% of the CRM market share.
- Zoho – Similar to GoHighLevel, Zoho is an all-in-one business management tool with built in CRM.
- Nutshell – Similar to Pipedrive, Nutshell is an affordable and easy-to-use CRM, but with limited capabilities.
- Close – Another affordable CRM with fast setup and all-in-one outreach capabilities.