14 Essential CRM Features in 2024 – Forbes Advisor – Technologist

There are a myriad of CRM features available, from core to advanced to industry-specific. However, when selecting the right CRM for your business, it’s paramount that you understand the essential CRM features that all providers should offer. Here are the top 14 essential CRM features you should consider as a baseline for CRM software.

1. Contact Management

Contact management is the most common feature of a standard CRM and helps you store, organize and manage prospect and customer information. Typically, CRMs will offer standard contact records with details such as name, email address, company, website, industry and more. However, many CRMs will also allow you to customize your contact records to include all the important information for your business.

2. Visual Sales Pipeline

Visual sales pipelines are also an essential CRM feature that all CRM software should provide. A sales pipeline is a visual representation of your sales process broken down into specific stages.

At each stage, you can denote benchmarks that are required to move a prospect to the next stage in your pipeline. Then, you can move leads or prospects from stage to stage as they meet each benchmark and see where each opportunity sits in your overall pipeline.

3. Task Management

Task management is a simple yet effective essential CRM feature that lets you create a list of tasks, set reminders and track the progress of each task. Tasks can be linked to specific contacts or deals within your pipeline and assigned to individuals or teams. They can be viewed as personal to-do lists, team-level tasks or Kanban-style boards for visual tracking.

4. Document Management

Leading CRMs offer document management as a core feature, allowing you to upload, store, organize and manage documents that are important to your overall sales process. The best CRM software will include secure storage, folders, version control and collaborative sharing features so your entire team can access important documents. Some CRMs will even offer templates for your most important sales documents, like proposals or contracts.

5. Calendar Integration

Calendar integrations connect your CRM with the external business calendar you use. This integration lets you manage your calendar directly within your CRM and syncs all events and tasks. These types of integrations are usually native, meaning that they connect directly to all leading business calendar tools without needing a third-party application programming interface (API).

6. Meeting Scheduler

In addition to native calendar integrations, most CRMs will also offer a meeting scheduler that makes it easy for customers and prospects to book meetings with you. You can set up multiple meeting types with various availability and custom questions to help gather information before the meeting. Then, the meeting scheduler will integrate with your calendar to know your availability and provide booking links that people can use to schedule a meeting.

7. Email Integration

Like calendar integrations, email integration is a native and essential CRM feature. This feature connects your CRM system to your business email, such as Outlook and Gmail, letting you manage your business email directly from within your CRM. This includes sending and receiving emails and creating various email automations like autoresponders and more. Your inbox will sync and update automatically between your CRM and business email.

8. Reporting and Analytics

The best CRM software will include sales reporting and analytics that you can use to make informed business decisions. Most will offer both prebuilt and custom sales reports that you can combine into a centralized reporting dashboard to stay on top of all your key metrics. Advanced CRMs sometimes include intelligent sales forecasting based on your metrics so you can plan effectively for the future.

9. Workflow Automation

CRM workflow automation allows you to streamline repetitive sales and marketing tasks by creating powerful automations based on defined triggers. Typically, you start by identifying repetitive workflows that can be automated. From there, you’ll set up triggers, such as a new customer being added to your pipeline. Finally, assign an action to the trigger, such as sending an automated onboarding email to the new customer.

10. Lead Scoring

Lead qualification is important to ensure that you and your sales team are talking to the right prospects. Because of this, many CRMs offer lead scoring capabilities that assign each lead in your sales pipeline a score based on how closely they fit your ideal customer profile.

You can customize the exact criteria used to score leads. For example, you might score demographic information such as industry or income and behavioral information such as email responses.

11. Built-In Telephony

Leading CRMs will often include a built-in business phone dialer as part of their core feature set. This built-in phone gives you and your sales team individual business phone numbers to make calls directly from within their CRM.

This is helpful because it separates business and personal calls and can save money on third-party business lines. Some will even offer auto-dialers that make continuous outbound calls until a prospect answers the phone.

12. Proposal Management

Proposal management is an essential CRM feature that helps you create, send and track proposals across all your prospects and opportunities. For example, many CRMs will track whether a prospect has opened your proposal attachment, giving you key information to help with follow-ups. CRM software will often also include proposal templates and customization options, eliminating the need for third-party proposal software.

13. Contract Management

Like proposal management, contract management is an essential CRM feature that can help you create, send, track and even sign contracts using built-in or integrated e-signature software. Many CRMs will even help you manage key contract milestones and obligations after the contract has been signed and executed.

14. Third-Party Integrations

Third-party integrations allow CRM systems to connect with a multitude of third-party apps, such as social media, email marketing, e-commerce, web conferencing and productivity tools. Many of the most commonly used third-party apps, such as email and calendars, can be connected natively. Other apps can be connected through available APIs, whereas a small number require a third-party connector, such as Zapier.

The best CRM software offers a marketplace of third-party apps that can be connected easily to your CRM. Make sure you verify whether your most used apps can be connected to your CRM of choice.