What is an Online Sales CRM?

Saphyte Team

4 min read

Updated: May 18th, 2022

Businesses across industries have been affected by market turbulence— one that is largely caused by the pandemic. The disruptions that have taken place for more than a year were enough to change how consumers behave: which business they prefer, which products they would prioritize, or which marketing channel they interact with the most.

Coupled with factors such as tight competition and outdated sales practices, some companies struggle in surviving and keeping the business afloat. They experience trouble adjusting to a market with new consumer demands such as more updated technology to cater to their new needs, or more personalized content that serves these changing needs.

What you should know:

An online sales CRM uses cloud technology to help users manage lead and client information, perform sales and marketing tasks in a centralized platform, and make use of automation to fast-track business processes.

Companies like CocaCola, Apple, Amazon, and Tesco have found success in implementing their own CRM strategy. Local companies like Vision Consultancy have also observed noticeable improvements in their business processes after using a CRM.

There are a variety of online sales CRMs on the market. To simplify the task of choosing, list down your business needs and preferences and evaluate whether your CRM of choice can match your list.

Online sales CRMs can improve the user’s lead generation efforts, organize lead and client information, and ease bottlenecks in the sales funnel to improve the company’s overall sales output.

Other companies also find difficulty in getting new leads or when getting leads, managing the surge of leads. Some find it particularly hard to effectively engage potential customers and keep them interested in the product or services they’re offering.

To address all these challenges, experts suggest the use of an online sales CRM. Successful companies like CocaCola, Apple, Amazon, and Tesco have already started adopting the technology. Local companies like Vision Consultancy, enjoy the benefits of faster transactions with clients, elimination of delays in payments, and the smooth handling of documents that contain important client information.

Immigration advisory services company, Vision Consultancy, noticed faster and smoother customer transactions and documentation processes after using Saphyte.

What is an online CRM?

Compared to their on-premise counterparts, online CRMs are known to be cheaper, more convenient to use, and more reliable.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is an approach that focuses on maintaining good relationships with customers to drive sales and business growth. Using a software designed for customer relationship management, businesses can manage data related to leads and clients, perform sales and marketing tasks using the CRM platform, and engage with leads systematically until they turn into long-term customers.

But CRMs can be implemented in two major ways: first, online using cloud technology and second, on-premise, which means that the CRM provider has to install the software manually into the client’s computer or other hardware.

Recently, more companies have started to prefer online CRMs as they are more convenient, more affordable, and more reliable compared to on-premise CRMs.

What is the Best CRM for Sales?

There are several online sales CRMs available on the market. Remember to choose one that perfectly matches your current business needs and preferences.

Online sales CRM software should be able to scale up a business, be customizable to match business processes, and should be easy to use. It should also be capable of multi-channel communication, automate online transactions, and help with customer prospecting.

Below are a list of CRMs that are best suited for sales tasks and sales management in general:

Zoho CRM

Saphyte

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Bitrix24

Pipedrive

Nimble

Nutshell

How Online CRMs Help Businesses

Online CRMs help solve common business problems which may prevent companies from growing. Among these are:

1. Slow Lead Generation

The market can get a little volatile sometimes and extremely unpredictable, which may result in fewer leads for the company. With an online sales CRM, the task of generating leads (such as inviting website visitors to fill out a sign up form) can be automated, so the sales team can channel their focus into other tasks that could help generate more leads for the company.

Saphyte, for example, has a landing page feature that allows users to design their landing pages and enable them to prompt website visitors to fill out a signup form. The contact information that they will be providing can be used by your sales team to plan how to approach a specific customer so that he or she may convert in the end.

Setup your landing pages to automatically migrate customer information into your database with Saphyte, so your sales team can focus on more important tasks at hand.

It also helps your teams personalize their approach— upon knowing where the customer lives, what company he or she works for, or what kind of industry he or she is in, the sales rep can tailor his or her pitch so that only relevant details are included, increasing its impact to the potential customer.

2. Messy Customer Records

Documentation can get messy for many companies, especially those that deal with a number of clients or customers. Be careful though as this can result in more damaging impact to the company.

Messy customer records can lead to lower sales conversion rates, slower collection of payments, or even awful customer service.

When details about your clients and their journey are well-organized, it makes it easier for your sales team to personalize their interactions with specific clients and deliver services that are relevant to the client’s needs.

But with a CRM software, creating records of new clients or customers, managing their information, and pulling up their records anytime to check their previous engagement with your company can get a lot easier.

With interfaces that are usually designed to be user-friendly, your sales teams can now easily manage your customer records and perform tasks at a much faster pace using the CRM.

3. Bottleneck in the Sales Funnel

Not all sales techniques work effectively— some emails may remain unopened, chats ignored, and dead leads clogging the pipeline. Issues that go unnoticed and undiscovered could result in bottlenecks in the sales process. And this can result in operational inefficiencies: your sales team will end up investing energy and other resources into someone that has zero chances of converting into a customer.

Description: CRM software helps users identify bottlenecks in the customer conversion funnel, correct errors, and make solutions to encourage customers to move to the next stage of the funnel.

With a CRM, you can easily spot these dead leads and craft a strategy around them— either to revive them or even remove them to unclog the funnel.

By identifying performance issues in your funnel, you can improve your sales techniques and guarantee the success of your leads converting.