The CRM Features Users Care About Most (CRM Study: Part 3)

Casey Meehan

3 years ago

SMBs Make Their CRMs Work Hard

Many of the people we surveyed indicated that their teams were bending their CRMs to the company’s needs.

A clear majority of respondents (62.5 percent) said their teams used most of their CRM’s features. Meanwhile, another one-third of respondents said their teams used at least half of the features in their CRMs.

Most teams customize their CRMs to meet their unique needs, too. More than half (53.5 percent) of respondents said they had added some customizations to their software, and another 19 percent said they had added deep integrations to their CRM.

That said, more than one-fifth of respondents (22 percent) said their teams used an uncustomized, off-the-shelf tool. CRM vendors targeting the SMB market should be prepared to address the needs of these users as well as the multiple-customizations of the power users.

The Must Have Features

Far and away, “customer management” was the No. 1 use case among our survey respondents. Four other features stood out as must-haves for about half of respondents:

Email marketing
Lead management
Sales funnel / Pipeline management
Customer interaction tracking

The Features SMBs Use Least

Likewise, a handful of features stood out as things few SMBs need from their CRMs. At least one-fifth of respondents said they never use the following features:

Social media sentiment analysis
Product suggestion
Social media management
Quote / Proposal creation

CRM Buyers Study

Here’s how 200+ software decision-makers say you can win their business and become their CRM provider. This study explores how to attract and convert CRM buyers at small to medium size companies.

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Author
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Casey Meehan

CEO at Epic Presence

In January of 2014, I launched Epic Presence, a content marketing agency focused on SaaS and HR Technology.

Since then my team and I have published over 2,500 long-form articles for SaaS and HR Technology companies all over the world and engaged with over 20K influencers to promote this content.

I’d be happy to chat with you about anything and everything we have learned along that journey. Please don’t hesitate to reach out!