How CRM customization can boost revenue growth and sales productivity

Why look for CRM customization

Customization and configuration form the basis of your customer relationship management program, resulting in better sales performance and higher sales productivity. Here are some reasons why you should look for a custom CRM solution software for your business.

Build the CRM around your business

Say no to a CRM that forces you to change your business process to match its capabilities. A CRM system that allows custom modules, custom fields, industry-specific customization, and workflow automation can better fit your business needs.

Streamline sales processes

Make your sales process efficient at scale. Collect and record data in a way that makes the most sense to your business. Digitize your sales processes across different regions, business units, currencies, languages and more. Automate these processes through workflows, improving overall efficiency and reducing errors.

Implement and scale faster

Customization simplifies your CRM rollout and positions it for long-term growth alongside your business. Configure the system to your precise needs, ensuring it adapts easily as you scale, without costly re-implementations or disruptive changes.

Increase sales productivity

Help sellers win deals by giving them access to the right information and tools. You can regulate CRM data access for users so they only see the information relevant to them. Enabling users to tweak user-specific accessibility settings such as languages and time zones can make the CRM more intuitive to use. 

Improve reporting and insights

Get to the insights faster with the right reports for your business. You would be pleased to know that custom CRM capabilities often extend to reporting and business intelligence. Once you choose the required metrics that you will track, you can create custom reports and dashboards to track the most important KPIs for your business.

What to customize in your CRM

Layout customization

Achieving a single source of truth is a key reason businesses invest in CRM. This starts with having data recorded on the right fields and modules. Configuring custom modules and custom data fields during CRM development can help with data sanity in the long term. This can have a far-reaching effect on organizational performance across business intelligence, sales process efficiency, and customer experience.

User customization

User adoption is important for CRM program success. The ability of CRM admins and end-users to customize the user experience on the CRM platform can help organizations build more employee-friendly solutions. This also helps improve sales productivity.

Automation and business process customization

Not all sales team members operate alike.  Customizable workflows, sales pipelines, and assignment rules are some features that help organizations automate sales without changing existing business processes. These features lead to better adoption, and also boost sales productivity.

Beginner’s guide to CRM customization in Freshsales

Here are some of the most commonly used customization options to help you fine-tune Freshsales for your business. Let’s take the example of a real estate firm, “House Hunter” that is in the process of customizing their CRM software.

1. Data customization

• Custom modules Modules help you structure different types of records and the associated information. With custom modules and custom objects, you can create records relevant to your business or industry. For example, a custom module, “properties” in Freshsales helps House Hunter manage their property records. They can see relevant attributes such as the number of bedrooms, carpet area, pricing, and more. They can also create associations between different modules to assign a property to a real estate agent, see all the contacts interested in a property, create opportunities, and close deals.

• Custom fields You can create custom fields on all modules to record information that’s unique to your business. It could be specific customer information that are unique identifiers such as subscriber IDs and account numbers, or any attributes you want to identify about a record type. For example, House Hunter can add a field, “loan” to their contact profiles to track and support clients with home loan applications.

• Custom events Your leads perform various actions during their purchase cycle. Custom events can help you identify and record when customers perform favorable or unfavorable actions. When combined with workflows, it could help you automate responses and engage with customers proactively. For instance, when a prospective customer visits House Hunter’s website and looks at different listings or downloads a brochure, these activities can be recorded as custom events. Workflows can be set up to add the visitor to a segment or engage with additional information based on their interest. House Hunter can personalize the experience in real-time for their customers.

2. User customization

• Custom user roles The ability to customize user roles extensively allows you to create different profiles for users in your CRM system. You can define data permissions, module accessibility, and other settings to fine-tune the CRM experience for each user. This can help protect data privacy while improving end-user experience. Real estate agents working for House Hunter have territories assigned to them. With access control, agents working in southern California only have access to properties and contacts that are local to them. This helps make the CRM more secure, ensuring that only those who are meant to have access to data can access it.

• Language and accessibility Freshsales allows users to customize certain aspects of their CRM experience. Users can choose their preferred language, switch between time zones, and make use of other accessibility features to further improve their CRM experience.

Business process and industry customization

Workflows and sales sequences

Workflows help you automate day-to-day operations. The ability to easily customize workflows and templates in Freshsales makes workflow automation simple. It eliminates busywork and improves productivity. 

For instance, consider a customer who visits House Hunter’s website and shows interest in a listing. Once the agent has engaged with the customer and identified an opportunity, the system automatically creates a deal. A well-executed workflow helps House Hunter reps focus on selling while the system takes care of the rest.

Multiple pipelines

Multiple pipelines help you better track sales across distinct sales processes. Freshsales allows you to create multiple pipelines for your different products, business units, or customer segments with customizable stages and layouts for each. The real estate firm, House Hunter, caters to both individuals and businesses looking to buy or lease property. Having configured two sales pipelines for B2B and B2C, they can track deals across various stages of each business. The custom pipelines allow them to understand the performance of each business better and forecast sales for each revenue stream.

Custom sales activities

Activities like having lunch or playing golf with a prospect, and other processes unique to your business can be configured on the CRM to fine-tune sales automation for your organization. The real estate firm House Hunter has set up a custom sales activity, “Open house” to identify when an agent shows a property to a customer, helping them track conversions from showings and optimize agent performance.

Custom reports

Customizable reports and dashboards on Freshsales can give you actionable insights to meet your unique business goals. You can set up reports to track individual, team, and business performance, helping you unlock growth opportunities. House Hunter agents were spending a lot of time showing properties to customers but could not convert them into deals. By looking at conversion rates across 6 months in the North America region for prospects looking for residential homes, House Hunter could identify the customers most likely to convert after a property showing. The prospects that did not meet this criteria were instead invited to open houses. This change in strategy helped them free agent resources while increasing sales.

Apps and Freshworks Neo platform

Your business and employees likely use multiple solutions for different activities. Freshworks Marketplace helps you integrate these solutions with your CRM to ensure data flows across your systems. Freshsales is built on the Neo platform with APIs that enable you to develop custom apps for the CRM based on your use case. A company like House Hunter can integrate their business email, internal Slack, and customer support into the CRM to improve collaboration and make their post-sale process more efficient.

Things to note about customizable CRM

With insight into CRM customization and its importance, you should be able to visualize your ideal CRM and how to implement it. Start by understanding how your data needs to be organized across modules. Then, document the different sales processes that need to be automated. Finally, determine how different CRM stakeholders will use the platform. This should help you determine if a given CRM will fit your needs. If you are looking for more information or guidance on this subject, please feel free to contact our CRM experts, who can help with your specific needs.