As your organization grows, this enables all of your employees - whether they are responding to a billing inquiry or conducting in-person sales calls - to have a complete, up-to-date view of each customer.

2. Marketing Automation – Utilize robust marketing automation tools to segment customers and prospects, automate campaign activity scheduling and follow-up activities and track response rates. Workflow capabilities for lead routing ensure that no leads slip through the cracks. And, revenues can be tied to specific campaigns so that it's easy to analyze campaign ROI to increase marketing efficiency.

3. Customer Service and Support Solutions – With Service and Support solutions, your organization can track and resolve customer questions, issues and technical support inquiries for a high-quality customer experience. In addition, Web Customer Portals empower customers to find the answers they need by allowing them to view, add or edit service and support tickets.

4. Advanced Account and Opportunity Management – While contact management applications may allow for company or account hierarchies, they do not provide the ability to track leads from campaign, through the opportunity cycle, to close.

5. Robust Forecasting and Reporting – Accurate, timely revenue forecasts help sales close more deals, bring higher profits to the company and align expenses with revenue growth. Forecasting also gives companies critical visibility into future product and service demand trends.

With a CRM solution, opportunities can be segmented by account manager, region or probability of close. Management can analyze historical trends to gauge individual or team effectiveness and guide strategic changes such as territory realignment or redistribution of marketing spend

6. Automated Workflow – Automated workflow enables an organization to automate business rules and processes across departments and employees. Some examples include auto leadcapture and distribution, as well as configuring email workflow, escalation conditions and notification routing when these conditions are triggered.

7. Scalability – CRM solutions for mid-sized organizations are designed specifically to scale with the growth and changing business requirements of these organizations. A CRM solution is equipped to handle a variety of scalability factors that affect database performance including number of users, records, attachments and documents.

8. Configuration and Customization Capabilities – Contact management solutions are adaptable at the end-user level and allow for some layout and database changes; however, CRM solutions enable organizations to expand and customize data tables and other areas of the application globally to meet their business needs. A CRM solution should be able to adapt to your organization's unique sales and customer interaction processes.

9. Integration – Integration with existing legacy databases, accounting applications and other company-wide business management solutions is critical for any organization. CRM applications provide robust integration to products that organizations use every day, providing employees and management with a complete view of all the customer interactions for making more insightful business decisions.

10. Advanced Security – While sharing knowledge is critical to an organization's success, the security available in a CRM solution allows an organization to control the fields and views that various other individuals and teams can view and modify.

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