In my 10+ years of working in the CRM industry, I have often come across sales reps complaining about not spending enough time on selling their products despite using sales quoting tools. The key to resolve this issue is to look for CRM tools that can help sales reps to sell more efficiently, tools that can boost their productivity, tools that allow them to access customer data quickly so as to make smarter decisions and get better results.

Following are the tools that you need to use if you are in the CRM industry. These tools when implemented in the right manner can help drive business growth and give competitive edge in terms of customer service.

Yesware
As a part of your promotional campaign, you are sending numerous mails to your customers. You wish if you could know how many of them are opening your emails, how many are clicking the link you want them to click, how many are opening your emails on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Well, your wish is just a tool away! Use Yesware, a popular email analytics software tool that has been designed to track what happens after you send emails to your customers.

Yesware is essentially an email tracking solution that lets you know whether customers are reading your emails. You can run Yesware on Microsoft Outlook and with Gmail, provided you are using Chrome and Firefox.

Yesware send you an email notification as soon an email is read and by whom. The Yesware ‘Tracking Report’ feature provides details of how customers are interacting with your email messages. This helps you to understand what messages work best for your marketing campaigns.
With Yesware’s Mail Merge feature, you can quickly send up to 200 personalized emails to your prospects in one go from your Gmail account.

This can considerably save time and improve your email productivity.
Moreover Yesware integrates with Salesforce and other CRMs so that you can better handle your customer data.

Nimble
Nimble is the one of the best social sales and marketing CRM software applications. It is a social media dashboard with the additional functionality of a CRM system. It provides information about contacts from the perspective of their social media accounts. Apart from giving basic contact information at one place, Nimble also gives details about social profile of your contacts.

Simply put, you can see a contact’s social profile by moving the mouse cursor over the name. You can also track your contact’s social media activity across various platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Gmail, AngelList, Crunchbase, Tweetdeck, and Hootsuite.

Using Nimble, you can connect with your contacts from any social site. Browsing through their social media activity, you are bound to come across individuals that are related to your business. Viewing their social media profile, you can know which contacts and opportunities are most relevant. So Nimble gives you a great opportunity to increase your outreach by engaging with customers across popular social channels.

Freshdesk
Looking for an easy way to provide a multi-channel support to your customers? Well, go for Freshdesk, a cloud-based customer support software that allows your customers to contact you through different channels including phone, email and social media like Facebook and Twitter. Freshdesk integrates different communication channels into one stream of information, which is far easier to handle.
So regardless of how customers decides to communicate, their issues reach immediately to the right customer team member. For instance, any customer complaints that you receive on social media can be addressed directly through Freshdesk. Also, no matter how large the number of tickets are, you can easily manage them and provide prompt service using Freshdesk.
Freshdesk is easy to understand and use, and moreover can be customized to suit your company’s requirements. On the whole, when managing customer issues on multiple channels, you can certainly rely on Freshdesk.

Applane CRM
Applane CRM is an enterprise grade CRM that gives a complete view of your sales cycle through a single user interface, thereby enabling you to easily keep track of leads, opportunities, conversations with prospects and customers. It is essentially a sales management software that provides meaningful insights into your sales cycle. This can help you to identify the areas where you need to focus your sales efforts so as to improve quality of your sales cycle for faster lead-conversion ratio.