Customer sales can hinge on landing the best CRM tool

So you want to enhance and improve your company's customer engagement success rate? The right customer relationship management tool can make the difference. Before selecting the best CRM tool, you'll need to establish which product features are most essential to your company's customer engagement model. Those must-haves include support for content marketing, search engine optimization and marketing, email marketing, managing multiple cross-channel campaigns simultaneously, integration with content management systems, creating and distributing marketing messages, plus basic lead workflow and scoring capabilities to process sales leads.

But there's a lot more than a product's bells and whistles. Before deciding on the best CRM tool, your company will need to do some soul-searching as well. That means pinpointing your company's weaknesses when it comes to generating sales. You'll need to look at your company's lead generation and conversion, customer data collection process, multichannel marketing strategy and ability to track customer behavior patterns. Then you'll need to move beyond identifying current problems and assess where your company plans to be in the future.