Navigating this complexity in the digital age requires a strong set of tools. A manufacturing customer relationship management (CRM) system is an essential tool for managing your business and understanding your customers’ needs to be able to provide them with a positive experience. In this post, we’ll break down how a manufacturing CRM benefits your business and why Insightly is the best CRM for manufacturing businesses.

Why your manufacturing business needs a CRM

In the manufacturing industry, the success of your business depends on your ability to consistently produce high-quality products and to do so efficiently. Low-quality or defective goods will lead to unhappy customers and will negatively impact your company’s image. The end result is less revenue and more difficulty winning new business.

But, in today’s market, simply producing good products isn’t enough. The most successful manufacturing companies also create great client relationships that match the quality of their products. To provide great client experiences, you need to know the ins and outs of your customers’ needs so that you can provide a service that matches their expectations.

Now, there are plenty of tools and data sources to gather this information. However, challenges arise when your data is spread across multiple platforms. Teams often use different tools, leading to data silos and slow communication to get necessary information. With these limitations, you lack the clarity required to create connected customer experiences.

A manufacturing CRM gives you a single tool for storing and managing your customer data. Everyone on your team can work from the same system, so there are no data silos or need for inefficient methods of collaboration. By bringing all your information into a centralized platform, your business is better equipped for managing leads, converting them into deals, and providing great experiences as customers.

Essential features of a manufacturing CRM

Before you adopt a CRM in manufacturing, it‘s essential to know what makes a good CRM system, or in this case, the best CRM for manufacturing. The right tool can have a profound impact on your business success, while a poor selection will lead to suboptimal results. Here are some key functions to look for in both a basic manufacturing CRM and for a CRM advanced manufacturing.

Pipeline visibility

As a manufacturer, you face the challenge of accurately forecasting your upcoming sales, whether it’s for the upcoming month, quarter, or fiscal year. With long and complex sales cycles, built with many distributors, dealers, and retailers, your marketing and sales teams must create accurate, in-depth projections if the business is to plan effectively.

A manufacturing CRM should give you a single tool to visualize and manage your entire pipeline. You want to see every detail of your current deals as well the value of every open opportunity in your pipeline. With this data, your team can accurately forecast future demand to know exactly where the business stands.

Customizations

No two businesses are the same. Everything from your sales cycles to the nature of your customers will vary based on your unique needs. Because of this, it is important to adopt a CRM platform that is customizable. You want the ability to create custom fields and objects and adjust the steps in your sales process to match your business operations.

Real-time reporting

A good CRM for manufacturing will enhance your data analytics. You want direct, real-time insights into each of your contacts to see how they are evolving through the customer journey. By understanding each customer’s complete picture, you can understand past performance, including which products sell the best and which distributors drive the most revenue. Having this information at your fingertips will help you know where to focus your efforts.

CRM for industrial sales

At times, people may refer to a CRM for manufacturing as a CRM for industrial sales. This is essentially the same thing in that the features and tools of a CRM will be the same across both of these types of businesses. No matter if your manufacturing firm is a start-up, a small business a mid-sized business, or an enterprise, the features used in a CRM for industrial sales are similar. There are many choices for a CRM for manufacturing or a CRM for industrial sales. There are generic CRMs that span all industries like Insightly, HubSpot, Zoho, Pipedrive, Monday, Aurea, Saratoga, MS Dynamics, and Copper CRM. There are also CRMs that are more specific to be a CRM for manufacturing or a CRM for industrial sales, like Pivotal (by Avolin). When selecting a CRM, it’s important to compare features, read reviews, and get demos of many platforms to see which is the best fit for your organization. Hearing from other manufacturing businesses using the platform is also pivotal.

Insightly is the best manufacturing CRM

A CRM for manufacturers should streamline important tasks while giving your team powerful features to help them perform at their best. Insightly comes packed with all the features your manufacturing company needs to create stand-out experiences for your customers.

Here are some of the reasons why Insightly is the best CRM system for your manufacturing business:

Personalized communication

Insightly comes packed with powerful segmentation features to help you organize your contact lists based on interests, demographics, industry, and more. By creating highly refined audience segments you get clear insight into what past buyers value the most and where new opportunities are in the buying process.

With this information, you can personalize each interaction based on individual interests and needs. By doing so, you create a more relevant and meaningful experience, increasing your ability to build a long-standing relationship with the customer.

Project management built in

Insightly CRM includes project management functionality to help you deliver on projects. You can convert won opportunities to projects and work them inside Insightly, rather than moving them into a separate PM tool. This is not only convenient, it also avoids data loss. From there, you can track project milestones, manage processes, and integrate with external systems to ensure on-time delivery and happy customers.

Reporting and dashboards

With Insightly, you can create customizable dashboards to quickly show the information that is vital to your business. For example, you could set up views to see the value of the current opportunities in your pipeline to create more accurate demand forecasts. Or you can create a visualization for your project pipeline to see how many projects you have going and their current statuses.

Powerful Integrations

To make the most of a CRM system it needs to be compatible with the other tools your business uses. After all, the end goal of the platform is to boost your overall efficiency and your ability to provide great experiences to customers.

With AppConnect by Insightly, you get ready-made integrations for hundreds of the most popular business software. This includes accounting software like Quickbooks, HR platforms like BambooHR, and communication apps like Slack. By setting up integrations for your favorite tools, you can automate processes to remove the need to switch between solutions, helping to save valuable time that can be spent on your customers.

Expand your manufacturing business with Insightly

CRM software gives manufacturers the tools to handle the complexity of their business. With Insightly, you can see every detail of your sales pipeline to know exactly where your business stands and the amount of demand to expect in the future. Robust automation streamlines essential processes, freeing you to focus all your attention on what matters most, satisfying your customers.

Start with Insightly CRM, then expand to Insightly Marketing for lead generation and management. Add on Insightly Service to manage customer support ticketing and more. Then, use Insightly AppConnect to integrate the tools you use across your business. Insightly grows with you every step of the way.

Start a free trial of Insightly CRM or request a personalized demo to begin empowering your manufacturing business.