Checklist: What to consider when choosing a CRM

8 Steps to Take When Choosing a CRM for Media Companies 

A CRM is a vital tool for businesses of all sizes - it can make or break your customer service, increase sales, improve customer retention, provide critical analytics, and increase productivity. With so many CRMs on the market today, it’s difficult to decide which one is best for your business. Does your CRM give you a 360-degree view of real-time prospects and data? Was it created specifically for the advertising media industry? 

What to consider when choosing a CRM - Checklist: 

Below, we’ve covered eight product features to consider when deciding on the CRM that will work for you and your team: 

1. Does it support complex customer hierarchies and business models? Is your CRM equipped to handle media business customer profiles? Media business customer profiles are complex, with advertiser/brand and agency/holding company hierarchies, not to mention splits and upfront commitments in addition to standard deals. Make sure your CRM can handle these complexities so that the right message gets to your target audience. 

2. Will I need additional support to onboard, configure, and maintain the platform? Is your media sales organization searching for an easy-to-implement and maintain CRM? A media sales organization’s CRM is the lifeblood of its business. Many CRM providers expect companies to hire external consultants to configure the platform or allocate valuable headcount just to maintain the system. The best CRM will be seamless and efficient - one built specifically for you, with minimal additional configuration required.

3. Is it easy to use? A CRM is only as useful as the data entered into it. Ensuring your CRM is easy to use stops resistance from your sales team. Drag-and-drop deal progression, automated deal creation, RFP creation from email, and bottoms-up forecasting are just a few of the features that can make your CRM a go-to for your sales team and not just a headache of manual data entry.

4. Can it help increase revenue? A good CRM can track deals and provide comprehensive reports, but a great CRM goes even further to give you insights to grow your business. With the right CRM, you can prioritize daily tasks and identify opportunities for client expansion based on past purchase data, categories, and trends.

5. Does it work with your other systems? The best CRM platforms will work seamlessly with the rest of your tech stack, from pre-sale to post-sale delivery and reporting. Check that your CRM can integrate easily with your OMS, email client, workforce collaboration apps (e.g., Slack, Google Workplace), and other key software platforms. 

6. Does it provide forecasting? A CRM system helps provide a real-time view of pipeline activity, from prospects to leads to closed-won and closed-loss business. The best CRMs even enable bottom-up forecasts, revealing seasonal trends and gaps by team and product area. 

7. What metrics can you track? A robust CRM with powerful data analytics and reporting capabilities is essential in today’s competitive business environment. With the ability to track key metrics, generate performance reports, and gain insights into sales, customer behavior, sell-through rates, and margins at various levels, you can optimize your sales strategy and make data-driven decisions. 

8. Can you get help when you need it? Your chosen provider should be a partner, not just a vendor. Ensure they are responsive and proactive, offering reliable technical support, regular software updates, and a track record of understanding the unique problems faced by media companies. 

Are you struggling to choose the right CRM for your media sales organization? With a saturated market, it can be tough to decide. Our out-of-the-box media-specific CRM will simplify your workflow and provide seamless onboarding. Plus, with hyper-accurate forecasting and revenue maximization, you can let your team focus on selling bigger, more profitable deals.

See how Fandom leverages Boostr’s CRM 

If you’re on a mission to achieve the most accurate revenue forecasting for your company, it may be time to say goodbye to decision dilemmas just like Matthew Fishman did. Fishman, Senior Director of Global Revenue Operations at Fandom, wanted to make data-driven, educated decisions when forecasting without breaking the bank while doing it. Overextended teams and stretched budgets made it difficult for Matthew and his team to forecast accurately. His goal was to improve forecasting without incurring the cost associated with building his own platform. 

Using Boostr, Matthew was able to:

- Scale products and internal business operations without spending millions

- Gain imperative insight into the product mix being sold, percentage of custom content, and cost of produce

- Obtain greater trust in the accuracy of sales forecasts

According to Fishman, “Boostr is something I’m very proud of. It will allow our company to make educated decisions about the future of the business.”

Read the full case study here.

Boostr’s CRM is built specifically for media sales organizations and lets you see, sell, and manage deals and inventory with dashboards that show all products, packages, and highest-margin opportunities in one place - regardless of your product complexity. Leverage our best-practice configurations out of the box, or easily implement your own deal rules with our no-code customization. See how we support Sales and Rev Ops.