Best Feature for a CRM Added to Base CRM (Now Zendesk Sell)

Update: Novem­ber 2018: Base has joined with Zen­desk Sup­port. Their new name is Zen­desk Sell. Their pric­ing struc­ture has changed as well. It spans from $19, $49, $99 and $199 per user. I use the words Base CRM in the arti­cle below, writ­ten in 2013.

Using a CRM

If your busi­ness is not using a CRM to track leads, cus­tomers, and sales, you need to start this now. It is one of the most cru­cial things your small busi­ness needs to run a suc­cess­ful busi­ness. I’ve writ­ten on a lot of Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) pro­grams over the years. You have a lot of choic­es. For those who want sim­ple, clean, easy to use yet has one of the best fea­tures ever for a CRM, I rec­om­mend Base CRM. Here is why Base just got 10x bet­ter the past few weeks (this week for iOS).

Geolo­ca­tion for iOS & Android

Base CRM just intro­duced Geolo­ca­tion fea­tures on their mobile devices: Android and Apple prod­ucts. Accord­ing to Base’s recent blog post:

“Geolo­ca­tion allows you to visu­al­ize your Con­tacts, Leads and Deals in rela­tion to where you are, on a beau­ti­ful map and get one-touch dri­ving directions.”

This new fea­ture will be a real help to your sales team. Lets say you have a new sales­man who just does­n’t know much about the area and what deals, leads or cus­tomers are near­by. When he shows up to an appoint­ment, he can tap a but­ton on the mobile app and watch Google Maps pop up with easy to view icons of any­thing around him that is relat­ed to his com­pa­ny: deals, leads and con­tacts. He can tap on the icons to learn more. This could help him not only on prospect­ing but engag­ing with past cus­tomers when he has extra time (before he leaves the area), mak­ing task to fol­low up by phone/​email/​personal note, or even to show a poten­tial cus­tomer all the work his com­pa­ny has done in the area. In the past, the only way to get some­thing sim­i­lar look­ing was using many man hours of data entry and pro­grams like Batch­Geo. Now, it is all auto­mat­ic based on what you’ve already put into your CRM sys­tem. When I heard Base was work­ing on this fea­ture, I was very excit­ed. I have yet to see this on oth­er CRM pro­grams on the mar­ket. Anoth­er rea­son I like this 1 fea­ture is because I think it will help the con­trac­tors get more excit­ed about the ben­e­fits of a good CRM pro­gram. If all a com­pa­ny does is type in the address, city and zip of their con­tacts, Geolo­ca­tion will do every­thing else. To help engage and sell more ser­vices, I think this is a very cru­cial upgrade. The best part about this new fea­ture is that it is includ­ed in all ver­sions of Base: even the free one. Give it a shot and let me know what you think. I’ve been test­ing it this week, and I’ve yet to find a bug! Works very well!