5 Must-Have CRM Features for Customer-Driven Distribution

Meta Description: Looking for reliable CRM for distribution company? Ask for these 5 features.

Whether it comes to manufacturing, wholesale, or distribution, companies can hardly stay at the top of their game without a thorough analysis of customer needs. Even if your business provides goods to retailers, end-customer satisfaction is still the primary goal. In order to satisfy the customers, a company needs to establish long-term relationships with them, and to get familiar with their expectations.
A reliable CRM solution can help you improve all of this, particularly when it’s process-driven and custom-tailored for distributors. These are the 5 essential features to ask for.

Distribution Management


There are two elements that make distribution companies operate like well-oiled machines – comprehensive customer needs analysis is the first, and distribution through multiple sales channels is the second. Together, these functionalities allow effective distribution across the board, while still offering high-level personalization and targeting.

When to that you add sales forecasting and opportunity management, you’ve got yourself the most powerful distribution management toolset. With this list of features, it’s available only in the best CRM software systems, among which bpm’online is recommended by most. For these and other convenient functionalities, check their offer at: https://www.bpmonline.com/distribution.

Product Management
For distribution companies, effective product management is just as crucial as customer relationship management. Traditional CRMs that provide little but repository of customer data don’t suffice here. In addition to this, these businesses need centralized product portfolios too.

The ability to generate complex product bundles is another feature to consider, since it affects everything from strategizing and roadmapping to defining features and marketing products. The best CRM distributors offer this capability as well, so make sure to ask for it.

Service Management
Products or services, it’s all the same for successful distributors. The quality still has to be on the highest possible level, which in turn requires effective management methods and tools. Cutting-edge CRM solutions luckily guarantee both, but only when they are equipped with powerful features.

Service management is certainly one of those, now offered exclusively by leading vendors. Apart from case assigning and status tracking, it should include an intuitive contact center automation too. This feature allows you to stay on top of each customer and every channel, at any given time.

Quote Management


It goes without saying that all of these functionalities should be adjusted for a mobile version of software as well, thus assuring efficient field work for distribution companies. The same applies to our next feature, since quote management should be fast and accurate wherever you are.

If your company is empowered with the best CRM solution, your distributors and salespeople are enabled to generate quotes and convert them into invoices in a matter of seconds. In addition, the aforementioned bpm’online CRM makes establishing special quotes swift and seamless.

Marketing Automation
With state-of-the-art CRM solutions, marketing automation is no longer a separate feature. Instead of asking you to integrate with other tools, they equip you with built-in functionalities for managing far-reaching campaigns. This is finally made possible thanks to CRM advertising.

If you need marketing automation to be another valuable part of your CRM system, ask for capabilities like multichannel campaign management and marketing resource management. They are deemed as core CRM advertising features, and your system should absolutely include them both.

Companies that have already employed CRM for distribution are seeing an improvement not only in product quality and service efficiency, but also in internal communication, customer service and data-based decision-making. Join them soon, and reap the same amazing benefits.