Review Of LeadMaster CRM

The award-winning LeadMaster CRM is a set of comprehensive tools and cutting-edge CRM solution for managing sales processes and customer relationships.The CRM is an on-demand web-based sales and marketing product which helps in solving business challenges: lead generation, lead capture, lead management, lead distribution, long-term lead nurturing and lead incubation strategies, as well as data mining tools, ROI analytics and much more. The solution is powerful yet easy to use, has been designed specifically with the needs of sales and marketing professionals in mind, delivering powerful benefits to everyone on the company team, from field reps to marketing managers to business partners.

LeadMaster is a web-based lead management system available through a subscription based cloud computing model – there’s no need for software or hardware investment, no costly IT expenditures neither there’s a need to hire IT consultants, additionally the rapid deployment cycle results in further cost savings. All that is needed to use the system is a web browser or an Internet enabled cell phone. Technologically, the CRM is a web application developed using Microsoft .NET framework and related technologies.

LeadMaster CRM at a glance

• Free Trial: Yes, fully functional free trial is available for 30 days.
• Ideal for: For businesses of all kinds and sizes.
• Training required: Not much, interface is intuitive and easy to use.
• User limit: There’s no limit, add more users as and when required.
• Accolades: Had been recognized by ZDNet Australia as one of the best CRM Suites in their article published on November 30, 2011.

Website
Its a neatly designed website with lots of marketing information and details related to product features, case studies, product videos, advantages over competitors.

Getting started
There’s a free trial on offer which requires completing a small form, your trial instance is ready to use as soon as you receive an email with the link to access the same.

Look and feel
The application has an uncluttered layout, with major functionality easily accessible. The screen capture below shows the screen that comes upon login for the first time.

On the left hand side, the forms ‘Quick Search’ and ‘Find Match’ are for quickly finding the records you need. Underneath them is the calendar with the current day selected, a mouse over on any of the days brings up an all day frame listing all your tasks/ appointments/ meetings for the day.

There are few personalized features such as ‘My Appts & Call Backs’, ‘My Searches’, ‘My Cases’ etc. for quick access to your leads, cases etc.

At the center of the screen is the Sales & Marketing Dashboard’ with two charts, each of the charts has a ‘drill down’ feature allowing you to get into the data for further analysis. The ‘Information Center’ tab displays list of messages boards for the workgroup.

Custom dashboards
LeadMaster allows configuring and saving more than one dashboards, the screen capture below shows a custom dashboard named ‘Sales Dashboard’ designed by us with custom charts in it.

Let’s take a look at various configuration options to administer the application –

1. User/ Workgroup group has functions related to managing users, defining security permissions, designing company hierarchy, setting rules for automatic record assignment and tracking user activity.
2. Campaign / Messaging/ Reports group has functions for designing and managing marketing campaigns, features for measuring campaign’s efficiency, configuring email templates. There is as well a section on designing email notifications that are sent to internal users upon lead assignments (single or bulk) and task assignments.
3. The Automation / Customization section lists functions for customizing screens, form fields, changing text displayed on the labels, managing marketing workflows, designing custom forms and forms to be displayed on websites including settings to determine and manage duplicate records.

Feature set

Automated Record Assignments
Allows adding Account managers that will receive leads/records/accounts via an automated Round Robin queue, when leads/records/accounts are assigned to a round robin queue they are assigned in sequential order. This feature helps in load balancing and even distribution of load amongst your sales team.

Account Management
The Accounts tab offers an easy way to quickly review the Companies associated with all records to which the current user has access. The screen allows performing simple searches by Company name as well.

It is even possible to customize the layout of the list displaying companies. One can change the order of columns being displayed and even add new columns, for example, its possible to swap the position of columns City and Province.

Here’s how an account appears in the detail view.

Here’s how an account appears in the detail view.Contact Management. The Contacts tab provides provides functions to review the contacts in the system and as well allows creating new contacts.

The contact details screen gives a bird’s eye view of the entire contact.

Reporting
The robust Reporting function allows presenting data from your online sales and marketing database in printed form. LeadMaster comes with a general set of built-in reports and a wide variety of reports, including sales forecasts. Its also possible to email the reports to other team members. The screen capture below shows the default set of reports.

In case the default set of reports are not enough, you can define and design custom reports tailored to your organization’s needs.

There’s an option to subscribe to reports, wherein subscribed reports would be delivered over email to configured recipients. If there’s a need to view certain reports on a daily basis, then its best to subscribe to those reports and have them automatically delivered at defined times in your email inbox, this nice piece of automation eliminates the need to manually generating entire report.

Library
Library can be used as to organize company wide information so that important documents are easily accessible when needed. It can act as repository in which its possible to setup private folders and restrict access.

Lead Management
Let’s look at the form to manually enter lead details into the system. The lead creation allows associating the lead with a campaign, setting up appointment from the creation screen itself.

LeadMaster ensures timely follow up – As leads are enter the system, they are automatically assigned to reps and partners, with email notifications to alert them to the new opportunities. As leads are followed up, a journal of sales activity is maintained for each opportunity, with areas for reps to provide valuable feedback, set callback reminders and more. Managers can track the progress of every lead, evaluate sales rep activities, introducing increased accountability and transparency into the sales process.

Importing Records
Organization’s migrating to newer systems often have existing marketing and sales data in other databases, LeadMaster has an Import wizard which can help import records from other databases and programs into the application.

The Import wizard guides through the steps necessary to import the records, mapping all of the data in uploaded file to the correct fields and even assigning the records to the appropriate users.

Important to note, only those users with appropriate administrative security permissions have the necessary access to import records through this function.

We did a trial import to evaluate the functionality, let have a look at the screen shots below –

The first step is selecting the workgroup where the records would be imported.

The next step is uploading the CSV file containing the records which you would like to import into LeadMaster

LeadMaster quickly examines the file and determines the number of records to be imported into the system.

In this screen the import wizard asks for selecting a template – which is a set of rules containing the mappings of import fields to LeadMaster fields. To be able to use a template is a convenience feature which saves time and facilitates quick  import of data into the system, if we use an existing template, the choices are preloaded with saved settings. Since we are importing for the first time, we will be using the option “New Import Template”.

Next step is optional, which asks if you would like to import the records into an existing campaign during the import process.

Once you have chosen the campaign and indicated whether or not the file contains any header row, its time to setup the mapping between system fields and fields in the import file. This is an important step as correct mapping ensures that each piece of data in your import records is mapped to the corresponding field in LeadMaster’s database.

 

Once mapping is complete, the import wizard asks if you would like to assign the records being imported to any particular sales manager or sales rep, herein we chose to assign the leads to an existing sales manager and even configured to send notifications.

The last step displays the summary, there’s an option to save the template file for future use. Once you have reviewed the import summary, click on Finish to load the records into your database.

The imported records will immediately appear in the database and will also be included in the New Leads hyperlinks on the Home page of the user(s) who have been assigned the records.

The import wizard may appear lengthy for first timers, however subsequent imports are very faster and imported leads are immediately available if templates are used.

Marketing and Campaign Management
LeadMaster allows configuring variety of marketing campaigns starting from email campaigns to lead nurturing campaigns, moreover there are predefined reports which help measure the effectiveness of the campaigns.

The screenshot below shows a sample marketing campaign

Email marketing campaigns feature enables users to create, launch and track outbound email campaigns directly from within the online application. This feature allows users to send emails to a large number of contacts at a time and track the email on each contact record. Emails can be sent using email templates stored within the application or the text of the email can be entered on the fly. The mass mailing feature also includes analytics to track and report on open rates, clickthroughs and unsubscribes.

Customizations
LeadMaster offers some powerful customizations features to help tailor the application per your needs and taste.
Design custom forms – Its possible to design custom forms for collecting data from within the application and via the web. You can develop custom forms to tailor data input, collection and analysis to your company needs. There are four different types of custom forms, each with its own unique design and purpose:

1. Supplemental form – A general use form used to collect additional information associated with a record.
2. Web form – Similar to the supplemental form, but designed to be accessed directly on the web so that external users (e.g. visitors to a website, event registrants) can complete a form which is then submitted directly to the online database in real time.
3. Sales update form – A form specifically designed to collect custom sales data.
4. Feedback form – A form tailored to present a series of questions to elicit feedback from the sales channel, including rating the quality of leads, sales progress feedback, satisfaction information, etc.

Authorized users may as well change the labels and alter page layout, the screenshot below shows the add/edit contact page may be customized and sections re-arranged as per your needs.

Security
LeadMaster offers fine grained security options, access to features and functions is determined by user’s security profile. User-level security controls are used to define the user’s ability to access or change various areas and functions within the system. Access can also be tailored by administrator’s to limit the user’s access to certain records that meet geographic criteria. These security measures help prevent users from inadvertently changing information in the database and protect sensitive data contained in the database.

Integration with external applications
LeadMaster integrates very nicely with Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, it is capable of capturing leads directly from landing pages, various forms in a web page and place the captured leads into your instance of LeadMaster database.

Pricing
Though pricing options and details are not available on the website, however they appear to be very flexible with their pricing. From what we have gathered, its an affordable solution with no long term contracts and a per-user fee structure means you pay only for what you need.

Pros

1. Simple yet powerful and easy to use interface with strong focus on lead management.
2. Rich set of features, easy to customize and administer.
3. Nice integration with web sites, web pages.

Cons

1. User interface appears bit out-dated, this is one area they can definitely improve upon.
2. Help documentation is either missing or is non-functional at several places. Help documentation can be improved as well.

Conclusion
LeadMaster is a good CRM application which offers amazing flexibility, rich set of features and powerful data mining tools. Its an affordable solution which has been designed to help companies build their businesses by closing the loop between marketing and sales.