Managing your relationships with your leads and customers can be tricky. In order to build stronger relationships and close more deals, you need to know your audience well. Enter data analytics and CRM systems.
Robust data is what will allow you to offer the best possible service to your leads and customers and assess the success of your marketing team's efforts. A CRM will help you gather and store this information and automate more menial tasks. Read on to discover how your small to medium size business could benefit from a CRM as well as why we always recommend the Hubspot CRM software to our clients.
What is a CRM
A CRM, or a Customer Relationship Management system, is a central location that allows you to track and store data about your customers and prospects in order to streamline your sales and inbound marketing. It helps you keep all data about your customers and prospects in one place and automate the more menial tasks in your marketing and sales process.
Benefits of a CRM system
There are a vast number of benefits associated with CRM for businesses of all sizes. Here are just a few:
1. It improves customer satisfaction
With CRM software, you’ll be able to see a customer’s full history with you, allowing you to easily personalise your service to them for the best possible experience.
2. Keep the whole team on the same page
With all prospect or customer information at your fingertips, it’s also easy for everyone on your sales and marketing team to provide the same great level of service.
3. Automate data entry
As a CRM automatically logs things like emails and calls, you save time recording these and can spend it on more valuable things.
4. Be reminded when it’s time to follow up
Lead nurturing can be a long and complicated process. A CRM helps to automate this process, sending follow-up emails on your behalf, giving you an alert when it’s time for a call, and logging all interactions you have with your lead.
5. Keep everything in one place
A CRM system means you can say goodbye to endless spreadsheets that you forget to update. Everything you need to know about your leads and customers will live in one easily searchable database.
6. It grows with your business
When you’re just starting out and have a small team, it might feel easy enough to track and store data about your customers through a number of different apps and spreadsheets. However, a system like this isn’t scalable, and will soon start to limit you. A CRM will grow with your business and saves you a lot of time finding and importing your data to a CRM later down the line.
Why choose Hubspot’s CRM Software
7. Free to use
Especially for small businesses, it can be hard to justify another subscription. Luckily, Hubspot CRM is free to use for an unlimited length of time.
Many CRM platforms offer free light versions of their products, but these are usually very limited in their capabilities. Not so with Hubspot. While Hubspot does offer a premium version of its CRM, the free version packs a hefty punch.
You can store up to a million contacts and have an unlimited number of users from your team linked to your account with the free version. Some of Hubspot’s more powerful sales automation tools are exclusive to the premium version. With the free version, you only get access to five email templates, five snippets, and five documents, as well as one meeting scheduling link.
However, the free version should be plenty for small businesses to start with.
8. Easy and intuitive to use
Hubspot users consistently praise its CRM system for its ease of use. For one thing, it eliminates the need to search through a bunch of spreadsheets that are only accurate as long your team is vigilant about updating them. Everything you need to know about any single contact is on the same, searchable database.
Hubspot has also built its software to be as intuitive as possible, and many people will be able to feel like a pro navigating through the software on their first day.
The Hubspot Community can help answer any questions you might have, while the Hubspot Academy can also help you get to grips with more advanced features.
9. Integrate it with other tools
You can integrate Hubspot CRM with a huge number of popular apps like Gmail, Outlook, WordPress, Zapier, Mailchimp and much, much more.
Hubspot itself offers a number of other great free tools to improve your sales and marketing. They offer email marketing, content management, and landing pages, just to mention a few things. You can also track metrics around your ads and link Hubspot with your company’s social media accounts in order to capture data on direct messages, followers, likes and shares.
Hubspot also has a great, beginner-friendly online academy for brushing up your sales and marketing skills, all for free.
10. Access detailed analytics
Hubspot allows you to track many things about your leads and customers, including website visits and traffic sources. It even offers a free A/B testing kit.
Hubspot lets you get very granular with your audience segmentation. You can, for example, easily filter your contacts to find people who were ready to buy a while back but then went quiet. You can then send these contacts a targeted email with a special discount to encourage them to come back.
Hubspot contextualises your data and offers actionable insights for improving your sales and marketing strategies. You’ll be able to recognise patterns and cycles within our sales pipeline and find ways to balance things out.
