Does your Business need a CRM?

Before we answer the million-dollar question, lets quickly understand “ What is CRM”

 CRM or Customer Relationship Management refers to all strategies, techniques, tools, and technologies used by businesses for developing, retaining and acquiring customers. In today’s digital world it also stands for a set of  tools that allow a company to manage and analyse its own interactions with its past, current and potential customers.

Now allow me to introduce you to HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and service platform built to help you implement inbound and grow better. It’s all powered by the same database, so everyone in your organization — Marketing, Sales, Services & IT — is working off the same system of record. This allows for a smoother handoff between teams, and a more delightful experience for your customers.

HubSpot’s free CRM platform is the perfect opportunity for growing businesses to experience the benefits of a CRM  platform before upgrading their Sales, Marketing, Services and CMS  (Content Management Systems) into paid models.

HubSpot is built around the concept of inbound marketing –  In today’s digital age, inbound marketing focuses on attracting, engaging and delighting end customers so that businesses can market better, sell better and serve their customers better.

CRM for a Business Owner

Piles of business cards?  Too many spreadsheets with different formats? Unorganized LinkedIn connections?  Does this sound familiar to you?

As a business owner you have efficiently juggled many excel sheets to track your sales and   marketing metrics. But now, in an increasingly digital and automated world, the multiple excel sheets have become bulky  and difficult to manage. You need to upgrade  to a CRM system. You need to upgrade to HubSpot!

The HubSpot Advantage – HubSpot aligns Sales, Marketing, Services and CMS on a single platform. This makes it easy to track revenue and productivity centrally. A live dashboard offers multiple options for customized reports, displaying data in a pleasing yet detailed manner to derive deep insights from marketing campaigns and customer responses. HubSpots’ reporting structure makes it easy to measure ROI on your social media marketing.

HubSpot also offers a huge scalability benefit with its free CRM as the beginning point and modularized Sales, Marketing, Services CRM and CMS Hubs offered at various flexible pricing packages.

HubSpot’s offers integration with a large number of apps and web services to build your sales and marketing stack. These include both free and paid integrations that can be activated based on your specific business needs.

A free meeting scheduling software syncs with Google or Office 365 calendar. This enables your sales and services teams to quickly connect with prospects and customers without hassling them

HubSpot’s App allows you to easily customize your most important reports to be available on-the-go. Your marketing and sales teams will also have quick access to information about their deals, email open rates and other status updates.

CRM for your Sales team

When did I last speak with a prospect? How should I prioritize my leads? Which customers are ready for an upsell? Does this sound familiar to you?

As your company grows, it has become harder and harder for your sales team to hunt down information about customers and prospects. This information is scattered across the mind/ inbox/ whatsApp of the different sales , marketing and accounting personnel – past and present. (A complex sentence for a complex situation)

Added to this complexity is the fact that sales personnel on the field, often fail to maintain an updated data about daily visits and interactions with customers. This is often the most common failure point for the success of any organization-wide sales systems.

The HubSpot Advantage – With HubSpot’s CRM, your sales team and managers will have full and accurate record of the prospect’s history with one click.

Additionally, HubSpot has met the challenge of input failure by creating a platform with a extremely user friendly and simplistic layout. HubSpot CRM automatically logs calls made and emails sent from the system. This is then posted in a timeline-like view on a contact’s record page. If the contact is not in the system, a record is created automatically , thereby further reducing the dependency on manual inputs. 

The lead scoring feature empowers your sales teams to prioritise leads by assigning values to the leads . Other contact properties like  ‘lifecycle stage’ and ‘lead status’ help qualify prospects or leads; ensuring that your sales team focus on the most profitable leads.

CRM for your Marketing team

Which pages on my website convert the visitors? How can I measure a posts performance across multiple social channels from a single place? What topics should I write about to attract the right target audience? Does this sound familiar to you?

CRM is not just about sales and contact management. Its also about attracting more  (relevant) visitors to your site and converting them into qualified leads.  It is  about tracking and  managing engagement data on your content marketing which is important to establish the ROI for your marketing activities.

The HubSpot Advantage – One of the unique features of HubSpot is the Buyer Persona Adoption. You can easily tag your contacts to any of your multiple buyer personas and track deep analytics on them.

Marketing automation frees your marketing resources from repetitive tasks to focus on  strategy development and deriving insights for continuous improvement. HubSpot lets you manually publish content directly from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google+. Automatically share new content as soon as it’s published.

Automated email marketing adds further value by planning email campaigns to be delivered at the right time, to the right person with the right content.

Next on the list is the benefits derived from personalization. With its inbound marketing, integrated sales, marketing, services and CMS modules, HubSpot centralises all properties of a contact and translates them into a personalised experience to your customers.

Improve the impact of your content marketing with built in SEO advice for blogs, landing pages and website pages. Template packs offer additional paid options to quickly launch new content .

CRM for your Service Team

How do I seamlessly transfer customer data from my sales team to my service teams? My support team spend a lot of their time answering basic queries again and again? Does this sound familiar to you?

Customers want answers and support quickly. Both your sales and service teams are busy and the handover of paid clients from sales to service is often unorganised, requiring constant to and fro between the departments.  A CRM tool with a ticketing module , integrated with your sales system can address these challenges.

The HubSpot Advantage

HubSpot Service Module enables you to create service tickets from a dashboard or an inbox to track customer communications providing  thorough and personal responses every time.

With the integration of sales, marketing and services functions, HubSpot offers a clear picture of your customers’ status in real-time. Your customer, in turn experiences a seamless transition across the various business functions and is delighted with the personalised interactions.

The Live Chat feature connects your website visitors on a real-time basis with personalised chat bots.

Conclusion

HubSpot is made for businesses and organisations that want to take their sales, marketing and services to the next level. The sales, marketing, services and CMS hubs cover all your customer facing functions and create a symmetrical and personalised experience for your teams and your customers. All this at extremely flexible pricing plans.

If you’re ready to take your business to the next level and want an expert help about  HubSpot, enquire now about a special discounted Starter Growth Suite bundle. Reach us at neetu@marketing4sales.in for a detailed discussion.


About the Author

Neetu Vijoy Bansal is a marketing coach, working with small and medium business owners. She helps them create and navigate their SMarketing (sales and marketing) strategies. She guides business owners in aligning their marketing and sales strategies to create measurable results through the triad of People, Process and Technology. She advocates “Customer Perspective” passionately across every function of marketing and sales.

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