CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. As its name suggests, CRM software is a customer relationship management system.
For most businesses, their most valuable and important
asset is their customers. In the beginning, in many businesses, details about
those customers – who they are, how they interacted with your organization –
are spread across many different places. The CEO's brain, a salesperson's
inbox, the accountant's stack of bills.
As a business grows, it quickly becomes necessary to
have a central place where all of this information lives.
Your team will be slowed down without quick answers to
important questions. Who are our customers? How to contact them? How do they
interact with our content? What does our portfolio of new businesses look like?
Your prospects and customers will feel the pain when
your team isn't on the same page. From their perspective, they have a
relationship with a company, not a collection of different people and
departments. Everyone on your team needs context about each customer's needs,
wants, and current state, so they can pick up the conversation where it left
off.
These are the problems that CRM systems are designed
to solve. With a central location to organize all of your prospect and customer
details, it's easy for everyone on your team to get an overview of the status
of your business and the status of each customer relationship.
Who should use a CRM?
Who uses CRM? The short answer is that any business
that wants to maintain a relationship with its customers can benefit from using
a CRM system. To be a bit more specific, there are two groups of companies that
often see the most benefits:
- B2B companies, which typically need to follow leads and customers through long sales cycles and through upgrade paths (e.g. software company, recruiting company)
- B2C thoughtful buying businesses (e.g. a jeweler, landscaping service, or real estate agent)
That being said, there are plenty of companies that
don't fit the above two profiles, but still see the value of using a CRM
system. Another way to determine whether or not a CRM system can help your
business is to think about the challenges that CRM software aims to solve:
- Do you need to maintain a centralized list of information about your prospects and customers? Is this information in several different places?
- Do your customers regularly interact with multiple people on your team? How does everyone know where the conversation with a customer left off?
- Do you need a way to better understand your sales team's productivity? Does your sales team follow a structured process?
If you answered yes to one or more of the questions
above, chances are your business could benefit from a CRM system.
When is the right time to adopt a CRM?
If you've decided that a CRM system is probably in
your company's future, the next logical question is when.
Many businesses start small, storing their leads in an
email tool and their customer list in a spreadsheet. It works fine for a while,
but at some point things start to break.
- It becomes difficult to manage your data in a “flat” structure like a spreadsheet as it grows (e.g. visualizing relationships between contacts, companies, sales opportunities, etc.)
- Jumping between the different places where your data lives becomes tedious and slows down your team (e.g. login to the messaging tool to find your contacts' email addresses, your accounting tool to see what income they are at associates, a spreadsheet to find out what state they are in, etc.)
- An employee who quits results in data loss (e.g. a sales rep quits, abandons all the deals they were working on, leaving you no way to pick things up where they left off)
But how much does a CRM cost? CRMs vary in price;
there is no universal answer. Some important points to keep in mind:
- of number ux CRMs charge a fee per user. In other words, one user would cost $50, two users $100, and so on.
- Some CRMs charge for additional data. This could take different forms. Some CRMs charge per record: you pay for each additional set of 1000 (or 10000, etc.) people in your database. Others charge for data storage in size. For example, you can store up to 5 gigabytes of data for free and then pay for each additional gigabyte.
- Still others charge for functionality. Pay $50/user/month for contact, company, and deal management; pay an extra $50 for the “Enterprise” product which includes lead scoring and reporting.
While CRM pricing factors can be complex, the good
news is that the barriers to CRM adoption are lower than they have ever been.
Get your whole team using what she's used to it and move a few reps.
The evolution of CRM
What driving forces will define the future of CRM?
Well, that depends on who you ask. Most experts agree that businesses will
naturally turn to any CRM systems – or alternatives to CRM – that actually
drive business results.
The challenges of CRM systems:
- Most CRM systems are complicated and using them correctly requires a lot of manual work from the sales team (who usually don't see the same value in return).
- Most CRM systems are empty databases that have no idea what customers are doing on your website, on social media, and in the many places and ways you interact with your business today.
With these realities in mind, in 2014 HubSpot launched
HubSpot CRM. Designed to work seamlessly with the marketing product, they went
the extra mile to make the CRM 100% free for anyone to use. No user limit, no
storage limit, no time limit.
How CRM fits into growth
In a 2014 Gartner report, research vice president
Joanne Correia wrote, “CRM will be at the heart of digital initiatives in the
years to come. This is a technology area that will benefit from funding, as
digital is essential for businesses to remain competitive. " For what? One
word: growth.
But simply put, businesses are growing faster than
ever. As they do, in both marketing and sales, there are plenty of new
opportunities to reach and interact with potential customers, from new social
channels to the rise of video marketing.
While growth provides a huge advantage to businesses
of all sizes, these additional touchpoints muddy the waters when it comes to
effectively tracking and monitoring your business. interactions with individual
prospects. When businesses enter rapid growth phases, it's all too easy for
great prospects to slip through the cracks. Not because marketing isn't doing
their job or because sales aren't finishing, but because both teams are
overloaded with information.
Without a CRM system, as you grow, your marketing and
sales staff will spend more and more time searching emails and trying to
connect with colleagues for the latest information and insights. more precise
on the state of the prospects. This can lead to missed or double-booked
appointments, or failure to follow up on vital tasks essential to nurturing
leads through the sales funnel.
Plus, each rep on your team can rely on a different
sales process. In this scenario, communication with prospects will be inconsistent,
or worse, prospects may have to repeat the same information every time they
connect with a representative from your company. Prospects can interact with
your brand on social media, but because marketing isn't clear about where the
prospect is coming from, marketers provide information that doesn't match the
prospect's needs or requests.
CRM systems like HubSpot CRM solve the many challenges
of growth. CRMs efficiently organize contact, company, and deal information, as
well as all interactions that take place through the myriad of customer
communication channels, including your website, emails, phone calls , your
social networks and other channels. It is more essential than ever for
marketing and sales teams to operate as a cohesive unit, and CRM systems are
the perfect solution to help scalable organizations achieve this goal.
Perhaps most importantly, modern CRM solutions support
the complex workflows of rapidly growing sales teams. CRM systems keep your
team focused and in sync, which facilitates more efficient use of time and
eliminates many troublesome tasks that take up time without adding value (such
as searching through email archives for most recent communication with a
prospect, or tracing) the marketing representative who was last in contact with
a key prospect to obtain the information necessary to complete the
transaction).