Why Your Company Needs a CRM

We’re back this week, and with a topic crucial to your company’s growth.

You always hear the term “CRM” or hear talk about Salesforce, Dynamics, Hubspot, etc. But what exactly is a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM)? Is a CRM worth the time and money? The answer is always, yes. Further on we will highlight the individual importance of CRM, but first, it is necessary to know what a CRM is in the first place, and what its capabilities are. CRMs are a very powerful tool. It is a system implemented into your company, useful for every department. It can be used to track customer data, streamline collaboration between teams, manage payroll and invoices, the capabilities are endless. There are thousands of CRM systems out on the market, and every size or type of business can benefit from implementing a CRM.

So, why is it so important?

The following article was written by Kristen Baker (@kbakes_2) for Hubspot Blog

Importance of a CRM

We’ve used HubSpot as an example throughout each of the following sections to offer insight into different use cases for this type of system.

1. Center business growth around your customers.

When your business enters the phase of rapid growth, it can be easy for valuable leads to fall through the cracks — after all, friction is a natural result of business growth.

But an all-in-one CRM platform like HubSpot can eliminate that friction because it’s built with your customers and the customer experience in mind — in fact, it centers everything you do around your customers.

HubSpot allows you to architect your business as it appears to your customer and audience. The CRM aligns all of the work your sales, marketing, and service teams do with a variety of natively built tools and integrations — this makes it easy for you all to collectively center business goals and daily work around your customers.

2. Align your sales, marketing, and service teams.

Cross-team alignment is integral to the success of your business. This alignment — specifically, the alignment between sales and marketing — helps your team streamline all stages of the buyer’s journey.

In doing so, internal teams will be able to share critical data and customer information so they can work as a cohesive unit. As a result, customers will have a seamless and consistent end-to-end customer experience that makes them want to remain loyal to your brand.

HubSpot makes this alignment simple because the platform comes with natively built tools and features — including Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, Service Hub, and CMS Hub — plus a library of integrations.

3. Sync and share data with ease.

CRMs like HubSpot streamline time-consuming tasks like data syncing and sharing — manually updating your contact records is a thing of the past. No matter who speaks with a contact (e.g. a sales rep, and service rep, or a marketer), contact records and data are immediately synced and updated in the system for you.

By syncing all of your data and every interaction between your team and a customer, your team will have access to accurate records that can easily be shared from within the platform. This makes your CRM a single source-of-truth when it comes to your data — and as a result, your team can create personalized customer experiences with ease.

So, what other tasks can a CRM platform like HubSpot automate?

4. Automate daily tasks.

CRMs automate other day-to-day tasks, speeding up your time-consuming but necessary work. CRM automation may include data entry and contact record updates after every interaction, as mentioned above, as well as:

• Follow-up communication
• Email sequences
• Sales workflows (e.g. unenrollment trigger workflows, deal workflows, quote workflows)
• Chatbot conversations
• Lead-to-rep assignment
• Lead nurturing campaign
• Campaign analytics

5. Create workflows.

We just mentioned workflows but let’s talk more about them — the best CRM systems offer workflows. Workflows complete and organize sales, marketing, and service processes to save you time.

Set criteria that automatically enroll records and takes actions of your choice (e.g. related to your contact records, deals, companies, quotes, or tickets).

With HubSpot (depending on which CRM plan you have) you can create workflows for:

• Contacts
• Companies
• Deals
• Quotes
• Tickets
• Custom objects

6. Simplify customer interactions.

Today, there are many opportunities to reach and engage leads and customers online such as live chat, email, video call, and social media.

CRM solutions like HubSpot have evolved to meet the challenges of customer-facing teams and reps — they integrate with a wide variety of other services and channels through which your leads and customers engage with your business.

For instance, HubSpot has:

• Call tracking to prioritize, place, and record calls from the CRM and then log those calls with the associated contact record.
• Live chat and a chatbot builder to handle queries and FAQs.
• Email tracking to tell you when leads open emails, automate email marketing campaigns, and send well-timed sales follow-up messages.
• Social media management tools to monitor brand mentions, comments, and questions on social media and then respond directly from within HubSpot.
• Video integrations, like Vidayrd, to send memorable and personalized sales and marketing videos and track engagement.

7. Build custom dashboards and report on the metrics that matter to your business.

CRMs make reporting on and analyzing your processes and pipeline simple. The reporting features within a CRM can be customized — such as your dashboards — to help you analyze the metrics that matter most to you. This allows you to identify areas of opportunity and growth to create better customer experiences.

With a CRM like HubSpot, create custom dashboards and reports or select from one of the pre-made templates to save you time. Preview those reports in real-time, visualize your CRM data any way you’d like, and share reports with ease by sending individual reports to your team members’ email addresses, or automate your reporting emails so they’re sent daily, weekly, or monthly.

Grow Better With a CRM

A CRM has the power to supercharge your flywheel — now that you understand the importance of a CRM, choose the right system for your team to start growing better.

The previous article was written by Kristen Baker (@kbakes_2) for Hubspot Blog

https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/why-your-company-needs-a-crm-system-to-grow