Posted: April 27, 2020
What are CRM and CRM Systems?
Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is a business strategy to track relationships between a customer and their business from before they buy to after they have purchased something. A CRM system is the tool/solution for managing contacts, deals, and leads without resorting to complicated spreadsheets or trying to centralize your businesses’ marketing and sales tactics on a company server.
It’s the natural progression from file cabinets and spreadsheets. As more business is tracked and conducted in the cloud, CRM can also be conducted from anywhere that can access the Internet. It’s the next leap forward in what businesses can provide and what customers are beginning to expert during the buyer’s journey.
Why would you need a CRM?
Before CRMs, businesses would track deals and customer information in spreadsheet databases or in paper files with sticky notes. While those methods can be effective, a CRM digitizes that information and allows for autonomous data collection. When your customer or lead revisits your website, for example, that can be tracked by the CRM without you needing to lift a finger.
This makes it easier for a business to provide excellent customer service and allow leads to be guided at their own pace through the marketing and sales flywheel. That translates to higher customer satisfaction and more sales. Let’s see a spreadsheet automatically populate customer information like that!
More importantly, when a business is just starting out, one very important facet of the customer experience is high satisfaction. More leads expect a great customer experience, no matter if you are a one-person operation or have 50,000 employees across the globe. Customers want to feel like they are being taken care of and that a product/service will solve their problem. They don’t want to feel like they are simply being sold to for company profits. A CRM helps even the smallest of businesses to stay on top of marketing and customer outreach.
A good CRM system will also help a business make more accurate sales forecasts, as it will help predict when a lead is likely to convert. Having reliable data leads to more accurate forecasting, which can also help scale sales processes in the long-term. Those are a lot of benefits from one tool!
When do you know that you need a CRM?
Some people might argue that you don’t need a CRM if you’re a brand-new company and don’t have any customers. They would say that until you reach a certain threshold of customers and leads to track then it doesn’t make sense to use a CRM.
However, using that logic, you can actually argue the inverse as well. Even if you’re just starting out, you can establish a CRM system so that as your business grows, you’ll already be well-established to handle that increase in customers.
If you currently are experiencing low levels of output for the amount of work being put in, a CRM system can increase both efficiency and productivity. By creating a shared, cloud-based place to track customers, leads, and deals, your entire company (or at least your marketing and sales teams) can view the same information in real time, no matter where they are located.
There are two additional clues that it may be time for you to invest in a CRM: missed sales opportunities and low data viability. If your sales team feels like they don’t have a great track record at making sales when leads are ready to buy, it may be that they don’t have the timing down. If they don’t have enough information to close the deal, that deal can just slip right on by. CRM systemss help by providing the information that you need as you need it, to either provide more information to help convert a lead, or by suggesting that a lead may be ready to make a purchase.
How to Choose the Right CRM
Choosing the right CRM system will be different for every business, as every business has different needs! The only way that you will know what is right for your business is if you have a clear idea of what problems and challenges you are looking to solve. Start by asking these questions:
What problems/challenges are we facing that a CRM system would improve?
If you’re facing problems with unreliable data, looking for a CRM system that offers database management, reporting, analytics, and pipeline forecasting would be a huge improvement.
If you’re not connecting with customers at the right times during their buyer’s journey, look for CRM systems that offer segmentation, workflows, and integrations with your email and social media accounts.
If you’re facing misalignment between your marketing and sales teams, you’ll want to look for a CRM system that offers tools for both marketing and sales integrations, as well as task and deal tracking to get everyone on the same page.
Considering those problems/challenges, what features would improve our current marketing and sales processes?
We mentioned a few of these above but you can also look for call recording, software integrations, mobile CRM, leaderboards, landing pages, CMS integrations, campaign tools, and more.
How many users/accounts will we need?
Some CRM systems charge by the number of accounts that will need access to your system. Will only a one-person marketing team be using the CRM system to start? Or will you be onboarding your entire marketing and sales departments? This will help you get an estimate of the annual or monthly cost of your CRM system as well.
This will help guide your path to choosing a few potential options for a CRM system. Then, all necessary decision-makers can choose between those options based on internal determining factors for a final selection.
Our favorite CRM system of choice is HubSpot. We find it has a great selection of CRM tools and additional features that make it an all-around great selection for a wide variety of businesses.