Customer Relationship Management – Why Your Business Needs a CRM and How to Use One Effectively
At some point during your business’s growth, you may realize that keeping all client data in Excel no longer cuts it. It can be difficult to parse through emails and call logs to find out when communications happened with customers, who spoke with who, and what was discussed. Enter Customer Relationship Management. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a system that helps businesses manage interactions with customers and prospects. In layman’s terms, it helps you keep track of all your interactions with your customers. But a CRM can do so much more to help your business.
Why Do Businesses Need a CRM?
It can’t be overstated how important customer communication is for just about any business website. Without a CRM to help your business keep your customer data organized, customer information and interactions might be scattered across emails, notes, text messages, and spreadsheets. This makes tracking and managing customer relationships challenging and frankly, sometimes impossible. With these oversights and inefficiencies, valuable insights or opportunities can slip through the cracks. For example, if you have multiple team members communicating with one client, it can be difficult to manage who spoke to the customer at what time, and what was discussed.
A CRM centralizes this information, allowing you and your employees to access key details stored within a centralized place. This helps create efficiency within your communication strategies and in turn, creates customer satisfaction.
How To Use a CRM To Create Efficiency In Your Business
CRMs go beyond keeping records of all customer interactions. There are many more features that can help your business become more efficient, effective and strategic in your operations.
CRMs go beyond keeping records of all customer interactions. There are many more features that can help your business become more efficient, effective and strategic in your operations.
Contact Management
By having a consolidated view of each customer, teams can engage with clients more effectively and strategically. This improves personalization in communication and builds stronger relationships.
Sales Pipeline Management
CRMs like HubSpot offer sales pipeline tools to help you track leads through each stage of the sales process. You can see where each lead is currently in your sales and marketing funnel. It also highlights bottlenecks or areas where leads are dropping off. Ultimately, this helps you prioritize leads, track performance, and identify potential revenue opportunities.
Reporting and Analytics
It’s one thing to make marketing and sales efforts; it’s another to see if your efforts are actually paying off. CRMs provide reporting dashboards with metrics such as conversion rates, average deal size, and customer retention rates (to name a few), to help your business make informed and smarter decisions.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation can save your team a whole lot of time, and provide personalized messaging for each client, without all of the leg work. This allows your team to focus on other tasks while your messaging stays unique and personalized.
Maximizing Your CRM
Now that you have an idea of what a CRM can do for your business, you may be wondering what CRM will fit your business. HubSpot is a great way to discover what a CRM can do. You can get started for free, while more premium features are available for a cost.
But for those of you that already use HubSpot, there’s a good chance you may not be optimizing the robust CRM to do all that it can do for your company. And if you’re looking into switching from your CRM to HubSpot, it may seem like an insurmountable task. No business needs to go on a CRM quest alone. Pearagon can be a guide for all those HubSpot integration questions and more.
Pearagon is a company specializing in helping businesses maximize their investment in HubSpot by offering custom integration solutions. They assist in setting up HubSpot for a seamless workflow, ensuring businesses can fully leverage HubSpot’s CRM capabilities.
Conclusion
A CRM like HubSpot can help level up your business in many ways. It can improve customer communication, automate tasks, and provide data on your efforts through reporting. And whether you're introducing a CRM to your business for the first time, or you’d like to maximize your CRM, Pearagon can help you along the way.