Keep track of customers, leads and sales activity in a CRM
CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management” and is a web application or software that helps businesses keep track of all communications and maintain relationships with their customers and leads in one easily accessible place.
There are many types of CRM software including Hubspot, Salesforce, Zoho, Monday, ZenDesk and more.
At M Designs, we use Hubspot, so this will be the system we draw our examples from.
Instead of using a bunch of spreadsheets, docs and separate applications to keep track of our customer relationships, we use our CRM to keep track of:
- Contacts:
- Business professionals that we network with
- Customers we service
- Leads who may become customers
- Phone Calls… the CRM connects to our phones and shows the call history with each customer.
- Online Conversations
- Chat on the website
- Email conversations
- Ad Campaigns
- Marketing Form Submissions
- Sales Deals/Prospective Jobs or quotes
- Tracked Documents sent to customers or prospects
- Service Tickets (customer service)
And much more!
What is really special is the dynamic nature of all of this. You can add customers/leads by emailing them in your connected email program (like Gmail) or by hand. You can also add them by filling out forms (or they can add themselves this way) and even with a smartphone app that is equipped to scan business cards.
Each business or individual can be selected and you can view all of their interactions, engagement activities, emails, scheduled meetings, calls, and more with yourself OR other staff members. This is really helpful to keep everyone on the same page and reduce redundancies or missed communications.
You can even use the CRM to allow customers to submit support tickets, which allows you to have an organized way to help customers with a variety of issues!
Tracking sales deals is a very visual process with the Hubspot CRM. The interface is a series of columns that represent each stage of selling. The names of each stage in your selling process are editable, but we use the following:
- UNTOUCHED
- REACHED OUT, “NO SIGN OF LIFE” YET
- SCHEDULING
- INITIAL DISCUSSION SCHEDULED
- INITIAL DISCUSSION COMPLETED
- PROPOSAL SCHEDULED
- FOLLOW UP
- OFFICIAL AGREEMENT SIGNING / PAYMENT PENDING
- DEAL WON
- DEAL LOST
Using these steps helps us to see where we need to work on our sales process, and where people are either getting stuck or falling off. The interface is drag and drop, so as each step is completed we can drag the record to the next stage.
There are even marketing tools integrated into the system that allows non-technical people the ability to create lead flow forms on the website, Facebook or other advertisements and a booking calendar to automate appointment setting. Initial connection to the website is required, but after that, it makes it really easy to use and each action on these forms, ads or calendars is recorded back to the original contacts profile within the system.
We can’t imagine running our company today without a CRM! Hubspot is also FREE (paid options available too) so we encourage you to check it out and consider using a CRM for your business.
If you want help setting up Hubspot for your business, please book an appointment. 🙂