A CRM is a Customer Relationship Management system that helps all departments within a business stay aligned.
Typically, sales and marketing are the primary users of a CRM, however it's even more valuable if the whole business is invested in using the CRM every day.
There's many benefits to a CRM for businesses:
- Align teams around a single source of truth
- Keep your data more accurate and useful
- Customer experience is improved as you keep all information about them in one central place
- Leverage data to improve business processes and increase revenue
Although a good CRM system is a significant investment, the upsides from having a good CRM system (such as HubSpot) will pay for itself.
Why is a CRM important for marketing?
Having an accurate CRM system is essential for marketing teams to be effective. The marketing team can use the CRM to segment your audience into useful segments to target with various marketing activity.
For marketing, the CRM enables alignment between the marketing and sales teams. The data that sales inputs into the CRM about various accounts can be utilised by the marketing team to send personalised email marketing and more.
Benefits to sales teams of an accurate CRM
There's nothing worse than speaking to a prospect and you have the wrong information about the person or company you're speaking with. Ensuring your CRM has accurate information ensure your communications are personal, timely, and hit the right tone with your target. There's many more benefits though:
- Create prospecting lists based on information you collect about your target contacts and companies.
- Send automated email campaigns based on data, e.g. birthdays, business anniversaries, spend, contract renewals.
- Get accurate reports based on company and contact data.
Why you need a CRM
If you're still managing your business in spreadsheets or barebones accounting software, your business is missing out. If the above points haven't convinced you already, there's plenty more benefits to a good CRM system:
- One place for all your customer data.
- Integrate your accounting software.
- Get insights on what website pages your contacts are viewing (yes, really!).
What's the best CRM?
The best CRM depends on your business needs. For B2B, HubSpot is by far the most intuitive and accessible CRM. For recruitment agencies, Bullhorn may be the best solution. For huge ecommerce sites, Shopify if the clear choice.
How much does a CRM cost?
From £free, but up to £100,000 a year for enterprise businesses with lots of users. HubSpot offers a completely free version of their CRM, if you would like to set up a demo with us please book here and we'll show you how we can transform your business.
