Are you looking for a better way to manage your customer relationships? CRM software is the answer. Learn more about how it can help your business grow, and what features are available. 

Customer Relationship Management software, or CRM, is a program designed to gather all aspects of your customer information in one place. A CRM solution helps your business organize interactions and relationships with customers and prospects alike.

CRM software centralizes all the data about your current and future customers so that your team may remain on top of their tasks. For example, agents will log accounts of customer purchases, calls, emails, chats, support tickets, etc. This way, no detail of a customer’s relationship with your business will slip through the cracks.

CRM solutions accommodate businesses of every size and budget: from a small SaaS subscription-based model to large-scale enterprise installation. As a result, companies both new and established will benefit from using a suitable CRM solution.

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 rapid growth phase, 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 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 various 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 to 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 access 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. For example, CRM automation may include data entry and contact record updated 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, many opportunities exist 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 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, 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. In addition, the reporting features within a CRM can be customized — such as your dashboards — to help you explore 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 pre-made templates to save you time. Then, preview those reports in real-time, visualize your CRM data any way you’d like, and share reports with ease by sending individual messages 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. 

CRM solutions accommodate businesses of every size and budget: from a small SaaS subscription-based model to large-scale enterprise installation. As a result, companies both new and established will benefit from using a suitable CRM solution.

For those who work with a CRM platform, it’s hard to imagine a world without it. If you love structure and organization, an advantage CRM software offers is that it can keep everything related to managing your customer relationships — data, notes, metrics, and more — in one place.

A CRM platform helps companies target different audiences, set scores and alerts based on an individual lead or customer’s activity, proactively work with contacts and maintain relationships. Best of all, a CRM system can be used across departments to ensure that all customer-facing teams are empowered with the correct data to create incredible customer experiences.

CRM benefits a company in a variety of ways. While the benefits vary by department or industry, six uses of CRM platforms that affect every user include:

• Trustworthy reporting
• Dashboards that visually showcase data
• Improved messaging with automation
• Proactive service

Trustworthy Reporting

Data is a necessary part of business, and it’s available from several resources: social media, Google Analytics, business software, apps, and CRM technology. It’s not helpful, however, until it’s sorted, cleaned, analyzed, and made actionable.

Companies of all sizes use social media and rely on metrics from those platforms. Google Analytics is an essential tool many business owners use, at least minimally, to monitor their website traffic. However, you can’t rely on these tools alone.

A CRM system helps you go deeper with all your data and metrics, including those from other sources. For example, when your company is dedicated to maintaining clean data, or data free from errors, you can use your CRM platform to collate, tabulate, and organize that data, which is easy to interpret with reporting features. This is one of the most significant benefits of a CRM system, and it trickles down to other benefits that become available once you have this usable data.

CRM platforms have an advantage over other customer relationship management systems because you can see who interacts with your company and how. For example, a lead successfully filled out a form on a landing page after seeing a particular ad on social media. You can also run reports to see where your opportunities are, how well you’re interacting with leads and customers, trends in your sales and customer service efforts, and more.

You can run those reports with any number of parameters. For example, it’s common to categorize the consumers in your CRM as being in one of three different stages in the sales funnel: leads, opportunities, or sales. Generally speaking, marketing works with leaders, sales works with options, and customer service works with sales, though there is overlap.

• Leads — These are consumers that have filled out a form or otherwise expressed interest in your company. They may be high-quality, prospective customers, but you won’t know until they continue on the customer journey. Reports, especially those with insights driven by artificial intelligence, help CRM users work with leads to convert them to opportunities.
• Opportunities — Leads who, at some point, make their way further down your sales funnel and are close to purchasing become options. For example, maybe they spoke to someone on your sales team and asked for a demo, or perhaps they put an item in their shopping cart on your eCommerce site. A person’s location in your sales funnel is not something that Google Analytics or social media platforms can show you, but reports from your CRM platform can. These reports can also help you see which ads and marketing messaging are most successful at guiding leads down the funnel to opportunities and then opportunities down to sales.
• Sales — Once a person converts and becomes a customer, that doesn’t mean you’re done gathering and analyzing data. The data you collect before the customer’s purchase, the additional data you collect on their habits after purchase, and the information you glean from the reports you run on that data will ensure you understand those who purchase your products and services.

The best CRM systems can do more than tell you which ad a lead came from. They can show you precisely what a person clicks when you send them an email marketing message, how many times they open an email, how often they have conversations with your sales team, what they need when they contact customer service, and more.

Reports are one of the most valuable benefits of CRM platforms, significantly when AI enhances them. Actionable data allows you to communicate with your current audience more effectively while also making it easier to reach out to those who have shown interest in the past. In addition, these reports guide your decision-making process and are invaluable. 

Your company needs data visualizations at its beck and call to keep an eye on absolutely current statistics to make minute-by-minute or daily decisions. This is where another one of the benefits of CRM comes in: dashboards.

Dashboards that Visually Showcase Data

Using a spreadsheet to manage your company means inputting or importing data manually, figuring out what’s important, and then creating a graphical way to present this data. 

CRM does most of this for you. Once you’ve invested in the platform, you can take advantage of another CRM benefit, the dashboard. You can set up a dashboard for every individual in your company who has login credentials for your CRM platform.

For example, a director of marketing would be most interested in email marketing metrics, specifically the click-through rates of each campaign. 

They can set up a dashboard that immediately displays how many people a particular email was sent to, how many opened it, the click-through rate, and more. 

However, a director of sales would want to know how many calls are made per hour and how many of those calls resulted in positive action, such as a future meeting or demo. Dashboards let users quickly see the most critical data to their workflows without having to dig, sift, sort, or run a report.

More Personalized Outreach with Automation

Because you are continually capturing data about and insights into your audience, market, and industry, you can create more relevant, personalized messaging and outreach — in both your manual efforts and your automated campaigns. 

This is the advantage of dynamic content and automated messaging: You can put people who have an essential similarity — for example, an interest in a niche product — into different drip campaigns.

This capability benefits many CRMs and lets you set up a series of automated emails that speak to that audience precisely and are triggered by specific actions. As a result, drip campaigns can be used throughout the sales funnel.

For example, on a tour company website, if someone builds a custom itinerary for a trip to Thailand, you can start a drip campaign for people who create custom itineraries for Southeast Asia instead of sending them generic emails about travel. 

Automation also allows you to take someone out of a drip campaign at any time based on their actions. So if, for example, the person interested in a trip to Thailand finally books the itinerary, your platform will automatically remove them from that particular drip campaign to avoid redundant emails and confusion.

Proactive Service

In the same way that the data in your CRM platform can help automate more personalized outreach throughout the marketing funnel, it can improve a sales team’s outreach efforts or customer service’s ability to help customers. For example, if a sales team knows what interests a particular customer most, they or a support representative can meet their needs and solve problems more proactively.

This is a significant advantage for a customer service team. With relevant data available in their dashboards and cases, there’s no need to dig for information, so a rep can get right down to what matters. It saves everyone time and makes your potential and current customers feel essential when sales and customer service are proactive and knowledgeable — plus, it can improve your bottom line through higher customer satisfaction and reduced time to resolution.

About Us

Focus on Force is the ideal preparation for your Salesforce Certification. I’ve spent eight years working with the Salesforce platform in various roles (including business analyst, project manager, consultant, solutions designer, and solutions architect), and worked my way through 10 certifications in order to move up the career ladder. 

Salesforce Certifications are Tough!

Which is exactly as it should be: they actually mean something to the real world, and you’ll bring tons of value to the company or clients when you pass the exam. As a result, having a Salesforce Certification (or many) under your belt carries a considerable salary premium. By setting yourself apart from your uncertified peers and becoming extremely well acquainted with the platform, you’re able to benefit from new job opportunities, promotions within existing jobs, and instant credibility. 

Martin Gessner

Martin Gessner is the Founder of Focus on Force.

He has spent over 10 years working in various Salesforce roles including business analyst, project manager, consultant and solutions architect. Along the way he has earned twelve certifications, published "The Salesforce Career Playbook", and helps Salesforce professionals learn more about Salesforce, develop their career and prepare for certifications.