We get this question quite often.
Simply put, a CRM is Customer Relationship Management/Manager.
What Does That Mean For A Company And How Do They Use One?
A CRM is a great place to store all of your company’s information. Some companies and industries have onesspecifically designed for them.
Some of the bigger names like HubSpot, Salesforce and Zoho are some of the leaders in CRM. You probably have heard somebody talk about CRM but never quite understood.
Or maybe you’ve heard a name thrown around but you never knew how it affected business.
Every CRM is different and can be cut and pasted together to work for pretty much any business as long as they’re selling a product/service or they need to keep track of information.
Yes that does sound extremely generic, however some of these CRMs are specifically designed to just be data warehouses.
What can a company expect from a CRM? They really do run the gamut for what they offer. The most common thing that CRMs offer are marketing, sales management, and ticketing systems.
A variety of CRMs offer different services, some may offer more options and some offer less. They are sometimes specifically tailored to a certain industry that may not need one aspect of the software.
What Does This Mean For Your Company?
Having a CRM is a simple way to keep track of many different things inside your business. Typically they are used to keep track of sales. This allows sales people in different organizations to either collaborate together or forthe businesses to look at the sales process and keep track of how many sales are happening and what the quota looks like.
For people in the business world this makes total sense! Everybody wants to know how their sales team is performing and how much money the company is going to make.
If you’re not on the sales side of business, then this is probably something new to you. You may be using one without even realizing it since most companies will call it a proprietary software. The proprietary software allows the CRM to function effectively and also keeps track of numerous other things.
For example an IT company can see what software the consumers have while keeping track of other data points your company may need. You’re probably thinking how do you pick your CRM?
Honestly there’s a million ways to pick one and I’m not going to tell you what one to use. But I will tell you how to pick your best fit.
Here at Baron Media Group we use HubSpot. It’s a very inexpensive and effective way for small businesses to grow. HubSpot also scales up nicely to large businesses and it offers a free option for people that don’t have the finances to pay for more expensive ones.
The easiest way to go about finding a CRM is to cross compare. Determine which offers what your business really needs. Most businesses just need to keep track of their sales and their marketing.
However, some businesses do need to keep track of a ton of other things.
There are tons of ways to compare different CRMs. The easiest way is to take a video seminar of all of them. Every software company is willing to give you a 30 minute, if not an hour long, video of how it works.
Take your time to go through and make an educated decision on which one you like. You have to understand before you get into it, they can be extremely expensive and picking the wrong one could be a costly mistake.
Some CRMs do not offer free versions and if they do, you may need to pay for some additional features, which can add up quickly. This is why it is important to watch the videos to find your best fit for the company.
One other note is the more money you spend on a CRM, the more customizations and features you will have access to.
You might be asking, why does that matter?
Some companies cannot operate on the bare bones of what a CRM offers. CRMs are also businesses so they also need to make money, and most will offer Premium services for a higher cost. It’s important to take into consideration on the business side how much work actually needs to go into setting it up.
There are significant changes that can be made in a lot of them to customize your software. You need to understand that when you purchase customized software or premium services those changes need to be made and if you ever want to switch, you need to know you had completely customized software beforehand. Which makes for a little bit of a sticky situation.
At the end of the day a Customer Relationship Manager is a simple way for you to take a 30,000 ft. picture of your business to see where you are at with sales marketing and various other sections of your company.
If you are company of over 300 employees, chances are probably pretty good you have a custom-made software or one with a less known name because it’s only available for extremely large companies.
If you would like more assistance trying to pick a CRM we’ve used several here at Baron Media Group, but we landed specifically on HubSpot for a variety of reasons. It just allows us to have the functionality we need and provides the marketing capabilities we’re looking for.
With our inbound marketing approach it seemed to be the right fit for us. If you have any questions feel free to reach out. We would be more than happy to sit and have a conversation with you.
Thank you for reading!!