Customer relationship management or CRM is a technology to help you manage your contacts and interactions with prospects and customers. Every business needs to invest in a CRM software to improve their communication and relationship with customers. As a business grows it becomes impossible to manage a contact list manually. This task can be time-consuming and tedious.
A CRM software can help automate all the tasks and interactions without any human errors. HubSpot CRM is one such tool that can track all customer interactions right from the beginning when they first interact with your website. In this article, we will discuss various ways in which you can use the HubSpot CRM tool.
First, let’s find out why you need a CRM software.
Benefits of CRM
Improved Customer Experience
CRM keeps a record of all the interactions your prospect or customer has had with your business. If your prospects have downloaded any content from your website, opened your email or signed up for your newsletter, you can track all these activities. Since you know how they have been interacting with your business it becomes easier to connect with them. You can reach out and provide them with whatever information they need.
With the help of CRM, you can also know when to follow up with your prospects and customers. This creates a seamless experience for your customers. Creating a good experience for them is valuable to building long-term relationships.
Automation
With CRM you can automate tasks such as reporting, logging calls and other interactions, sending emails and more. This saves you the time to do these repeated tasks manually. If you need to send outreach or follow up emails manually, sales reps would spend a lot of time sending these emails to each contact. But with automation you can schedule these emails to be sent to all the contacts.
This saves the sales reps time and effort. They can use this time to focus on other important tasks for your business.
Sales and marketing alignment
CRM is not just useful for the sales teams. Marketing teams also need to know how leads interact with their content or reach out to sales reps. With CRM both sales and marketing teams have access to all the information regarding their prospects and customers. CRM encourages the collaboration between teams and provides the relevant information about leads and customers.
Improved communication
With a CRM, sales reps can know if they have already spoken to prospect or if they sent any outreach emails. This makes it easier for them to plan what to cover in a future call or which follow up emails to send. You can have a relevant conversation with your prospects and customers that address their needs. This creates a consistent and relevant experience for them.
Easy management
A CRM system makes it easier for managers to manage their team. Managers can have access to data that shows them their sales rep’s performance. CRM can give insights about conversion rates, deal sizes, number of interactions and more. It is easier to track the progress made by team members. Managers can use all these insights to review and improve the performance of their sales reps.
Main Components of HubSpot CRM
If you are new to HubSpot CRM, you should understand its three main components which are objects, records, and properties.
Objects: This includes contacts, companies, deals, tickets, or any other custom object you create.
Record: A record is a single instance of an object where you can store information about your contact and track all the interactions. You can associate one record to another to understand the relationship between them. For instance, a contact can be associated with a company record, if that contact is working at that company.
Properties: Properties are the different types of information you can store on a record.
For example, a contact’s email address is a property.
These components can be used to organize and easily manage your contact list on the HubSpot CRM database.
How to use HubSpot CRM?
Here are some ways you can use HubSpot CRM.
Import contacts
If you are not already using any CRM software, then you probably use spreadsheets to keep a track of your contact and interactions. You can easily import your contact list on HubSpot by uploading a CSV file. Add different properties to the contact list as per your business needs. HubSpot will seamlessly import all your contacts and enable you to customize properties as needed.
Segment contacts
All the information stored on records can be segmented. HubSpot enables you to segment contacts so that you can target them based on different criteria like location or different stages of the buyer’s journey. Contacts can be segmented based on saved views, active lists, and static lists.
Saved views: This can be used with all standard objects like contacts, companies, deals and tickets. With saved views you can easily view a segment of your data from contacts, companies, deals, or tickets based on their property values.
Lists: Lists can be used with contacts and companies. It can enable you to segment your contacts with property values as well as other filters like form submissions or email interactions.
Active lists: Active lists automatically update the contact list. If new contacts match the criteria they are added to the list and when a contact does not match it is removed.
Static lists: Static lists do not update new contacts if they meet the criteria. They are just a list of contacts that was created with a set of requirements and saved. You can manually add or remove any contacts here.
Tasks
You can keep a track of your to-do lists with the tasks tool in HubSpot. Sales reps have a lot to do with whether it's interacting with prospects, calls, sending follow up emails and more. To not miss out on important interactions with prospects and customers, sales teams can set up tasks. Users with Super admin permission in your HubSpot account can also manage which users can view and edit tasks.
Schedule various tasks so that you can receive reminders on the due date or time. This helps your sales teams be more organized and efficient in their work. Instead of using other platforms to make a to-do list, you can do it in your HubSpot account and stay on top of your tasks.
Sales pipeline
According to HubSpot, a sales pipeline is a representation of how a prospect moves through every stage of a sales process. A prospect will move through a sales pipeline after completing specific actions which can be seen on your CRM. This can help sales reps look at the sales process, predict revenue and determine any challenges in the process. Every company has a different sales process; hence the sales pipeline should be tailored to your buyer’s journey. It can help managers forecast revenue and what stage a lead is in and assess which deals are likely to close.
Image from HubSpot
To set up the sales pipeline you can click on the settings icon in the main navigation. Go to Objects > Deals > Pipelines. You can manage your sales pipeline as per your business requirements. Use deal stages to track the progress of your ongoing deals in HubSpot. Each deal stage will have a probability that indicates whether the deal is likely to close. Sales pipeline can help you keep a track of all the ongoing deals, estimate future revenue and plan your sales process effectively.
Assign prospects to sales reps
If you have many sales reps working in your team, you can assign them contacts. This enables you to delegate all the tasks related to each contact with a sales rep. HubSpot can then send alerts to a sales rep whenever they need to reach out to any prospect. It is a great way to organize your ongoing deals. Each team member will have their own group of prospects they can focus on. HubSpot uses the Contact owner, Company owner, Deal owner, and Ticket owner properties to set the ownership of a contact, company, ticket, and deal.
The HubSpot CRM tool is flexible and can be customized as per your business needs. Once you have your CRM set up, you can also set workflows to help sales reps automate various tasks like sending emails. This is a great tool to organize and manage your contacts and create a database that is accessible and functional. This can improve your sales and marketing efforts to set you up for success.
Are you new to HubSpot? As a HubSpot certified agency, we can help you get started on this platform to streamline your marketing and sales efforts. Get in touch with us to find out more.