Choosing the right CRM for Your Business

We unpack the primary factors you should take into consideration before choosing the CRM for your business.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the most powerful and efficient approach to reaching, maintaining and creating relationships with potential and current customers.

At its core, a CRM system helps manage customer data, supports sales, provides actionable insights and integrates with digital marketing across all channels. Not only is this tactic proven to increase brand awareness and loyalty, it improves the bottom line by creating a trusted customer-brand bond. 

Through a CRM platform you are able to build personal and emotional links between your brand and consumer as the system is able to identify the individual needs of each lead. This personalised approach helps to serve leads and customers in a greater way, nurturing trust and driving sales.

In order to implement a successful CRM strategy across your business, you need to invest in the right platform for your business. With so many CRM options available, the vetting process can be quite overwhelming. As a business, you want to choose a CRM solution that is powerful enough to move your customer relationships forward while allowing room for scalability and your own unique business needs. There are a variety of factors you need to consider when choosing the CRM for your business including your existing software infrastructure, operational complexities, and budget. Ultimately, the CRM you choose needs to meet your requirements, not the other way around. 

5 Factors to consider when selecting a CRM for your business

1. Your Customer Experience

As stated previously, the primary goal of a CRM is to better relationships between your brand and the consumer. It is important that you identify the type of relationships and experiences you want to nurture and create. So, how do you get to this point? In order to deliver the best experiences for your potential and current customer, you need to align your sales, marketing and service departments. By aligning these departments, you are able to discover the various touch points that clients use to contact your business, unpack the ideal buyer persona and discover their needs and wants. This means that you need to find a CRM that helps in the alignment of these departments. For example, HubSpot provides a Marketing, Sales and Services hub that ensures all departments are able to measure, analyse and learn more about the sales pipeline and the variety of actions they take to get to the purchasing stage of the buyer's journey. 

You see, customers are going to come to your business through a variety of marketing channels and your CRM needs to support these channels. From search engine optimisation and content creation to social media lead generation campaigns and landing page lead forms. With this in mind, you need a CRM that is able to handle all of these tactics and customer interactions.

In Summary: The CRM platform you choose should be able to align your departments in order to understand the customer journey while integrating with the various digital marketing platforms that drive this journey.

2. Your Existing Software

A Customer Relationship Management tool is probably not the first software you have taken on as a business. With this in mind, it is important you select a CRM that is able to integrate with your existing platforms, from your accounting software to your website. 

When investigating the right CRM for your business, look out for one that is flexible and provides a great user experience when it comes to app integration. Essentially, the CRM you select should easily adopt new integrations and apps as you expand your software ecosystem over time. 

A great example of a CRM that provides easy integration with external apps is HubSpot. The platform is one of the most powerful and tightly integrated CRM, marketing, sales and service softwares available today. The company understands that joining forces with other solutions enables it to provide a greater customer experience. And through Chrome extensions and APIs, it performs integrations without any hassle. 

In Summary: It is vital you choose a CRM that has the ability to connect with a variety of business tools to ensure smooth implementation across your organisation. 

3. Your Workflow

A CRM should make all your operations and processes easier. It should also be simple to use and easy to navigate in order to help your marketing, sales and services teams become more efficient. 

The CRM you select should, at its core, be a powerful workflow engine that is able to collect relevant lead and customer information, store this information and analyse it. It should provide tools to create great marketing campaigns that work to attract, engage and delight potential and current customers. It should help you understand each individual lead and customer need which helps your teams create compelling, personalised content that is able to reach the right audience, at the right time, while tracking lead behaviour and identifying those that are sales-qualified. Essentially, you need to select a CRM that has the technology to understand and cater to every part of the customer journey. 

In Summary: The right CRM should be able to configure automatic communication and workflows that save your marketing and sales teams effort and time - something vital in improving processes and the bottom line. 

4. CRM Implementation and Customer Service

CRMs are not just about the product itself, you need to consider the implementation process. You can invest in on-premise CRM software but this comes at a cost in terms of ongoing maintenance and implementation. If you choose to work with a vendor, you are more likely to get your system up and running quickly. However, before you select a partner, try to sign up for a free trial to see how it integrates with your existing business processes and existing software. You do not want to end up with a CRM that ends up causing stress and takes up too much time regarding implementation. 

With the above in mind, investigate the support the CRM vendor offers. If they don’t offer top class customer service, chances are you will end up having to spend more money on in-house specialists for maintenance services. 

A CRM that provides great customer service is HubSpot. The platform is dedicated to teaching and upskilling its customers. With significant training and a vast e-learning ecosystem, from webinars and knowledge training, the support and educational content available is unmatched in the CRM space. Essentially, it provides educational material to help businesses understand how to optimise the platform in order to gain the best possible results. It is also important to note that HubSpot customer service is free, while most top-end CRM support comes at a significant cost. 

In Summary: Implementation and customer service needs to be considered when deciding on the right CRM for your business. You do not want to end up with a platform that will cost you more in the long run. 

5. Long Term Goals

It is important you consider your long term vision when it comes to selecting the right CRM for your business. In order to do this, you need to consult with your sales, marketing and service teams as well as your stakeholders. By consulting with them you will discover a list of CRM features you require, and will be able to understand your full CRM strategy in greater detail which in turn, helps you select the right solution for your organisation. 

Once you identify what each team needs, and their long term vision, you need to select a solution that is scalable over time and can grow with your goals. You may begin selecting a lower-cost option in the beginning, but you do not want to outgrow the software in a few years. Therefore, you need to balance your current needs with your long term goals. 

In Summary: Choose a CRM that has the functionality to grow and expand alongside your business as your teams work toward your goals. 

Key Takeaways

Choosing a CRM for your business is not a simple process. It requires input from marketing, sales, service and stakeholders and needs to scale alongside your business as it grows through the platform.

There are 5 questions you should ask yourself r when selecting a CRM for your business, these being:

  1. 1. Will it better your customer experience?

  2. 2. Does it integrate with your current software?

  3. 3. Can it manage and better your workflow?

  4. 4. Is it easy to implement and does it offer good customer service? 

  5. 5. Does it suit your long term business goals?

Once you have done this “soul-searching” and recognise what it is you require from a CRM, your decision becomes easier to make.

How we can help you

As DXG, we offer the entire suite of HubSpot CRM solutions. HubSpot is a world renowned all-in-one marketing, sales, and service software that offers tools to help your business grow. The software provides a central location for your Search Engine Optimisation, social media, content creation, marketing automation, lead generation, audience segmentation, and more, and is transforming the way the world does business. 

From implementing the HubSpot CMS and CRM systems to training your teams, we transform organisations with the inbound methodology and we adapt HubSpot to suit your business goals. Whether your focus is generating leads, accelerating sales or developing a powerful website, we offer the complete range of HubSpot services to meet your needs. Together, we build your custom solution.

Get in touch with one of our HubSpot CRM experts.

Unpack the differences and similarities between the two most prominent players in the CRM industry. Find out more here. Download your free guide, "HubSpot Vs Salesforce"

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