CRMs – What Your Marketing Stack Should Include

How do you keep in contact with your clients? Do you have a folder with their information to keep handy before meetings? Do you still use a Rolodex of your clients’ numbers nearby?

Looking to modernize your marketing stack? Well maybe it’s time to retire the Rolodex and Excel sheets containing vital information and move towards a system that will bring your client data collection into the modern age. A CRM, or customer relationship management system, is the solution you need.

You can manage your business interactions smoothly by utilizing a system that keeps all your clients’ information gathered in one, easily accessible location. No need to stress about studying up on your clients as a CRM will do it all for you.

CRM applications can help increase sales by up to 29%, sales productivity by up to 34% and sales forecast accuracy by 42%. (source: Salesforce)

As the numbers suggest, your company ROI could truly skyrocket with a CRM system.  But which one should you choose?  Are there different kinds of CRMs?  How can they help you stay personal and personable in a digital marketing landscape?  In this blog, we discuss the value and benefits of customer relationship management (CRM) systems.  Read on to learn what a CRM is, what it does and what you should include in your marketing stack.

What is a CRM?

CRM is the fastest growing software market today. It was a $14 billion industry in 2010 and is expected to reach $80 billion by 2025. That’s nearly a 600% increase. (Source: Grand View Research)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a form of software that is used to manage all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers.

There are many CRM systems that provide their users a clear overview of your customers. Most will have customizable dashboards that will provide valuable information about the customers and allow you to create lead generating campaigns.

CRM systems collect information about a customer like a website, email, phone number, social media and more across multiple sources online. Depending on the system you have, it can even gather information about the customer’s company for your record.

Not only does it gather information about your customers to be used throughout your relationship, it also manages interactions and activities with said client for you.

Why is it important for B2B marketing?

CRM systems provide a plethora of benefits to B2B companies and entrepreneurs, virtually making your business endeavors seamless. Here are the top 3 benefits of a CRM:

A Storehouse for Data

As all B2B businesses should, keeping a single storehouse for client or potential client data is important. CRMs are able to collect and store information about your client, including their buying habits, preferred communication, response to different forms of marketing collateral and so much more. With the data you collect from a CRM, your next meeting could be a seamless closer.

Optimize Communications

CRMs also optimize communications between the user and the clients; you can just about automate everything with your clients through this system. Automate meetings with clients through webforms, create and optimize email marketing campaigns, provide marketing analytics, and even keep track of a client’s inquiries.

Streamline Sales

CRMs help with streamlining and automating certain sales-related duties. It will perform tasks, such as providing quotes, sales forecasting, order processing and more.

CRM Systems That Integrate with Your Marketing Stack

There are many CRM systems currently on the market that will help you automate your business and marketing in one easy-to-use platform.

Some well-known CRMs on the market that we have also used for client marketing initiatives include the following:

What Should Your Marketing Stack Include?

When deciding on the right CRM for you and your company, try to consider all the features included in each to pick the right one for you.

Ideally, you should be able to find one that has the following features:

Contact Management

For sales purposes this will help you collect and organize customer data as it tracks your lead from the beginning of its life cycle to the end. It will maintain the history, relationship and even create a profile for your leads or clients to help you find information quickly and efficiently.

Accounts Management

Unlike contact management, this feature allows you to collect data about the companies you do business with rather than the contact of the lead you communicate with. This feature can forecast future endeavors with a selected account, track complete account details like expected generated revenue and can create spreadsheets based on the information gathered on a company.

SharpSpring’s account management feature allows you to track your website visitors’ conversions from the moment they first visit, all the way to the final sale. Businesses get detailed analytics that show conversion funnels and the life of leads. Furthermore, it allows users to set up interactions that are triggered by individual customer actions, with automated interactions to engage with the contact at a critical point in the buying process.

Opportunity Management

This feature enables businesses to manage and monitor the sales funnels and provides necessary information needed to complete the sales process. This can be extremely helpful for B2B businesses who have a significant amount of qualified leads they would like to close on.

Sales Process Automation

This feature also helps with the closing of sales leads as it enables the user to automate and streamline various sales features within their business. This reduces the sales cycle, reduces human error and improves the chances of turning a lead into a customer.

Campaign Management

When creating an advertising campaign, one has to ensure that their campaign in reaching their target audience. By using a campaign management feature, a user can launch the campaign, whether it is for Facebook, LinkedIn or Google, and track the results.

The campaign management features allows the user to see how many clicks their advertisement received, analyzes the data and helps forecasts how your future marketing endeavors may span out.

This is ideal for the professional marketer as they can create the campaign and virtually leave it up to the program to track the information for them. Set a date range and it will collect all the data for you.

Email Marketing Integration

You probably have a very busy schedule and creating over 100 different emails to potential clients is the last thing you want to do during your workday. Why not have your CRM system do all that for you?

Save time and money by utilizing an email marketing automation system to reach your target leads and clients without having to spend hours on end drafting an email and sending it out to your specified leads.

SharpSpring email marketing offers an all-encompassing automation platform that is customizable and user-friendly. It has features which include templates to design your email campaigns and messaging without needing to code. Furthermore, users can create focused emails with merge variables for any custom field in SharpSpring. Set up automated emails with information that only you can provide to your customers. Another great feature is the ability to send test emails out to your coworkers in order to see the set-up of the email and fix any mistakes in messaging, broken links or other structures. It is a time-saving, innovative platform that will help your business create better messaging and smoother client communication.

Social Media Integration

Depending on the market you serve and your products, social media marketing is a great way to spread the word about your company. However, posting everyday is tedious and can consume a large amount of time from your day.

Make posting to social media easier by scheduling in advance. Furthermore, utilize a tool that tells you the best time to post and streamlines all your social media profiles in one place.

SEMRush is a great example of a social media poster feature. It gives a full calendar view of your social media as well as an intuitive and easy-to-use scheduling feature. You can create individual posts for different platforms or post one single message across all of your social media platforms. Upload pictures, schedule out your post, click save and SEMRush does the rest.

Task Management

It is important to keep your team members all on the same page so that projects flow and communication at every level is clear. By creating tasks and assigning them to members of your team, you will know where your associates stand in your business. Using a CRM can help automate these tasks based on your employees’ skills, availability and so on.

By utilizing a task management feature, you are also allowing your company to service your clients quickly and efficiently, bringing them back for more.

Zoho’s CRM system includes a task management feature that can help you and your team prioritize tasks by assigning tasks to individual employees, set priority levels, and due dates. The system even allows you to track the time spent on each task and set it as non-billable and billable hours so you know how much work was needed for your client or your company.

Zoho’s CRM also notifies your other team members of anything done in regards to the tasks once the user changes the status of the task, adds a comment or adds a document. No more sending emails to your other team-mates, just change the status of your task to internal approval to let them know you are ready for them to review your work.

All these features included in your task management CRM will allow you and your team to know where your projects stand and what your team should be working on.

Customer Service/Support

Most CRM software offers customer support-related features to your clients by adding features like help desks, chat bots, and contact center support software. This feature is ideal whenever a lead or a client wants to know more information about a certain product or service you may have.

With the data tracking system in place, you can view where your client is struggling and during the sales process may devote more time and effort when explaining your business to them. This is ideal for the sales team and for your customer service staff on hand to help your clients feel more comfortable doing business with you.

Streamline your business with a CRM integration

At the end of the day, utilizing a CRM is the easiest way to run your business smoothly. All the features listed above can be located on an all customizable dashboard at your convenience. Tracking leads, generating campaigns, managing your team and posting to social media doesn’t have to be on three separate software programs.

When you pick the right CRM, you can do it all in one location. Find the perfect all in one marketing tool to help you achieve your sales goals and put your company’s brand at the top of its market.

Here at DreamFactory, we utilize the best CRMs on the market to help our clients achieve their marketing and sales goals. View our case studies and see how our strategies and marketing automation help our clients reach their goals and close their leads effectively.

Building your team and automating your marketing strategy all start with a conversation.