March 22, 2019
If you're a business owner, CEO, CFO, marketing director, manager or anywhere in between, chances are you've sat in on quite a few meetings to help your company understand the best approaches to managing your customers, contacts, leads, and opportunities. What began with telephones, a Rolodex and a datebook has now evolved to the use of sophisticated customer relationship management software applications - better known as a CRM.
How can you utilize a CRM to help you attract and retain more customers? How can you integrate your CRM with your other platforms like HubSpot?
A CRM helps you and your company manage your customers, your prospects, and your sales. CRMs can be either web-based or stand-alone systems and can keep track of people, their relationship to you, whom they work for, what they're doing, what they're thinking about buying and how often they contact you, among an incredible number of other options.
Some use CRMs for other purposes - such as keeping track of technical support or supplementing marketing goals — but the majority of users find particular use keeping track of prospects, opportunities, and other sales information. The benefits of using a CRM for you or your company are a more streamlined sales process, increased customer and prospect interaction, and the ability to not only keep track of the people you want but also to nurture those relationships in any way you see fit.
Ready to talk about your CRM integration? Schedule a free consultation.
The great thing about CRM software is that it has grown and evolved by leaps and bounds, giving you a wide range of CRMs to choose from, depending on your needs.
Some of the more well-known CRMs are Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot and NetSuite, but there are also other CRM alternatives, like SugarCRM for example, and various other custom-made CRMs.
Regardless of the CRM you use, the majority of CRMs hold the same types of information and have the same types of goals:
Improve customer communication and retention
Increase company profitability
More targeted marketing
Increase business focus
Enhance customer and prospect tracking
Simply put, CRM integration is combining another application, like your HubSpot account and CRM to function together seamlessly.
Instead of using your CRM to just be a system that retains customer information based on manual entries, CRM integration promotes your CRM to work double-time, automatically bringing invaluable customer lead data directly into your CRM using information already found throughout your HubSpot portal.
Aside from the aforementioned benefits, CRM integration with HubSpot helps streamline the sales process as leads come in through the various activities in your HubSpot account. Fields such as name, company, email, and phone are typical areas that will be populated from HubSpot to your CRM, and in most cases, you'll be able to track the entire journey a contact takes from the moment they first interact with one of your HubSpot-backed efforts — your emails, landing pages, blogs, and website. And what’s better? It’s all viewable in a single area! Custom fields are also possible to sync depending on the needs of your company.
And, with some CRMs, you can choose advanced options, so if a customer submits information from a particular part of the country, a representative from your company will be automatically funneled that information, without any other steps in between.
No matter what you or your company does, you must retain your customer's and your prospect's information, and this is where a CRM can be extremely valuable. A CRM can help you be better prepared, delegate tasks more easily, monitor company performance and spot customer trends as they happen.
Your HubSpot portal houses the marketing and sales processes of your company, asking your audience to view information through emails and blogs, comment on it, download it, and ask for additional resources. A HubSpot CRM integration can help you create better campaigns and customer nurturing based on the information you receive from the integrated sources. With the information collected through both systems, you can personalize campaigns for each contact. For example, an email can come from a specific sales executive that’s interacted with your prospect and include their name.
Additionally, syncing CRM data to HubSpot helps your teams identify when a contact has gone cold, whether it’s due to being inactive, or marked as a “lost opportunity.” HubSpot’s tools help you re-engage with these prospects and warm them up to become potential SQLs. However, integrating HubSpot and your CRM gives your teams visibility into what works and what doesn’t - so you could hopefully avoid a large number of cold contacts altogether!
Whether you have a CRM already in place or are about to select your CRM, experienced companies like Lynton can provide information on how the integration process works, and what steps to take to get you streamlining customer interaction the right away.
For information on how we integrate HubSpot with CRMs, and for all your other HubSpot questions, contact us today.
