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A Beginner’s Guide to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

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“The secret to all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.”

 -Marcus Aurelius

You don’t need to be a Roman emperor to realize that success depends on mastering the details that others miss. However, many businesses still try to drive their key sales and marketing campaigns without capturing and integrating the necessary information. The main reason they fall short is that they are not able to collect, track, and organize customer data in a useful way.

This is where an appropriate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution can help. We’re here to explain what a CRM solution is, why you should use one, and highlight the pros and cons of three of the most popular CRMs in the marketplace today.

What is a CRM tool?

A CRM is a tool developed to help you manage all of your company’s interactions with current and potential customers. The primary purpose of a CRM is to better understand your customers and improve your relationship with them. CRM systems collect and organize customer data in a neat and timely manner so that you can go back to it and use the information when needed.

But what kind of data and information does it track? That’s entirely up to your unique sales and marketing goals. At a general level, it can track phone calls, messages, and mailings. Some of the more specific uses can including delivering what data is usable versus what is detrimental. Still not convinced about CRMs? Well, we will explain some reasons why it would be ideal to have one in your growing business.

Why should I use CRM?

1. Optimizing Efficiency
CRMs can keep track of multiple forms of data and customer information. In most cases, this can lead to the development of more accurate reporting and more efficient strategies. With the recorded data, analysts can study actions taken and recognize what works better to drive desired results. Did mailing current or potential customers create higher revenues? Which campaigns were the most effective? Which channel generated the highest ROI? Knowing the answer to these questions helps sales managers reallocate time and marketing managers reallocate budget.

2. Improving Relationships with Customers
This was a given: CRMs were originally designed to improve the relationships between employees and customers. All CRM software has features which automate processes entering every bit of data on a lead that would be tedious work if done manually. Sales representatives especially benefit from these features since they can maintain more constant contact with their client lists and devote more time to the hottest prospects. Similarly, sales reps give their low maintenance clients a little TLC – with minimal time investment – by showing that they have not thrown them on the back burner while pursuing other opportunities.

3. Tracks Performance of Agents
Sales managers benefit the most from CRMs mostly because of their ability to track the progress and activity done by agents. We all have targets to meet, be it earnings, total sales, the number of calls made, or office visits. CRMs help managers keep track of the activity and performance data for their direct reports and manage it accordingly.

Business owners can benefit from CRM tracking capabilities as well. Owners can view and understand how their agents are performing which can lead to the development of intelligent strategies. CRMs make employee schedules visible and help compare those who have been closing the highest or lowest number of deals for the company.

What is the best CRM software?

There are plenty of CRMs available across the internet, and it is essential to know which are user-friendly, simple, and effective. We chose three of the most commonly used CRM platforms and listed their Pros and Cons, below.

1. Pipedrive

Pros

  • Mobile app
  • Multiple pipeline creation
  • User-Friendly
  • Helpful guidance

Cons

  • No lists of new leads and contacts
  • Manually adding activity and updating information
  • Paid subscriptions

2. Hubspot

Pros

  • Free
  • Live Chat
  • Better Insights into customer interaction
  • Can be used with other CRMs

Cons

  • Lack of Flexibility
  • Lightweight and cant handle large sales team

3. SalesForce

Pros

  •       Customizable dashboard
  •       Easy to navigate
  •       Social capabilities

Cons

  •       Pricing
  •       Uncontrolled administration
  •       Problematic technical support

What's Next?

It’s very beneficial for any company to integrate CRMs into their sales and marketing data as it helps you turn that data into actionable insights. Giving you the assurance of having an organized and trackable system that will let you take your sales and marketing initiatives in an informed direction. With a quality CRM, you will see your sales team reach new heights.

If you have further questions about CRMs or want to know more details, then contact us or leave a comment below! Further info can be obtained directly from the platform websites:

https://pipelinecrm.com/

https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm

https://www.salesforce.com/crm/crm-for-small-business/

5 Tips to Measuring B2B Marketing Initiatives

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The business-to-business (B2B) sales and marketing roles are continuously evolving because of social selling, marketing automation, mobile devices, and more. According to Biznology, today’s sales process takes about 22% longer than 5 years ago. So, how does your business measure the effectiveness of sales and marketing campaigns?  Below is a brief list of tips to successfully measure your B2B marketing initiatives:

Know Your Sales Pipeline Calculations

We get calls all the time from businesses that want to increase their sales and revenue.  Unfortunately, not all businesses take the time to access their sales pipeline and calculate what it will take to achieve their goals and objectives.

  • How many prospects do you need to call to book a meeting?
  • How many meetings turn into a quote?
  • What’s your quote-to-close ratio?

Knowing this information will give you a sense of your potential budget needed to create the incremental volume necessary while also determining whether or not your goals are realistic. You will also have visibility into phases in the sales pipeline that are under performing.

Capture Progress of the Sales Pipeline

It’s no secret that sales reps hate manually entering data. In fact, 23% of salespeople cite manual data entry as the biggest challenge using their existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system (HubSpot, 2017). Capturing the progress of the sales pipeline in your CRM allows you to measure the impact of each sale or prospective customer’s actions. This will improve the sales forecast or closing ratio. The incentive for your business and the sales reps is to help focus on which actions will generate high revenue and sales. Use marketing automation to work on your sales reps behalf.

Access the Impact Marketing is Having on the Sales Funnel

So, you just want more sales but do you respect the sales funnel? The sales funnel is the buying process that companies lead customers through when purchasing products or services.  The goal of your marketing is to have prospects enter the sales process to solve your customer’s problem. Access the impact your marketing is having on moving prospects through the funnel. Your business won’t increase its sales until more prospects move through your sales process.  

Create a Measurement Plan for B2B Sales & Marketing Campaigns

A measurement plan is a document that translates your business objectives into metrics that can measure your website’s offline sales. It provides a framework to customize the configuration of your digital analytics and sales funnel. It is a vital part of your digital marketing strategy and will guide you to set realistic expectations. If you can’t get to raw numbers to calculate the metrics, can you really measure it?

Report Only on B2B KPIs That Matter

There are so  many reports, dashboards, and analyses , but whichget to the point of your marketing and sales campaigns? Narrow down the metrics to your key performance indicators (KPIs) so that you’re not looking at every metric associated with your business to business (B2B) marketing and sales initiatives – only the ones that matter.

Check out Pipedrive (CRM) to improve your sales & marketing campaign tracking. Already measuring sales and marketing?  Let us know your thoughts and add to the list of tips.

DaBrian Marketing Partners with Pipedrive to Deliver Integrated Sales and Marketing Solution

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DaBrian Marketing Group added Pipedrive to its suite of client solutions. The strategic move will help area businesses improve their lead nurturing processes and accelerate sales cycles by fully integrating their marketing automation platforms and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. DaBrian will provide configuration, integrations, support and consulting to better align sales & marketing efforts for clients and allow them to extract the most value from Pipedrive.

Automatically Update Contacts

DaBrian Marketing Group’s marketing automation solution fully integrates with Pipedrive, allowing businesses to instantly sync contact information across both platforms. Any customers or leads added to or updated by sales and support teams are instantly connected with marketing efforts, and vice versa – eliminating the need for manual import/export. The automation removes human error from the data entry process and saves time. After an initial set-up by DaBrian Marketing Group, Pipedrive’s continuous integration does all the work to keep marketing, sales and support information aligned. This ensures consistency in data between systems and enhances database segmentation, lead nurturing, lead scoring and many other contact handling functions.

Push Marketing Insights to Sales Team

Businesses can now use Pipedrive to connect leads directly to the campaigns that generated them, allowing managers to focus their teams’ sales efforts and providing context to those sales conversations. DaBrian’s marketing automation platform will identify the most effective marketing channels and the most active prospects, directing the sales team where to increase efforts. Integrating marketing information with Pipedrive also allows members of the sales team to more effectively target prospects and personalize their messages. Better understanding the sources, preferred channels and interactions of prospects with marketing efforts arms sales forces with the insights they need to close more deals.

Simple CRM that Drives Profits

Pipedrive was developed by salespeople, for salespeople. In addition to integrating information between marketing automation platforms and customer relationship management systems, Pipedrive helps simplify and organize the sales process. Users can be up and running in less than 3 minutes and it’s easy to add or remove team members. Salespeople are notified about key prospect activities to ensure timely follow-up. And the solution comes with native mobile applications to increase convenience and productivity. An attractive user interface and graphic pipeline representations further increase usability and effectiveness. The CRM starts at $10 per user, per month for subscription.

About DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC

Founded in 2008, DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC is a full-service digital marketing agency that provides original strategic digital marketing solutions for businesses. DaBrian Marketing Group’s digital marketing services include email marketing, digital branding, search engine optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising, web hosting, web design, web analytics, social media marketing, and more. Company headquarters is centrally located at 500 Penn Street, Suite 201, Reading, Pennsylvania 19602. For more information about DaBrian Marketing Group, visit dabrianmarketing.com or call 610.743.5602.

About Pipedrive

Founded in 2010 by seasoned sales pros, Pipedrive is a sales CRM solution designed to help salespeople rather than control them. It is built on a proven selling framework that gives visibility into the pipeline and drives actions that push deals to close consistently. Pipedrive is serving more than 60,000 customers worldwide with corporate offices in New York and Estonia. Pipedrive ranks no. 14 on the Inc. 5000 list as one of America’s fastest growing private software companies. For more information, go to www.pipedrive.com.

What Is a CRM and Where to Get Started

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CRM may be an acronym you’ve heard floating around before – but what is it? CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, basically it’s how you can keep track of data on past, present, and potential future customers and log interactions with them whether it’s through, emails, phone calls, mailings and so on.

Why would you want to have that information? With information like that you can manage how to regain former customers, retain customers, and gain new ones. You’re probably starting to see that a CRM is an integral tool for sales and marketing for businesses and in fact it is.

You could start a CRM system by collecting and entering customer and potential customer information into something like an excel sheet but that can become tedious work that wouldn’t be very helpful in the long run. Fortunately, there are a ton of CRM systems out there that can help.

Track Conversions

There are a few helpful things to keep in mind when picking out a CRM:

Is It Automated?

As in does it integrate with any platforms you are already using such as your email and social media? This is useful because it will save you or your employees time from having to manually enter every bit of customer information on your own.

Is It Mobile?

Can you access your customer relation information on the fly? This is helpful when you meet a new prospective customer and want to get them in the system right away or access all the information about a customer out in the field without having to log into your computer.

Is It Usable?

A major factor to consider: is the program easy to use for you and your employees? A big reason for businesses leaving their CRM to the way side is not knowing how it functions.

However, searching through all of the CRM options out there can be overwhelming in of itself. I’ve picked a few of some of the best ones out there to get you started.

SalesforceIQ CRM

One of Salesforce IQ’s features is the automatic collection of customer data such as emails, calendar events, and smartphone calls so you can spend more time focusing on the client and less time on data entry. You can also share information with other employees in order to collaborate when communicating with customers. It also creates reports to keep you on track and focused on the most promising sales. It’s mobile so you can work from anywhere and streamline your workflow.

Prosperworks

If you use G Suite then Prosperworks might be the best option for you. It was made for G Suite and seamlessly integrates with G Suite’s apps such as Google Sheets, Docs, Slides, Calendar, Inbox and Gmail and automatically syncs collected information from these apps. It will also remind you when you are not following your schedule to follow up with customers or potential customers. And whenever you update your Google contact information, it will roll over to your CRM.

Hubspot CRM

Hubspot has a great dashboard to gain visibility into what’s going on in your CRM to keep everything organized. You can also swiftly sort customers by a number of filters to keep track of what’s happening. Hubspot also syncs information across several platforms for email, social media, and phone calls. One of the best things about this platform is that it’s free!

Do you use a CRM platform? If so – which one? What are some of the benefits and pitfalls you’ve experienced with a CRM platform? Let us know in the comments.

A Project Management System Can Do More Than You Think

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Speaking from over 20 years of experience in marketing and sales, it is quite common for agencies and companies to have trouble measuring their work. As a team of individuals that not only create written and visual products but also implement those products in strategic ways, it is not easy to quantify work. Of course – you can’t just measure the work that you do for clients or customers. You have to measure it in ways that make sense to people other than yourself!

Project management systems can help you sort through your countless tasks, duties, or responsibilities to produce an organized, collaborative, and transparent workspace. Start making sense to your clients or internal team members by simplifying your language with a digital solution.

Project Management Systems benefits

Promotion of Collaboration for Your Agency

With the high level of accessibility that project management systems deliver, all of the clients and employees that you need can finally work together. This forms a constant dependency on each other to maintain progress on projects and accounts. In other words: you have a concrete way to make your team actually work in coordination.

This kind of collaboration applies not just to your internal staff but also clients and external contacts. Approvals, recommendations, and reports are easily transferred and delivered to the right people. Overall, a project management system is closely tied to interdepartmental relations. It has the capability to help different people in different places do the same work that needs to be completed.

How Project Management Systems better your business

Accountability for Effects on Your Time & Money

A digital workspace that is maintained by a project management system offers visibility towards actual work and tasks being done. This form of digital workspace allows for the tracking of time, submitted documents, and completed duties. Gain visibility towards your work’s the effect on your budget and resources.

An example: Creative needs to produce a video that promotes DaBrian Marketing’s new white paper. But, Creative has spent past two work days designing that same white paper! Clearly, some re-strategizing is necessary to account for a much smaller timeframe.

the benefits of project management systems

Transparency to See What Agencies Do for You

By now it should be clear that a project management system can deliver profitable results for agencies – based upon improved internal functions. But, what about the external functions of those agencies?

For external contacts and clients: you can see and access the records of work that has been done for your account. Know the status of your hired agency’s progress towards completion or the launch of your new product. Benefit from increased efficiency through easy-to-use digital forms that connect you with the actual individuals that do your account’s work. Take the worry out of your schedule; utilize a simplified digital process to communicate with your hired agency.

Keep Track of What You Do, Keep Making Progress

Overall, a project management system operates as a kind of digital tracking device. Know who is involved, what is happening, and when your work is completed. You’ll be surprised by how much this can impact your bottom line. As I like to say around the office – it all ties together.

Need Help Finding the Right Project Management System for Your Team?

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