What Is A CRM System And Why Should I Be Using It?

It's always better to retain a current customer than it is to sign up a new one. And to stay on top of this you need a powerful tool to manage these relationships. This is where a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system comes into play. Let's get you cracking on this, shall we?

Covered in this article

What Is A CRM System?
WHY Do I Need A CRM?
Advantages Of Having A CRM
How Do I Know If I Need A CRM System In Place?
Where Do I Sign Up For A CRM System?

Cool, But What Is A CRM System?

It’s a bit of software where you manage business relationships and keep information on people of interest, like potential and current clients. The idea is to drive retention and also grow sales.

It hosts all of your contacts’ details including emails, phone numbers and any correspondence you have with them. From emails to tasks and even invoices and a sales pipeline, a CRM can be the centre of your sales world. What’s more, the whole team can access the data in real-time and always be up-to-date.

Although a CRM is seen as a sales tool it can also be an essential tool for keeping in contact with your current customer base and building deeper relationships with them. From remembering their birthdays to keeping a secure but important record of the conversations you have, a CRM can be the extra memory you’ve always wanted.

Fair Enough But WHY Do I Need A CRM?

Let's cut to the chase here. If you’re managing more than 10 clients or customers and have a strong focus on marketing and networking or any plans to grow and you don't have a management system in place, things might become a bit dicey. 

Networking, marketing, and sales all generate interest and the need to follow up and without a system in place to help you and your team (if you have one) will maximise your chance of more business.

Forgetting to follow up, invoice, call, email or arrange another meeting could well lose you sales and clients – especially if your competition has a system geared up to do it all.

Business is still very much about building relationships and if you’re in sales and marketing then you’ll know this all too well. If you have a team, then you’ll also appreciate how powerful a CRM could be to your productivity and team relationships. Keeping the working conversations open and in a place that’s well organised could be the answer to your forgetful, mismanaged team or the bonus needed for your remote team members and even the welcome addition to managing internal processes and tasks.

Advantages Of Having A CRM In Place

The features that your CRM system offers will depend to an extent on which platform you opt for, but here are some general things that a good CRM system typically allows you to do:

Keep track of marketing and sales results, so that you can log exactly where and how you brought in a sale, the value of each lead or customer, how much you spent on a specific channel (and what the return was), and other relevant details. CRM systems can be useful for helping sales teams better understand their pipelines, and also improve forecasting for marketing teams by allowing them to gain more of an overview of the sales pipeline and process.

Store an overview of every kind of interaction with a customer, from customer service interactions to post-sale follow-ups, as well as preferences like whether a customer has opted in to receive weekly email updates. This allows all of the important information to easily be tracked, managed and updated, as well as accessed by all of the relevant teams.

Organise and send to a custom email or mailing list for a particular marketing or sales campaign. This can be a very time-consuming process without a dedicated CRM system, but CRM systems allow you to organise and create dedicated lists with very little effort.

Improve synergy between marketing and sales teams by allowing them to share details and interactions with each customer, enabling one to pick up seamlessly where the other left off and access all of the relevant background information. CRM systems also improve general communication across an organisation by simplifying the process of recording information about clients – and leave colleagues with more time to spend doing the actual marketing and selling that they excel at.

Automate various time-consuming tasks like contact management, lead management, and reporting (another very tedious thing to do manually) and integrate with other systems you might be used to manage business processes, like email systems, calendars or scheduling tools, project management tools, etc. Not every CRM system has to include automation, but more and more of them do as standard, and it can save a lot of time on various tasks if your CRM does offer automation.

How Do I Know If I Need A CRM System In Place?

Of course, the hard and fast would be to answer a simple question: "Do I have more clients than I can manage?" If it's a yes then you need one... like yesterday already. But let's flesh it out even more because the CRM rabbit hole goes much deeper than that. 

Scan through these seven points, if you tick any (or all) of them then it's time to get in touch with us - we will hook you up in no time. 

• You’re unable to keep up with the lead flow.
• Your customer data is hard to locate.
• You don’t know what your sales teams are up to.
• Your customer service is coming up short.
• You have valuable, long-term accounts you need to manage.
• Your reporting process takes too much time.
• You’re unsure about your path to growth.

If one or more of the above scenarios hit a little close to home, it’s time to take the next step and start looking for a CRM solution for your business. The ideal system will help you find more customers, win more deals, keep customers happier, and connect your entire company — priming your small business for big-time growth.

Where Do I Sign Up For A CRM System?

You're in luck! Velocity Media is BFF with the world's leading inbound marketing software developer Hubspot... and Hubspot has a pretty awesome CRM tool to boot.

With Hubspot's detailed reports on sales activity, productivity, and individual performance, you’ll never be in the dark about how your team is tracking toward quota, and you’ll have all the data you need to coach your team to success.