What is CRM? A Guide to Customer Relationship Management

Originally Published at Hacker Toasts Media!!

A Guide to What is CRM? And Fresh Sales CRM VS Hubspot CRM[/caption]

A Guide to What is CRM? consists of the details of the facts of the CRM system and software. As well as a comparison of Fresh Sales CRM VS Hubspot CRM.

It’s very evident by now the most common word utilised by many business people in their daily routine of work is CRM. Be it small and medium to large enterprises.

But what is CRM? A most commonly used term in the industry yet we know little about it. In this article, we will discuss what is CRM and its usability and applications.

But also we will discuss the best CRM software to use for MSME and large enterprises. Comparing between the Fresh Sales and Hubspot CRM. Which is the best to use?

Table of Content — TOC

What is CRM?

How do CRMs work?

Features

*Contact Management
*Lead Management
*Customer Service Management
*Marketing Management
*Automation

Characteristics of a Great CRM System

*Simple Integration
*Ease of Accessibility
*Adaptability & Growth

Benefits of CRM:

*Sales efficiency
*Better Customer Services
*Team collaboration and better communication

Fresh Sales VS Hubspot CRM — Which is best?

Hubspot

Freshsales

Pricing and Features Overview

Key Features of Fresh Sales and Hubspot

Comparison between Fresh Sales & Hubspot

*Contact Management
*Record Management
*Lead Scoring
*Behaviour Analytics
*Email Campaigns
*Built-in phone
*Analytics
*Marketing Tools
*Support
*User Accessibility

Summary

What is CRM?

CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management. It is a tool, a strategy, a process that guides and is useful in maintaining customer data. Nonetheless, it all began from scribbling in notes and papers and then an advent shift towards a computerised system due to technology shift.

However, the shift was very much needed due to the high volume of data and its implications in serving instantly to customers, or prospects.

How do CRMs work?

Organizing a solid customer relationship is very essential, probably with a few numbers, one could easily maintain. But with hundreds, maybe thousands and millions of customers touchpoints, it is nearly as impossible to maintain it manually. This is the reason why CRM exists.

Customer Relations Management software (CRM) stores the customers’ information, their interactions, behaviour and analytics within a centralised database that is accessible to everyone and everywhere and anytime. It assists with the following:

Sales: Generate and assign leads, tag them, track your every customer in the sales cycle, view history and keep records of accounts and renewals.

Service: Track all sales and service records and resolve customer service incidents.

Marketing: Maintain your marketing campaigns, send targeted emails and qualify your leads. Some CRMs includes marketing automation functionality as well.

Analytics: View the trends, dive deep into the details of your analytics and see your pipeline and create customized reports for your analysis.

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image credit: salesforce

Features

Contact Management — A 360° View of Your Customers

Knowing your customer is knowing your profits. A relationship is a key benefactor to your business. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a massive and reliable tool for your business to maintain the records and tracks of customers, suppliers, leads, vendors, partners etc.

This facilitates you to store your contact details, email address and communication history, purchase history, case history, preferences, notes, documents, contracts, quotes, invoice and many more, providing you with a complete background and history of your relationships maintained.

As well as giving access to multiple users, realtime usability of the data anytime and anywhere.

Lead Management

In case you’re working closely on multiple deals or stakeholders within your pipeline, or have a big or complex sales cycle, monitoring every one of the details can be difficult. It can also lead to a loss of opportunity.

For this kind of situations, CRM comes in handy and plays a vital role in tracking your complete sales cycle. It provides you with the complete intel and view of your pipeline and to which you can efficiently manage and move your leads from one stage to another and lead them to the final cycle.

It also provides the users with a better understanding of how sales cycle, so that the users can make necessary changes and bring a change in their strategy. Enabling them to focus on what matters them the most.

Customer Service Management

It’s not just the acquisition of the customers or clients, but also the sustainability of its very important. A perfect CRM not only helps your business to acquire your leads or customers but also helps them in sustaining them.

Many CRM provides customer service tools for maintaining and escalating issues, tracking incidences and maintaining customers contracts and agreements. It can also be utilised as product expertise, tool for your team to resolve the issues of your customers, stored in the centralised database.

The customer service functionality in CRM, form a database of all your customers’ information which is stored accurately for your business and enables you efficient communication for your business.

Marketing Management

Isn’t it obvious you must be running parallelly a marketing campaign across several channels? If yes, then you must get out the benefit from CRM campaign management. It enables you to deploy the multi-phased marketing campaigns efficiently by targeting based on customer demographics, behaviour, purchase patterns, history and many more.

You can devise a strategic marketing campaign across several channels and nurture your new leads, attract new customers, create sales funnels, target niche or specific audience and cross-sell products and many more.

CRMs also allows email marketing campaign, that integrates with your contact database and helps you in targeting a specific audience. The best part is you can track and analyse all your marketing campaigns which will help you in taking right decisions.

It also allows you to optimize your campaign for mobile devices and allows you ad management and native targeting.

Automation

These workflow automation features can be as simple or complex as you need but are ultimately designed to save time, eliminate wasteful work and improve productivity.

CRM or Customer Relationship Management isn’t always about nurturing or creating relationships, but also it acts a huge time saver. CRM workflow eases your tedious and time taking tasks that your sales representatives, manager and other users do regularly.

It automates your works from sending reminders, to follow up messages, converting email sending to activities, scheduling alerts, analysing your websites visitors to leads and deploying the targeted marketing messages to the related customers.

This features can be as simple as to be a complex based on your needs and requirements, which is specifically designed to eliminate time junk and inefficiency.

Characteristics of a Great CRM System

Simple Integration

Instead of spending humongous time on doing the manual entry and transferring data to your existing CRM. A perfect CRM tool will allow you to import your data from different software and other third-party tools with ease. This way it eliminates manual data feed.

Ease of Accessibility

Irrespective of how extensive a CRM system would be, if it’s not user-friendly then it’s of no use. Users must understand and grasp the platform easily, with easy instructions and materials available to support. The idea and work of CRM are to run efficiently and be easily used by users.

Adaptability & Growth

The idea of business is always growing, whether it’s your employee’s size or your customer segment. In both the terms and perspective you require a CRM which doesn’t just fit your current requirement but also fits your future growth.

Benefits of CRM

Sales efficiency

From lead generation, to lead nurturing and maintaining the sales life cycle a CRM is a supportive tool for an organization to work smoothly. It eases your sales cycles and takes care of all the records and task. Which in turn you can focus more on your lead generation and sales activities. Thus, yielding more profit.

Better Customer Services

A CRM enables and facilitates the organization in serving better to its customers. Be it having related to product expertise or customer history details. It helps the organization better in serving the customer swiftly and reducing the time junk and customers dissatisfaction.

Team collaboration and better communication

In an organization, there would be multiple teams working on the project, and real-time access to it is very important for each to operate very efficiently. A CRM has a central database system, which is accessible to all.

Also, helping in better communication by providing team interaction facility within its platform. It also helps the managers and upper management to get keep a track record of it and maintain a quality check.

Summary

The above articles contain the details of CRM. As well as the best CRM available in the market to use.

At Hacker Toasts Media, we focus on the quality article and use cases for our readers. We empathise on experiments and possibilities of greater goods in the market. Thanks for reading our article. Till then you can enjoy our other articles.