CRMs, are they really for us?

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So before anyone comes in or the phone decides to rang, let's jump on with today's episode. CRMs are they really for us? So we've recently done a blog post and we've kind of turned it on its head around CRMs and given you five reasons, you don't need a CRM in 2023 I love this post, Tilly has written it and really kind of captured a great idea of giving you all the reasons why you don't need a CRM.

So before you think, oh, amazing, I knew I didn't need one, let me just read a few of those out to you. Firstly, you're an Excel warrior, CRMs collate all of your customer data in one central location, but for some of you hardcore Excellers, this is just too easy. Basically what we're trying to say is if you're happy with Excel, stick with Excel, but of course, Excel doesn't have all of the connections. It's not going to keep all your data up to date constantly.

This is a very much a manual process, and this is where CRMs can really help out. So, imagine you are trying to kind of keep up with a busy schedule. You're not going to keep your Excel up to date. We've all used Excel.

It was something the, which our business started off with, we had all of our customers in there, we had all of their contact details, we had their email addresses, we had telephone numbers, we had their street address, but, it was about where it stopped, we didn't keep that data up to date. So pretty much from the moment we put it in, it was starting to be out of date and we weren't keeping up with it in any way.

So any changes that were happening with the client, we certainly weren't tracking them or knowing that that was happening. Whereas the CRM is really clever in that regard to CRM is keeping all of your customer's information in one place, but also keeping it up to date. It may be plugging into a number of different other software or services that you use, which is also keeping that information updated constantly.

For example, if somebody is booking a meeting with you and you've set up that this meeting's coming along, then that is automatically going to be captured within the CRM so you know, you've got a meeting with Bob coming up next week and it's in your calendar, but it's actually also in the CRM. So you can track these touch points of how many interactions you've had with a customer.

So obviously we are very biased with HubSpot, we use HubSpot, but for me personally, I think it is one of the best CRMs that is out there purely from a usability factor. It's really simple to use and makes my life really easy when I'm running a business. To give you a really good example of how HubSpot works, I can email somebody and I'll do that through Gmail, through outlook, you know, through a standard email client.

Now, if the person I'm emailing isn't already on our CRM, it will actually create that person. So let's say it is Sheila at abc tech.com, it's going to create Sheila on our CRM and also log that I've sent her an email. That's clever in itself, it's already created this contact which has saved me a job. But what it will also do is pick up that abc tech.com isn't a Gmail, it's not a Hotmail so it's realized that this is actually a company.

So it's going to also create what's called a company record and associate Sheila with that company. If there is also any information around abc tech.com on the tinter web in any way, then it will also go and grab all of this information and populate the company record with that information.

So through me, just sending an email HubSpot's gone around and it's created a contact and it's populated that contact with some information, but it's also created a company and try to grab all of the information that it possibly can that is in the public domain about that company and also populated that as well.

So in terms of manually having to do things, if I was using Excel, I would have had to remember to go and add Sheila to our Excel and create it and that's a big time-saving trick already taken out because it's done for me. Now if Sheila is already on our CRM, then all it does is it just adds that email to the timeline, so it's updating that details for me. It knows that I've sent an email to Sheila and when I've done it.

So, these little things that CRMs can do keeps everything speedier in terms of what I need to know. Now let's take that action of imagining that that Sheila sent us an email, okay and she's had an issue and it was something that she needs done by the end of the week. So this needs to be done by Friday, she's emailed the studio at studio@hellomethod.co.uk. She's emailed our main inbox and without a CRM somebody might pick it up today and do the job.

Okay, then they might email Sheila back personally and say Sheila, this has all been done, all sorted. She's happy she's emailed back, then in a couple of days time, somebody might have been out the office. So tomorrow somebody might've come in, they'll see this email and this happens a lot with group emails. They will see the emails come in from Sheila and they will jump on it and think shoot this should have been done yesterday.

I'm just going to drop Sheila an email and say Sheila I'm so sorry I'll work on it today and I will make sure that comes back to you before the end of the week, Sheila's then going to respond actually, you know, this is already been taken care of one of your colleagues has done it for us, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of a sudden it's a bit awkward.

Now with a CRM it's automatically going to come in, it's automatically going to be added to Sheila's record and anybody who picks it up is also going to have updated that record just through emailing them back through taking the job. Now, obviously you're going to have task management systems, which are going to take the actual job away from a CRM.

But in this instance, whoever came in the next day, would've automatically seen that that email has been responded to and taken care of and it's off their list that they can automatically go on to the next task that they might have in place. So Excel really isn't going to win in anything like that, it's very static. It's going to have no updates and it's really not keeping you up to date now there's a lot of other CRMs that don't do some of these things that HubSpot do.

One of the things that everybody says to us initially, as you know, well HubSpot is expensive, but it's saving you so much time with everything that it's doing and all the tools that it possesses. That actually time is, is sometimes more important than that money and we've always said that, you know, treat HubSpot as a member of staff almost, that's their wages. And then what it does is it always delivers. Now HubSpot's pricing is also sometimes quite confusing.

But you can start with the free CRM. My mum uses the CRM and doesn't pay for any of the tools and she's quite happy with that and that works for her. So, also bear that in mind that it can grow with you and it can grow with your company. Also, obviously going back to this article is there's some other great points where you would a point four, for example, and I will drop the link to this blog in the show notes so you can obviously go and read it.

You'd rather manually track leads CRMs have built in automation technology that allows you to prioritize leads, which means these systems will allow you to figure out which leads to work on first, meaning you can organize your schedule logically, plus you'll be able to spend time generating some engaging content for particular leads reflected by the data you've collected. Does the lead automation system sound too robotic to you?

If you'd rather just pick and choose randomized leads to engage with, depending on how you're feeling that day, then do what works for you. Again, this is all about the automation that goes into this. So you can have, what's called a HubSpot score or a lead scoring system. For example, if they are downloading content from your website, or if they've engaged with social media, you can give them points for different actions that they've done.

This will then allow you to completely understand how this lead is weighted over another lead. So if you've got 10 leads that you need to follow up with, you can automatically order that list by, by a weighted score. So people have been interacting with the company more, or been doing more, more of these points and gaining more of these points. You're going to obviously want to phone those people first they're, they're much more engaged than somebody who doesn't have so many points.

We also within a CRM can actually categorize who people are and where they are in, what's called a life cycle. So in HubSpot's terms and following that terminology, you start off as a subscriber, which is probably somebody who is just subscribed to your blog. They're not really actively interested in buying from you, but they are maybe just subscribe to the blog.

Next up from a subscriber, you have a lead now, lead is traditionally somebody who you've emailed or somebody who's maybe filled in a contact form that is a lead. We then go through to a marketing qualified lead or an MQL, an MQL is probably somebody who has been to an event maybe, or downloaded a PDF from your website. That's a typical marketing qualified lead.

A sales qualified lead or SQL, is somebody who marketing have flagged as a really good contact for sales to, to talk to and to pick up with. Now this might be that. They've engaged a huge amount with marketing, marketing may have touched base with them in some way, but they've done a lot of interaction with the company backwards and forwards and now's the time for sales to step in and talk to this person. From an SQL, would it be an opportunity?

So an opportunity is somebody who sales have spoken to and who has had a maybe an invoice raised sorry, maybe a quote raised, you've spoken to them and they're interested and you've sent a proposal or a quote back to them. That's a typical opportunity. Next up is a customer, and I'm doing this all from the top of my head so hopefully hitting them all, but next up is a customer. Nice and easy, somebody who's bought from you, somebody who has paid for your services.

From my customer is what's HubSpot call and evangelists, not my favorite word in the world, but an evangelist is somebody who is kind of the gold standard of customer. So somebody who has bought from you, but who was also singing your praises to other people. So it's that perfect customer really who you have, you've sold to, they're loving what you're doing, and they're mentioning your services to other people and bringing you more business.

And then you have other which kind of categorizes staff members, freelancers, anybody kind of who falls outside that lifecycle stage. So why is that important? Well, Lifecycle stages can easily categorize your contacts.

So for example, I might for one day one to bring up all of the opportunities in, let's say a list who, so opportunities are people who've sent quotes to, so I want to see all of those opportunities who we haven't spoken to in six months, you know, why haven't we spoken to the opportunities that we have gone through all of this marketing, all of this sales, but we haven't turned them into a customer. You know, who are they and why aren't they a customer?

And we can bring up a list or a report and really dig down into that data. The same way we might be launching a new product. We don't really want to send it to everybody, so who are we going to send that to? Well, evangelists they're perfect they love us already, so we can really use those as a test ground to send this, this product information to maybe we want to send them a feedback form. Maybe we want to kind of get their feedback on something that we're going to launch.

They're going to be the perfect people to, to send that information to. We could then send it to customers, customers if we're looking to sell other services or we've added a new service to our business then that's ideal to send that to customers. You know, did you know that we are now introducing this or we've added a new product,, did you know we've got this new product? Do you want to learn more about this product?

Book in with us it's a really easy way to understand where everybody is in that lifecycle stage and to understand how to target people and within HubSpot and obviously other CRMs we can create lists or we can segment, and you'll hear segmentation a lot around CRMs. We can segment our data to understand who these people are and how we can actually get to them or send them that information. So, why else do you need a CRM? Well, you know, there are loads of CRMs out there.

As I said, we are super biased with HubSpot and that all comes down to usability. I deal with a lot of CRMs or some of our clients use other CRMs, but apart from HubSpot, I obviously don't like those clients as much, that's a lie. But obviously HubSpot is just easier to use from our point of view. I've always found it really easy and it seems to fit with a good 90% of the businesses that we deal with, it's software it's tools work for that organization.

So that allows us to really build some nice automation in terms of marketing or in terms of the sales around what we want to achieve for that business and that's why we're quite wedded to it. Because it allows us to look good for our clients you know we're suddenly organizing their whole business from marketing leads coming in, right into servicing current customers who might have support tickets, you know, all of that can be done within HubSpot and it's also one central central place.

Now HubSpot, when it was originally built, didn't like the idea of having these third parties plugging into it thought that it could do everything and it can't. So, there were lots of integrations as well that you can integrate in, into, into HubSpot or into the CRM. Allowing you to grab more information. So that's essentially what we want, we want one central place to understand everything around our customer everything that's going, right.

Everything that's going wrong and everything that's happening to them we want to know so we can make sure that we are on the ball. There were loads of nice things around HubSpot that are built in, but a lot of it isn't out of the box necessarily. So it's the one kind of negative in terms of a CRM, you know, it takes time to get going so I talk a lot about automation, automation is one of my loves.

Because it is saving me time and it saves our clients a huge amount of time and it keeps data clean. Now that doesn't happen overnight, you can't just say right, we're going to go with HubSpot off we go. Why aren't we seeing all of this clean data? Why have we still got old contacts in here? Why have we got old data in here? Well, that's not going to happen overnight. We work with you to understand what is happening within your organization and understand where the automation comes in.

Everybody is slightly different, everybody has different processes within their business, the sooner we can understand those, the quicker we can build it in. But again, it's not something that is going to happen as soon as you adopt a newer CRM. The CRM, isn't going to fix everything overnight but it's certainly going to give you a lot of wins overnight, having all of that data in a transparent place that you can deal with it.

One probably maybe final thing unless I carry on reading through some of these blogs that I've got in front of me, but at the moment, one thing that I think stands out is GDPR obviously.

We are holding people's data and if we are using Excel and contacts and you know, all of these other places, which are more of a manual place, G drive or whatever it might be and we're holding these documents on our contacts, then when somebody comes to us and says, actually I want to unsubscribe, then we're probably gonna have to go to, I don't know, MailChimp and remove them from the subscription list.

We're then going to have to make sure that we go to Excel and remove them from there, we're going to have to go to a number, different places and it's actually a lot of work. Whereas with HubSpot, they can not only control their own data so they can say, actually I want it to be removed or what do you have on me and we can quite quickly give them that because it's all in one place and it's all in one central place, central location.

But they can have control over that as well, so let's take subscriptions. We all get marketing through our inbox all day long and what you can do is basically manage those subscriptions. So traditionally you have a one-to-one subscription, which is me emailing Sheila, for example, as earlier, you know, for me to email Sheila, I have to have her permission to be able to email her that's one-to-one. We then might have a marketing, a general marketing subscription.

So that is marketing information that's going out from Method to our client base or to our contact base. You then might have a newsletter so this is very much blog a newsletter that is going out at a certain frequency to that person as well. So you tend to have those, but you might have service ones as well around actually helping that client. Do what they need to do, you know, to perform what you need to do. They have to have a service subscription as well.

So there's four examples, but imagine giving the contact their own make-up of that. So they could all of a sudden, well, I just don't want the newsletter, but I'm happy with marketing and obviously I want the one-to-one or the service, but they can customize what they receive and when they receive it at what it actually is for.

So all of a sudden you're giving power to them, which again means you don't have to constantly make sure that your email lists are up to date or making sure that when people email, they're not emailing with that stupid thing, which drives me mad, which is you have to email us back with unsubscribed and the subject line and things like that. That that's so old fashioned and why should I emailed you when I don't want you to email me?

One thing on the back of that is they usually email you back saying, you sure. And that drives me insane give them the power to be able to do what they want to do with that data. I'm not a flip side of that, I dunno going slightly off CRMs here, but the whole thing is behind the scenes. If they're not interested, don't try and keep them there because that is certainly gonna make them more, more likely to be less interested.

So, so let them control that data and remove what they want and I think, you know, things around GDPR are handled really, really well within HubSpot. It won't actually let you email somebody unless you've given them a subscription. It won't let you send the marketing email out even if they're in the list that we'll just stop it and say, no, hang on a minute they don't have a subscription. You haven't added it or they haven't, or they've removed it or it hasn't been added in the first place.

So yeah, but again, CRMs are going to free up your time. That's that's really what's key. Everybody within the business is going to have transparency that everybody's going to be able to see and dive in around people. You can log calls, you can log emails, you can log meetings. All of these things are taken care of within your CRM so you can truly understand what is going on with your contact.

So I think there's so much we can talk about, about CRMs but hopefully that kind of gives you a general overview. We obviously have a, a HubSpot demo that you can do, which is with me and I can run through that with you and kind of just if you're really undecided and say, I'm not sure if it's for us or maybe you've been looking at it for a while and just want to kind of run through it with somebody who knows what they're talking about. Then we have a resource which is a HubSpot demo.

You book a demo with me, it's actually through HubSpot that you book the time with me on my calendar and that will that will send you a meeting link and then I can go through some questions with you, see what you're trying to look for? And just really just show you the ropes to see if it's something for you. As I said, it's not for everybody hubSpot doesn't suit everybody.

I think everybody should have a CRM, every company needs a CRM, get it off Excel, get it into a CRM, but at least this will show you some of the benefits of why and then obviously we can talk through some of your issues or some of the things that you want to gain out of it. So that's, that's one thing. So there you have it. Look, I'll drop all of the links that we've discussed today, the blog into why you don't need a CRM.

I will drop through the link to a, to book a HubSpot demo with me all at the bottom. And that I think will help, help you kind of make your own decisions and there's a lot of information in there. I think because we've, there's so much within CRMs, we're probably going to carry this theme on for a bit, maybe interject it with some of the interviews that we've got coming up.

And maybe give you some, some quick wins around HubSpot, but, if you're using HubSpot, let us know what you think, let us know any of the problems that you're having with it. Or if you're using another CRM, you know, come back to us saying, well, I actually love this because and let us know what features you love about it. And you know we love tech. We love people finding solutions for their company and that's what it's about here.

You know, we're all about helping you guys grow through our experience, but that can only be improved with you guys asking us questions and telling us what you think about, about your CRMs or HubSpot. If you've enjoyed this podcast, if it's helped, then obviously subscribe, make sure you're getting all of those notifications when a new episode is available and also leave us a review wherever you listen to this pod, look, it really does help.

We're not one of the biggest podcasts we try and do our best. But we're gaining listeners every month, which is great. But please do leave us a review because at the moment that really, does help us get up through those listings and get to more people, which is what we want to do. Also remember to drop us any comments, if you want any questions answered about CRMs, or if you want to give us any more information about CRMs, then please drop it to us on our email podcast@hellomethod.co.uk.

That's it for this episode thanks for listening,, and we'll catch you next time.