How Hubspot can help you manage (and keep) your customers
Good customer management is all about the personal touch. But good customer data management is a different kettle of fish altogether. And when it comes to customer data management, it helps to have the right tools at hand.
If you’re a professional services business looking for ways to deliver more personalised customer experiences, engage with customers on a deeper level, or get more from your customer data, you’ve probably come across the term ‘CRM’.
A CRM solution can completely overhaul the way you connect with your customers and significantly boost your company’s growth in the process.
But it’s not magic; it’s all about the data. In this article, we’ll outline everything you need to know about implementing a CRM, from what it does to the advantages those three humble letters can deliver for your business.
What exactly is a CRM?
We’ll start by laying some groundwork: What is a CRM, and why might you need one?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and a CRM solution does pretty much what it says on the tin. Essentially, a CRM is a piece of software that helps businesses manage and improve their interactions with customers. Think of it as a central hub where you store and organise information about your customers, from their contact details to their purchase history and interactions with your company.
A CRM solution provides your business with tools and features that help you:
Centralise customer information so all your customer data is in one place, making it easy to access and share across your team
Improve communication ensuring everyone is on the same page about customer needs and preferences
Enhance sales by helping you identify sales opportunities, track deals, and automate tasks to boost the efficiency of your sales and marketing efforts
Deliver better customer service by offering a comprehensive view of customers and enabling you to offer personalised support and resolve issues quickly
Increase customer loyalty and build stronger customer relationships by helping you understand their needs and preferences
A good CRM helps businesses build lasting relationships with their customers. By providing both useful tools and actionable insights, a CRM can empower a company to improve its customer satisfaction levels and drive sustainable growth.
How does a CRM help with customer data management?
According to research, using a CRM system can boost customer retention rates by 27%, with 75% of sales managers saying that implementing a CRM has helped increase sales.
If you’ve never used a CRM before, you might be saying to yourself: “Okay, but how?” Once again, the foundation of this success comes down to data.
A CRM is like a digital filing cabinet for your customers, designed to collect, store, and organise all the information you have about them in a single, accessible place. Pulling together all this data into one place not only gives you a more complete view of your customers and your engagements with them, but it also means you can do all kinds of analysis on that data to help make decisions that drive growth.
Here are just some of the things CRM can do with customer data and how it helps:
Centralised data storage: Instead of having customer information scattered across emails, spreadsheets, or different systems, a CRM brings it all together. Having all this data in one place reduces duplication (of both data and efforts) and makes sure everyone has access to the same accurate information.
No more embarrassing conversations like reaching out to a potential customer only to find your colleague already spoke to them last week.
Data organisation: CRMs allow you to categorise and segment customer data based on various criteria, like demographics, purchase history, and engagement levels. This segmentation of customers means you can provide more personalised experiences and target your sales and marketing efforts more effectively. It also allows you to dig into customer data and identify patterns, trends, and new opportunities.
For instance, by segmenting customer data by business size and industry, you could learn what kind of services customers in that segment are most interested in, and then create tailored marketing campaigns that focus on selling that specific service to potential customers in that segment.
Data analysis: By collating and organising customer data, CRMs give you access to invaluable insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and needs—information that can then be used to make data-driven changes that improve your marketing, sales, and customer service strategies.
Data cleansing and accuracy: Many CRMs have built-in features to clean up and standardise your data, ensuring it's accurate, consistent, and of a high enough quality that you can thoroughly analyse it and gain in-depth insights.
Data security: With features like encryption, access controls, and data backups baked in, storing your customer data in a CRM makes it easier to maintain data security, protecting your customer information from unauthorised access and shielding your business from the potentially expensive and damaging consequences of a data breach.
The bottom line is that a CRM takes raw customer data and transforms it into actionable insights that can help you build stronger relationships, increase customer satisfaction, and drive business growth. Pretty nifty.
How HubSpot CRM helps manage customer relationships
Like the sound of a CRM? Wondering what a CRM could bring to your business? You might want to check out one of the leading platforms currently on the market.
A favourite among businesses of all shapes and sizes since 2006, HubSpot offers a suite of tools for marketing, sales, and customer service. Designed to help businesses attract, engage, and retain customers, the solution is famed for its user-friendly interface and comprehensive features—not least when it comes to customer data management.
HubSpot is packed with functionality that helps you better understand, connect with, and drive sales from your customers by tapping into data. Let’s take a look at some of these handy capabilities.
Contact Records: At the core of HubSpot's CRM is its Contact Record database, which allows you to store comprehensive information about your customers, including contact details, company information, purchase history, and preferences. You can also customise fields to fit your specific business needs.
Company Records: HubSpot also provides a place to store information about your customers' companies, such as industry, size, revenue, and website; particularly valuable for B2B and professional services businesses.
Deal Pipeline: This feature helps you follow opportunities from lead to close, and allows you to associate deals with specific contacts and companies or add details like deal stage, value, and closing date that help you keep track of the customer’s journey.
Properties: With the Properties feature, you can create bespoke properties to capture specific data points relevant to your business and create a more complete picture of your customers. You might create properties for customer lifetime value, preferred communication channels, or survey responses, for example; having this extra context means you can deliver more personalised communication and services.
Customisable Views and Reporting: There are plenty of reporting options in HubSpot that allow you to create custom views of your data and focus on specific segments or information, helping you examine customer data from all angles. HubSpot also offers super useful built-in reporting tools that mean you can get straight into analysing customer behaviour and performance metrics.
Key benefits of using HubSpot to manage customer relationships
HubSpot’s myriad of features add up to some serious benefits that can help you build strong relationships with your customers and make sure they keep coming back again and again.
HubSpot’s centralised hosting of customer data, for instance, gives you a comprehensive view of your customers, eliminating data silos and ensuring everyone in your organisation has access to the same information. And by streamlining sales processes, tracking deals, and automating tasks, HubSpot helps sales teams be more productive and close deals faster.
If a sales rep is working on closing a deal, for instance, they can use HubSpot's deal pipeline to track deal stages, set reminders for follow-ups, and automatically log calls and emails to help them stay organised and prioritise leads.
It can improve your customer service too. Giving your CX teams access to detailed customer history and preferences, HubSpot allows you to provide personalised support and resolve issues quickly, resulting in much happier customers.
On the marketing front, HubSpot offers marketing automation tools that help you nurture leads, tailor campaigns, and deliver targeted messages, boosting customer engagement and conversions.
Imagine that you want to nurture leads through the sales funnel, for example. Using HubSpot's workflow automation, you can create a series of emails, triggered based on lead behaviour, to deliver valuable, personalised content and move leads closer to conversion.
With its robust analytics and reporting capabilities, HubSpot also gives you the tools you need to measure the performance of your sales and marketing efforts, as well as the insights to guide decisions and improve your strategy.
Potentially the most impactful benefit HubSpot delivers, however, is its ability to boost customer retention. We all know that acquiring new customers is far more expensive than keeping the ones you already have, and with good customer data management, retaining customers long-term becomes that little bit easier.
Thanks to the personalised experiences, enhanced customer support, and in-depth data analysis it facilitates, HubSpot empowers your business to create a customer-centric approach that builds the kind of trust, loyalty, and long-term relationships that will make your customers want to stick with you long into the future.
Unlock the power of HubSpot CRM with help from Faben
As a HubSpot-certified agency partner, we can help you make the most of HubSpot, centralising your customer data, sales processes, and marketing efforts and taking your growth to new levels.
