A Career in Sales: The Ultimate Guide

This CRM best practices guide will walk you through how to evaluate a CRM, from how it will help your business and how to map your needs to core features. By the end of the guide, you'll know how to choose the best CRM for your business needs.

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• What is CRM?
• What are the benefits of CRM?
• Does my company need a CRM?
• Core CRM Features
• Getting Started with HubSpot CM+RM

What is CRM?

CRM, or customer relationship management, is a strategy companies use to track customer relationships from pre- to post-sale. A CRM system is software that stores information on client and prospect interactions with employees.

Marketing and Sales touchpoints (including email, phone, website, live chat, and social media) are tracked, providing customer-facing employees with detailed context on a client’s activity and feedback.

What are the benefits of CRM?

The benefit of having a CRM system is having a central database for all customer information.

A business’s most valuable and important asset is its customer base. At many companies, knowledge about customers is stored in many places — the CEO’s brain, a sales rep’s inbox, an accountant’s records, or even a spreadsheet.

The trouble with the approach outlined above is that as your company grows, it’ll become harder for your sales team to find information about customers and prospects. Sales processes become time-consuming and frustrating.

As a result, your customers suffer and so does your team. CRM systems are designed to solve these problems. By organizing all lead and customer information in one place and automating data entry, CRM software makes it easy to run the sales process smoothly.

Below is a view of how a CRM dashboard displays deal forecasts, sales pipeline, and deals closed against quota for a given month.

Does my company need a CRM?

Any company that wants to maintain a relationship with its customers will benefit from using a CRM system. Two types of companies that see the most benefit are:

• B2B companies that track leads across longer, consultative sales cycles and through upgrade paths (for example, software companies, agencies, or recruiting firms)
• Considered-purchase B2C companies (for example, realtors, financial services, or landscaping services)

The questions you should ask yourself when evaluating your need for a CRM system are:

• Do I need records of information about prospects and customers?
• Does that information live in many different places?
• Is it becoming difficult to manage my data?
• Do my customers regularly interact with multiple people on my team?
• Do I need a better way to measure my sales team’s productivity?
• Is my team getting slowed down because they have to jump between different places to find lead or customer data?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the questions above, your business could benefit from a CRM system. Adopting one sooner rather than later will help you avoid frustration and save you future headaches.

Core CRM Features

The core features of a CRM system include:

• Contact management. CRM systems provide a searchable database to store customer and prospect information and relevant documents.
• Pipeline management and sales forecasting. Your CRM should make it easy to visualize your entire sales pipeline as well as move deals from one sales process stage to another. No more mental math to figure out what’s closing this month.
• Reporting and analytics. Sales leaders can use their CRM to track their team’s activity and revenue growth to guide team coaching and sales forecasting.
• Process standardization. CRMs help standardize business processes through unified task lists, calendars, alerts, and templates.

Other features a CRM system may have include:

• Email integration. A CRM that integrates with your current email client can automatically log prospect interactions and pull other useful context right into your inbox. This integration eliminates a good portion of manual data entry and is a large factor in whether your sales team will actually use the CRM.

Getting Started with HubSpot CM+RM

Click below to get started with HubSpot CRM. Once you create an account, we’ll walk you through the necessary steps to get set up and start seeing the benefits of a CRM immediately.

The first steps & best practices to successfully implementing a CRM are:

• Migrate your existing data (whether from a spreadsheet or another database)
• Import contacts from your current database or spreadsheet
• Invite your sales team to the CRM system
• Migrate your existing data (whether from a spreadsheet or another database)
• Migrate your existing data (whether from a spreadsheet or another database)

Other features a CRM system may have include: