Sandy Bassi
When it comes to choosing the right CRM system for your building products company, it’s important to understand the capabilities you’ll receive from your chosen CRM system.
Read on to discover if a CRM system is right for you.
In this blog, we will cover:
- What Is A CRM System?
- Key CRM Features To Utilise
- What Are The Benefits Of Having A CRM System?
- Why Did A CRM System Have A Bad Reputation?
- Improving Efficiency And Productivity With A CRM
- What CRM Systems Are Out There?
- Using A CRM System To Improve Your Customer's Experience
- How To Implement A CRM System
- Conclusion
What Is A CRM System?
So, what is CRM all about? You’ve probably heard this term time and time again amongst the list of jargon you hear daily. But a CRM system is much more than just another piece of jargon.
A high-quality CRM (Customer Relationship Management) can empower you and your building products business to understand your customers, sales data and marketing like never before.
Long gone are them lengthy spreadsheets with data that are scattered from inboxes, filing cabinets, and pieces of paper.
A CRM system keeps your data in one place.
By centralising your data, you can drive your sales, marketing, and customer services to help deliver a better experience to your customers.
It will allow you to keep track of everything you need to build greater and more productive relationships with all your clients and specifiers.
With marketing automation, a CRM system would not be complete. For example, a modern-day CRM system uses marketing automation software for campaign management and lead generation.
CRM automation refers to the CRM system’s ability to automate repetitive, manual tasks. This allows you to enhance and streamline productivity within your construction marketing.
You’ll be able to learn more about them, their needs, desires and how best to interact with them.
Read more here: What Is A CRM System & Do I Need It?
Key CRM Features To Utilise
Apart from core features such as - contact management, interaction tracking and lead management; there are must-have features that can transform your construction marketing and reduce the workload for you and your team.
These key features involve - workflows, pipeline management, measuring return on investment (ROI), customisation, and customer support.
Automation Workflows
Make your life easier by automating your workflows. You’ll need CRM software that allows you to set-up custom rules and sales information to drive productivity.
Ultimately, your workflow will mean you can automate simple and complex business processes based on specific triggers you’ve set.
It works well for your sales team too. You can even send follow-up reminders for your team to call potential prospects back – boosting your lead generation.
View Your Construction Sales Pipeline
Wouldn’t it be great to visually see an overview of your sales pipeline with updates and the progress of each stage in the sales funnel?
If you don’t have a sales funnel, this feature is not one to go without. With this, you can have a holistic view of your whole funnel to keep your prospects in one place.
With this feature, you’ll have access to view your deal stages and keep track of how many deals each of your staff members receive.
Measuring Return On Investment
Customisation features are varied and dependent on your CRM system. For the most part, you’d want to create:
- Custom entities, fields, and forms
- Modify dashboards
- Customise workflow logic
- Use your branding throughout features
Another thing to keep in mind is third-party integration. With customisation, you’ll want the capability to keep everything in one place to drive your building product company further.
Customer Support
If you’re new to a CRM system, looking into your CRM’s customer support is essential. This feature will allow you to have guidance on the support you’ll need to fully understand how to use your new CRM.
Some CRMs’ like HubSpot offer online learning and training so you can watch online videos and receive certificates on certain modules.
Find out more here: Top 5 CRM Features To Utilise For Your Building Products Business
What Are The Benefits Of Having A CRM System?
Let’s go and delve into the benefits of a CRM system, to find out why they’re important to your building products business and your overall construction marketing.
A High-Quality CRM Provides Efficiency
Initially, CRM systems can become time-consuming because it involves adding data, records, and contacts.
Once this is done and your data is integrated with your emails and website – your records will be enhanced automatically.
When a new contact fills in a form for a content download or enquiry form, their company information such as name, size and contact number will get pulled through automatically.
Pushing efficiency, as you’ll have the repetitive, admin tasks covered and more time to streamline your efforts.
Improves Relationships
When integration is complete, you’ll be able to improve your relationships with your customers and contacts by essentially understanding how they interact with your company.
You’ll receive data on how many webpages your prospect has visited, how many times they’ve viewed that page and a live notification when they’re browsing.
You can also see when a prospect has opened an email even after you’ve sent it.
This not only gives you a huge insight for sales purposes but allows you to interact with your contacts at the right time. This could be the difference between winning or losing a sale.
A CRM Can Be Free
A CRM system can cost you a total of £0. Of course, different packages offer more features and deeper insights and tools. However, there is so much you can do with a free CRM.
Just some of the tools included on the free version are:
- Reporting dashboard
- Company insights
- Tracking deals
- Email tracking
- Meeting scheduling
- A website live chat
Find out more here: The 5 Benefits Of Using A CRM System For Construction Marketing
Why Did A CRM System Have A Bad Reputation?
Have you felt as if a CRM system will not cater to your unique goals or help your business reach your goals and ROI? Maybe you feel as if a CRM system isn’t useful.
Well, you’re not alone, a CRM system has suffered from having a negative reputation. Read on to find out why…
The Consequences Of Bad Data
With all CRM systems, they involve scoping out key features you’ll need, cleaning your data, and finally migrating and implementing data into your new CRM system.
It’s important to keep note that when this goes wrong and the right data isn’t cleaned or implemented - a CRM won’t work as well.
For example, if you contact inactive emails or contacts in the wrong list your bounce rate will be high, and you could risk your emails going into customer’s junk.
Difficult User Adoption
This refers to how easy and user friendly your system is to use. Complex CRM systems gain negative reputations simply because they’re not user friendly.
If this happens, you’ll waste your time by putting in more hours in learning understand the features so you may end up giving up and not using your CRM to its full potential.
A CRM system that prides itself for its ease of use is HubSpot. The best part about HubSpot is that people use it and utilise its features because it’s uncomplicated to use.
Complex CRM system
Having a CRM system that’s too sizeable with its features will mean you’ll end up only using a fraction of what’s available – costing you money.
Or the opposite and having a CRM system that’s too small and doesn’t cater to the features you’d want to use.
It’s important to do your research and find the best CRM packages for your construction company.
It’s good practice to utilise free packages first to have an insight into what your construction business could achieve.
Some systems offer tailored packages so you can alter your CRM system to your needs, ensuring you’re getting value for money to grow your building product company further.
Find out more here:
- Why Do CRM Systems Have A Bad Reputation?
- 5 Ways To Grow Your Building Product Company With A CRM System
- How To Scope Out Your CRM Requirements For Your Construction Marketing
Improving Efficiency And Productivity With A CRM
“Without a CRM system, 79% of all marketing leads are never converted to sales.” (MarketingSherpa). This stat showcases the importance of CRM when it comes to driving efficiency.
Centralise Your Construction Marketing
With CRM systems you can store your data in one place. A study by Forbes reveals that only 34% of executives feel like they have a single view of their buyers.
With data scattered across departments, you’re causing a disintegrated view of your customer.
Initially, you’ll need to migrate your data, this will provide you with a complete view of your customer database, backed up with metrics on how well these customers are interacting with your building product company.
Therefore, you’ll understand your marketing information by viewing how well potential customers are interacting with your website, social media and emails.
Use Automation To Save Time
Automation can save you a lot of time and eliminate those repetitive admin tasks that you probably dread doing. This then allows you to improve and streamline productivity.
Doing the hard work for you to enhance efficiency and allows you to spend your time driving growth for your construction marketing.
Some examples of using automation are:
Emails – creating email sequences that send emails depending on how they’ve interacted with your first email
Social Media - Automating your social media by scheduling posts in bulk. This takes the strain away from you if you happen to forget.
Find out more here:
- Improving Efficiency In Your Building Products Business With A CRM
- Increase Productivity With A CRM System
- Using A CRM System To Automate Your Construction Marketing
Best CRM Systems Are Out There?
Here, I’ll list 5 CRM systems so you can decide which system best suits you.
#1 HubSpot
HubSpot is a well-liked CRM system and it’s popular for its marketing automation capabilities. HubSpot is our CRM of choice for ourselves and our clients. Its a CRM built for marketing and sales teams, by marketing and sales experts. As a result, it directly solves the challenges experienced by millions of businesses around the world
HubSpot offers abilities for marketing, sales, CRM, and customer service. It has benefits of being easy to use and being user friendly, so anyone can use this powerful tool successfully.
It also has great customer service, so you’re by no means left alone with Hubspot. There’s always a representative available to give you a helping hand.
Read our top 25 HUBSPOT FEATURES YOU SHOULD USE IN 2022
#2 SalesForce
Salesforce is a cloud computing service that specialises in customer relationship management (CRM). Salesforce's services allow businesses to use cloud technology to better connect with customers, partners and potential customers.
With SalesForce you can quickly set up sequences and integrate with other apps.
#3 Zoho
Zoho is an on-demand CRM software designed to manage sales, contacts, marketing, and customer services.
It’s easy and straightforward to use and great for aligning sales and marketing. It’s also compatible with other Zoho apps, however, you’ll need to implement these Zoho tools initially.
Find out more here: 5 CRM Systems Building Product Companies Should Consider
Using A CRM System To Improve Your Customer's Experience
One of the main advantages of a CRM system for your construction marketing is improving your customer’s experience.
Offering a great customer experience is key to your building products business because it boosts customer satisfaction and therefore, increases customer loyalty.
This in turn will provide you with a competitive advantage so you can increase sales.
Learn More About Your Customers
With features such as dashboards, you can visually view your customer information in-depth.
Learning as much as you possibly can about your customers is key and it can be made easy with having a CRM system in place. With this information, you can improve your building product customers.
By viewing how your customers interact and how engaged they are, you can work to meet their needs and target them effectively.
Personalise Communications
Did you know that 62% of customers open emails with a personalised subject line? Personalisation is huge and can greatly impact your construction customer’s experience positively.
CRM system’s like HubSpot provides you with the ability to personalise the emails you send with allowing you to automatically input a contact’s first name.
This will work to build an instant connection with your building product business and the customers opening the email. Therefore, increasing open rates of your emails.
Find out more here: Using A CRM System To Improve Your Customer's Experience
How To Implement A CRM System
Implementing your new CRM system can become tricky. Some people believe that the pain of switching or implementing a new CRM system can outweigh the benefits that can be gained.
However, we hope to make it easier for you. Once your data is scoped out you can go on to implement data migration, integration and user training.
Data Migration
Data migration involves migrating your current data into your new CRM system, this can be either from a spreadsheet or from a different CRM system.
The key for effective data migration is by having ‘clean’, high-quality data that brings extensive data for you and your construction staff.
Data cleaning or cleansing is the process of identifying and eliminating incorrect, inaccurate, or insufficient records from your database and contacts.
CRM Data Integration
The next step is data integration. This is the process of building and retaining the synchronisation of data between your old CRM system (or your spreadsheets) and your new CRM system.
With clean data, you can ensure peace of mind that you’re taking full advantage of your new CRM system for its full abilities.
User Training
With your data being cleaned and integrated into your new CRM system, you want to take full advantage, right? With the correct user training, you and your team will be up to speed in no time.
This should be started with a good training plan, so check out what training platform your system can offer you.
For example, HubSpot offers HubSpot Academy that delivers quick, practical courses to complete certificates so you and your construction team can learn everything you’ll need to know about your new HubSpot CRM.
Find out more here: How To Implement A CRM Into Your Building Product Business
Conclusion
A modern-day CRM system can effortlessly work to transform your sales, marketing, and customer services so you’re working to drive relationships and further increase sales.
A good customer experience is one that promotes feelings of trust and positivity for your customers.
Essentially, it’s the outcome of reliable, quality interactions that stays with the customer throughout their entire buyer’s journey.
This can be enforced when you have a successful CRM system in place. Find out how we can help you with your CRM below.
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.
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