In growing businesses, it’s vital to leverage a CRM for growth, scalability and insight. But is your CRM slowing you down with clunky processes and outdated contacts? A clean, optimized CRM can change your business from sluggish growth to a systematized organization that’s ready for growth. Watch this webinar in partnership with Authentic, 11outof11, and Convergo to learn more about how to optimize your CRM for maximum insight and efficiency.
Key Takeaways
- Clear role definitions help align different departments’ objectives with the CRM strategy, enhancing cross-functional collaboration and data integrity.
- CRM systems serve as a centralized repository for all customer interactions, ensuring that all teams have access to the same up-to-date information.
- Designate a data steward or team responsible for overseeing data quality and integrity, including deduplication efforts.
- Revenue attribution helps organizations track the effectiveness of marketing efforts by linking revenue generated to specific campaigns or touchpoints, allowing for better resource allocation.
- While CRM systems often include marketing automation features, they primarily serve different functions: CRM is about relationship management, whereas marketing automation is about campaign management and lead nurturing.
Resources Mentioned
Webinar Transcription
Introduction and CRM Evolution
Angela Pointon: Good morning, everybody, and welcome today’s webinar. The title is “CRM Optimization: Aligning your organization for insight and efficiency”. We’re going to introduce ourselves in a minute, but before we do that, we’ll go through some housekeeping just to let everybody know about the format of today’s webinar.
Today’s webinar is simply going to be a panel, and the panelists are myself, Jennifer and Bill, and we are going to do Q and A at the end. So we’ve already articulated a few questions and answers that we’re going to go through today. But as you have questions as we’re discussing, feel free to use the Q and A or the chat to address those questions to us. And again, we’ll try to handle them at the end of today’s webinar. Okay, so I will introduce myself. I am Angela Pointon.
I am the president and CEO of 11outof11. I have been involved in CRM tools, a variety of them, for about 20 years of my career. It started when I was the marketing assistant at a software organization and I was named the Salesforce admin at the time. And then shortly thereafter I left and worked at an agency where I was the first HubSpot agency partner. And I have been using HubSpot pretty solely for the past 14 years. 11outof11 is also a certified HubSpot agency partner as well. Now I’d like to turn it to you. Jen, can you introduce yourself please?
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. It’s great to be with all of you here today. My name is Jennifer Zick and I am the founder and CEO of Authentic®. We are a community of fractional CMOs (chief marketing officers) that work with growing businesses all across the US and beyond to help them Overcome Random Acts of Marketing® and CRM and take healthy steps toward growth. And like Angela, my CRM career experience started also just over 20 years ago when I stepped into my first marketing support role with a little bit of biz dev mixed in and was handed a book on gold mine and said, learn how to use this tool.
And so between using Outlook, Goldmine, and ACT in my early days and then stepping into a firm that became one of the first Salesforce.com CRM implementation partners, I have been both on the user side as a sales and marketing leader, and inside of the consulting space working with companies implementing CRM. So today as a business owner, we run our firm on HubSpot and I’ve gotten a great look in the rear view about all the history of how CRM has evolved over time and where it’s going in the future. And it’s just exciting to be here today with my colleagues who have had their own experiences. So we’re happy to share with you.
Angela Pointon: All right, Bill, why don’t you introduce yourself?
Bill Poole: Thanks so much, Angela. My name is Bill Poole. My company is Convergo. We help entrepreneurs break through the sales ceiling by helping them acquire and serve ideal clients. We provide systemization and fractional services to help them with that. From a CRM perspective, I really don’t want to say how long I’ve been associated with CRMs, because that might tell you how old I am. But in the mid nineties, as a sales rep, I had some experience with some really, really bad CRMs. And as my career evolved, I was a sales leader still, that’s definitely a different lens than using it from a sales rep perspective. But the CRMs were still pretty bad, and the reasons for using them weren’t nearly as good as they are today.
After I grew out of my sales role, worked for an agency, and we helped some clients leverage CRM from both a marketing and sales perspective. So I have a few different lenses that I have to draw on from my CRM experience, and it’s a pleasure to be with you two ladies today.
Angela Pointon: Well, all right, so we wanted to get started by taking a poll. Let me see if I can launch this. So the poll is asking, how would you describe your current CRM situation? We’re obviously looking to get an idea of where everybody sits from how they’re using CRM at work today. So we’ll give you a few seconds to fill that out. I see some coming in now. Okay, I’m going to go ahead and end the poll. Three, two, one. All right, let’s share the results. So it looks like the majority of people have a CRM that’s working quite well, but there’s room for improvement. So good hope to provide some of those ideas and some of those ideas for room for improvement. Second, we have. We have one, but it’s either not optimal or we’ve outgrown it.
And then tied between option one, two, and the last option are we currently don’t have one. We sort of have one, if you can call it that. And we have one that we love, and it’s perfect.
Bill Poole: There’s some perfectionists in here then, because they still need to learn more.
Angela Pointon: Right? Love it. Love it. All right, so let’s start with you, Jen. We want to take a little history on CRM evolution over the years. So can you talk about where you believe CRM started and where it’s at today.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, absolutely. This was a fun exercise in the throwback machine, really, to go back in time and rewind, really, when you think about it, fundamentally, the practice of documenting relationships and exchange of value is as old as mankind since the beginning of commerce and trade of goods, records of keeping of names and amounts and value. But the real practice of what we now consider modern CRM really had its genesis in the fifties and sixties as computers started to come into the business world, and in the seventies, as they started to become more affordable to most businesses. Some of the foundational aspects of business, like finance and accounting and ledgers were kept in computers.
And during that time, and even all the way into the eighties and early nineties, of course, most sales activities were still happening through a Rolodex and index cards and notebooks and maybe spreadsheets at best. So the current modern CRM that we think about in customer relationship management really started to hit the scene in the early nineties with the emergence of tools like I referenced earlier, Act Goldmine, some of those early solutions, and also the formation of Siebel, which became kind of the first enterprise play in the CRM space. And as those, what they were called at the time most commonly was SFA Salesforce automation. Right. And as those tools continued to develop through the nineties and become available to both small businesses and large, something was happening over here which would later become the cloud.
And in 1999, Salesforce quietly arrived on the scene with a cloud based solution, and Siebel was starting to adopt mobile and ECRM solutions as well. And so big businesses were afraid to take on those scary online platforms because data and security and the cloud is going to be a fad. But small businesses started to adopt, and that’s really when my career in the CRM space started to intersect this market. So through the two thousands, we saw the quick embracing of cloud based CRM and the growth of that space, and then the onset of more mobile adaptation and social media. So CRM started to become a platform that connected to entire ecosystems of relationship and process and workforce management. So that’s where we’re at today as the tool set is much more broad than just sales relationship management. We’ll talk about that.
We’ve all experienced the overlay of marketing automation and marketing engagement tools with CRM. So it’s been an exciting place to work and an exciting technology stack to work with.
Angela Pointon: I agree. I love it. One of the things that I think throughout this journey, we’ve all learned is there are some critical roles associated with CRM and when implementing that internally. So I just wanted to speak about that. As far as some learning points for everybody today we help implement CRM tools within existing client accounts, as well as manage and optimize existing CRM tools if they have them already. And one of the things that we always coach and guide a customer on is really defining the internal roles of the organization and who’s responsible for what. And I mentioned I was appointed as a marketing administrator, assistant Salesforce admin way back when, and that was a really smart idea for that company to do. I had no idea what I was doing at the time. I was trying to figure out everything myself.
But the mere fact of picking someone to be the internal champion is really wise. We’ll talk a little bit about the detriment of doing that, because you might think, oh, like one person knowing everything might be a risk. So we’ll talk about how to avoid that risk. But as far as those of you who are maybe struggling with the tool that you have now, or just looking for ways to optimize the tool, one of the things I encourage you to think about is, do you have one singular internal champion who really knows everything? The ins and outs of that CRM is attending the training, going to the conferences, really becoming an expert at that CRM tool on behalf of the organization.
So I just talked about one person, but I’m wondering, Bill, if you can talk about the different departments and what they can gain from using a CRM that’s optimized.
Bill Poole: Sure thing. The list is really growing these days, as you know. Right. So obviously sales, we’ll start there. Improved win rate, lead conversion rate. That’s kind of obvious, right? That’s nothing new, but some of the newer things, it used to be hard actually to sell a sales team on a CRM change a lot of times because they were being a big brother thing, not necessarily something that would benefit them, but really one of the newer benefits is that team productivity. There’s a lot of options for semi automation in sales. Your templated messaging that has great messaging as a starting point for communications. So that really enables sales reps to be more effective with a better message and more efficient with some of the automation and templating there. It also helps with accurate forecasting.
And for the sales leaders out there, it’s a great tool for rep development because you can, you know, at a macro level, understand where you might need to make changes as you’re looking at metrics and dashboards to your make improvements to your organization. At a micro level it helps with rep development, but in the end, selling sales on a new CRM is a lot easier now than it used to be. From a marketing perspective, obviously you’ve got improved lead flow there. Some of the newer benefits. One is there’s a lot of closed loop reporting available and a lot of times marketing. The marketing folks used to work in platforms that were just dedicated marketing, but now some of that closed loop reporting enables attribution so that the folks in marketing know what’s working and what might not be working.
Another one is increased revenue per client. So having additional insight to your client, what’s going on and what they like, what they don’t like, helps you create a more effective message and really keep them informed of other ways that you can help them. So marketing to your clients is a big one there. The folks in client success or delight enhanced client satisfaction. There’s a lot of different communication channels now that are built into CRM that enable a client success team to open up and let their clients meet them where they are, with features like chat and texting and all different sorts of communication mediums. So enables people can interact with your business the way they want to. And in addition, having that 360 degree view of all the clients interactions with the business is very helpful for client success.
New players there are admin and finance. There’s back office functionality now integrated into CRMs as well. So they’re a little bit new to the party. So what do they stand to gain? A lot of CRMs. And Angela, you mentioned HubSpot has billing and payment like payment contracting integrations in the application, which can also feed into billing and billing accuracy as well. And those folks also benefit to having visibility, 360 degree visibility to their client base as well. It.
It’s a little bit different now as well, because they, not only they support the CRMs historically when they’re on premise, CRMs that used to cause a lot of different headaches, and now CRMs moving to the cloud can help them out a good bit, and a lot of the dependence on it from an administration perspective is removed and the users in the environment are now more empowered to do things on their own. So moving the application to the cloud means less systems to support for them. New CRMs also have a great there’s a need for security these days, so the newer CRMs give it the opportunity to provide more secure solutions than they may previously would have been able to really even imagine in the old crmsheen something that’s even a little bit more recent the last couple of years is mobile enablement.
Today’s workforce is really demanding, especially with sales teams and now even operational folks are working from home as well. So the workforce really needs to be enabled with technology where they are. So that mobile enablement gives the workers the ability to extend mobile enablement to help sales reps in the field. Lastly, leadership of really a fully functional, integrated CRM is a huge asset for the leadership folks. It helps with business planning. When you get your CRM dialed in and your processes dialed in, you have much more accurate business planning and forecasting. So you know what might be coming down the pike. And also just the mere fact that the CRM creeps along the entire client journey, which drives cross functional alignment. So lots of different people, lots of different, more departments benefit today from CRM than previously.
Jennifer Zick: If I can chime in on some of that layering in some of the history lesson upfront, it’s fascinating, Bill, as you share that to reflect back on what were the drivers that were championing the CRM decision back in the day. And for those of us who’ve lived through 20 plus years of this evolution, it’s actually crazy to think that we used to have to be on premise to log into a desktop, to a local premise software to access data, right? But when I first started selling Salesforce early CRM, I was selling to it and I was selling it against this concern about data security and cloud, right?
And then pretty soon I was selling, not much later I was selling to heads of sales because, and the problem they were trying to fix was every time I have a salesperson leave the company, I lose the intelligence that they have, I lose their spreadsheet, I lose what’s in their head. Like we can’t keep having to rebuild over and over. Like how do I get salespeople to put stuff in a place so we don’t lose it if we lose them? And then the next generation was talking to marketing saying, hey, we’re over here using the standalone email system, but we can’t wait and rely on sales to give us the list. Like how do we become more efficient in getting the data we need to power this, right?
So it’s just been fascinating to watch the evolution of the departmental value propositions and what the issues are that they’ve been trying to solve and how those issues are changing. They’re changing at the speed of technology and what it enables.
CRM Roles and Departmental Benefits
Angela Pointon: I’m going to keep it with you and ask. So Bill talked a lot, and you were reflecting on the different departments, but what about the data in the CRM? So when people think of CRM, I think they often think of either sales or marketing, because we’re trying to attract customers and we want to track all that. But has it moved beyond that mentality, in your opinion?
Jennifer Zick: It absolutely is in my world. And I see it at different stages and different levels of maturity in different businesses.
Angela Pointon: Right.
Jennifer Zick: But these days, you know, when you think about the fact that every business, whether your B2B, or your B2C, or your B2B2C, or your e-commerce, whatever the model of your business is, you run a business that relies on relationships. Relationships with your prospects, relationships with your customers or clients, relationships with your partners, with your prospective employees and candidates, with your actual employees, with your investors, with your other stakeholders.
There are so many relationship spheres that surround any business. And if you’re not managing those relationships well, you’re not managing your business well. And without a central source of truth that keeps everyone in your business aligned on who’s managing, what next step, what touch in that relationship. If you don’t have a CRM, do you really have a business? Right.
None of us go into business to not create value. And so if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re a founder, if you’re a leader in a business, your goal is to create value for your stakeholders and value in the business. And see how CRM has become such a central component of measuring the value of a business, because it literally is the safety net that captures all the intelligence and it’s the central source of truth about who matters, why do we matter to them, how are we showing up, where are we engaging and how do we consistently deliver? CRM is central to every single relationship that touches your business and your brand. And it goes way beyond sales and way beyond marketing campaigns.
So companies who are really embracing its full potential are using it to orchestrate the harmony of every way that their brand engages in the world.
CRM Implementation and Common Mistakes
Angela Pointon: Love it, love it. I wanted to talk a little bit more, as I mentioned, about some of the mistakes companies make when implementing or if they already have a CRM when thinking about it. And, you know, I think that the. So let’s talk first about whether we don’t have a CRM, which is some of you in the room, or we have one that we don’t want, and we’re looking for a change. So when we think about implementing a new CRM, as we just talked about, it crosses many departments and has a lot larger value for the organization than we might have historically thought about. And so it’s not a small project to implement a CRM. You can do it as a small project, but it’s not going to have the impact that you probably want from the organization.
If you’re teeny tiny and you’re just starting out, that might still be true. So for the people on the webinar that are in that category, looking at a CRM that’s going to allow it to grow with you, rather than resisting the urge to buy something because it’s just cheap might be something that you want to think about. For those of you that already have one and you’re just looking for a change or looking to further optimize it, really look at the project as it deserves. So in our experience, typical implementation of a CRM can be anywhere from three months to six months. That’s half of a year spent on organizing a piece of software around your business and leveraging it, which at first glance may sound crazy. Why can’t we get this done in a couple of weeks?
But the goal is to have a payoff for years of the organization, right? Second would be, again, that ownership. So when we think about a champion internally, we want to nominate somebody who’s hungry, who wants to be working with the technology and really intimately understand how it works cross departmentally with the entire lifecycle of a customer. From the very first touch to okay, we’re now trying to sell or upsell additional things. They’re a customer today with that individual. One critical thing to avoid your own risk is to have them create a running log. We call it a playbook, but a guide of the CRM sounds laborious. But if they ever leave, a new person needs to be handed that guide so that they can understand how data flows, custom properties, and rules behind the scenes. All of that should be documented.
They shouldn’t have to hunt around in the CRM and hope that they find it. It should be very clear so that, again, you’re protecting yourself from that risk. If someone leaves the organization that has been named champion and then the last, of course, there’s tons of agencies to help you. There are people who have to be certified in CRMs in order to be able to implement them. Not just talking about us on the call here today, but many others out there in the world. So as you’re seeking to find the best partner to help you implement, looking at their certifications, looking at their level of partnership with the CRM you’re interested in will help narrow the field a little bit in finding an expert that truly can assist and has the experience under their belt to do so.
Bill Poole: So, can I add something to that? Angela, mistakes that I’ve seen made with regard to rolling out CRMs, one is the lack of leadership, buy in and sponsorship. It’s really important for if you’re rolling out a CRM, the leader’s not. Leader’s not in the room, that’s not good. The leader’s in the back of the room, that’s not good. The leader should be at the front of the room introducing the concept. So you have that top down alignment. It needs to be very clear that the leadership is in support of this, and alignment is very important. I once talked with a business owner and he said, Bill, we implemented a new CRM.
And I told the reps that they need to input their content, their calls into the system, because I want to know how many calls they make, and I just don’t get it. They’re not doing it well. There’s no alignment there either. The folks that are supposed to use the system need to understand how it’s going to make their life better. The CRM has a lot of ways to make everyone’s life better in those departments that I just mentioned, but presenting it as how it benefits everyone, that it’s not a big brother situation that everyone stands to gain with this. So the top down alignment is something that is really important. And obviously, the appropriate communication and training as we have changed management in our blood, that top down alignment, communication, training and stickiness is really important.
But it does all start at the top. And the leaders actually need to use the CRM as well, not just communicating the importance of the CRM. So we’ve seen that. I’ve seen that mistake made a lot.
Jennifer Zick: Can I chime in too? I don’t mean to take us off track, Angela, so just reign me in if we’re getting too far off course. But mistakes made in CRM implementation could be a whole series of webinars, of course. But some of the most common that I’ve seen is that a lot of organizations get that they should have a CRM, or maybe they need a more modern CRM, but they’re trying to compare solutions, apples to apples, without first identifying the criteria that their business requires. And one of the biggest mistakes made in the CRM community is being made by the software companies themselves, who hype up the capabilities of the tool with fancy demos that look awesome. And you can imagine how that would work inside of your business.
But then when it really comes into your business, I’ve never yet seen a client who can just take what’s out of the box and it fits. So software companies don’t do a good job. They do a disservice to the buyers about the level of rigor and intentionality required to implement properly. And if the business that you’re running doesn’t already have a proven process, if you don’t know what your sales process is to start with, for instance, how do you go from a lead to qualification to proposal to a bid, or what if you don’t have a process? You can’t make a CRM work for you, even at its core functionality, right?
So knowing your process, understanding before you start looking at solutions, what the problems are that you’re trying to solve, and then looking for that fit, and then being super pragmatic about the level of effort that it takes to both implement that and map it to all of your business processes. And to Bill’s point, so importantly, change management, because there’s nothing automagical about any of these tools. They require human adaptation and adoption. And that’s probably the hardest part, because CRM, if it’s going to become a central source of truth, needs to be completely adopted and continuously improved. So it’s a big undertaking indeed.
Angela Pointon: That was a really good point. You actually made me write something down for a client. Thank you.
Bill Poole: CRM doesn’t fix everything, Jen. Doesn’t mask the fact that there’s no documented processes or strategy in the business.
Jennifer Zick: That’s the next opportunity for innovation in CRM. When the next company invents something that is the easy button for CRM, we’re all buying it.
Vertical vs horizontal CRMs
Angela Pointon: All right? The three of us are going to get on that right after this. There is a distinction, and I want to turn to you, Bill, between what’s called a vertical CRM and a horizontal CRM. So for our friends that may be thinking they don’t have the right tool now or don’t have a tool, can you help distinguish the difference between the two?
Bill Poole: Sure thing. Vertical CRMs are really designed for a specific industry or application. They’re really tightly wound out of the box, almost like plug and play, ready to go, wrapped around the business. Like you see a lot in healthcare, real estate, legal CRMs that are designed for those specific businesses, and they can be incredibly functional for those businesses as well. Right out of the box, they can be ready to roll on the downside of that, though, if there’s a lack of functionality. There’s always trade offs when you make CRM decisions. But a lot of times those vertical CRMs lack the functionality of a horizontal CRM, especially in the marketing space where an integration allows the marketing folks to do what they need to do, integrating that into a vertical CRM can be challenging.
Sometimes integrations with other systems in the business can be more challenging as well. Sometimes those vertical CRMs are ERPs as well. On the other hand, horizontal CRMs are designed really to work across our horizon. They’re designed to work across many different industries, providing a lot more functionality and flexibility for businesses so that you’ve got a really comprehensive range of features that work across the entire client journey. Examples of CRMs there are like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, money.com is a new one and great for small businesses as well. So these CRMs are not really ready. They’re very limited functionality when they come out of the box.
But it’s a toolkit and it’s a toolkit once, to Jennifer’s point about having documented processes and such, those horizontal CRMs are a toolkit to be able to wrap the CRM around all those processes and things that you have as a business. Again, if you don’t have those things, then the CRM is going to be limited in functionality, but they’re designed to be more flexible and really functional from a marketing perspective, especially when you look at HubSpot, when you’re trying to decide how do you know which one’s for you? And as Angela mentioned just a minute ago, that it’s really critical to do a good job defining requirements across the business. Excuse me, that defining requirements involves talking, you know, ensuring that all the people’s perspectives are taken into consideration, the processes that ideally are documented and followed by all.
But also the technology requirements need to be defined as well as a lot of these CRMs have a lot of, we’ve got an app store, right, and a lot of different options to integrate with existing applications and then APIs for more complicated proprietary applications that allow some integration as well. So it’s really, really important to do a thorough job defining those requirements across the business. And then you can look at the trade offs. And the trade offs make a lot more sense as to understand what the requirements are. And that adds a lot of context to helping you decide and what trade offs you’re, what you’re willing to live, what you need and what you might be willing to live without.
Jennifer Zick: If I could add to that in terms of some of the ways you might think about whether vertical or horizontal best suits your business. I would encourage leaders to think about the culture of your organization and your longer term vision and roadmap for your business. Because as you’re first getting started, let’s just imagine that you are a traditional law firm. Then a vertical solution might feel like it’s easier, it’s lower cost, and it meets all of our current needs.
But if your business decides to diversify by adding on new offerings or services or capabilities, or maybe you’ve built some other custom component and you need to go to market differently than the average law firm now, you might find yourself really tightly wound around a solution that’s embedded in everything in your business and hard to extract from, and it’s not flexible and that becomes painful. So if you are a culture of a more traditional industry, we’re going to stay the course. We’re going to stay in this space. This is our vision. Vertical solution might be a great fit, but if you’re a highly innovative leader or cultural team and you want to have space to maneuver, you’re going to want a horizontal solution so you don’t get stuck.
Bill Poole: Great point Jen.
Angela Pointon: Yes, it’s hard to see that from, you know, now to the future, but it is a smart thing for sure to think about. So we’re coming around to some of our last questions. If anybody has any questions for us, feel free to chime in the q and A and we’ll address those at the end. If there aren’t any questions, we’ll let you go on with your day. So Jen, I wanted to know if you’d be willing to talk a little bit since you have a lot of history in CRMs about Authentic and your own use of HubSpot.
Jennifer Zick: I’m happy. I love to be an open book with other entrepreneurial teams. And I’ll caveat by saying that Authentic, as the fractional CMO firm that we are, we’re not affiliated with any CRMs. We don’t implement CRM or sell CRM, and we don’t provide the kinds of hands on services like Angela’s company does. But we are a very modern marketing organization and we’re a young company. So I founded the business six years ago and of course I had the benefit of coming from a whole background of sales leadership, marketing leadership and CRM ecosystem around me. So I knew from day one I’m building a modern marketing organization. Even if it’s just me. I’m going to start day one with CRM and good clean data so that I can start building a baseline and building a pipeline.
And of course at the time when I was a founder with an early stage startup and a pretty simple model, all I really needed at that point was a contact management database and somewhere to manage my deals and hopes and prayers that deals would come right new business and so my first CRM was a tool called Copper because I was running my little startup business on G suite and Google, and copper was an inexpensive, easy plug and play way for me to start building CRM capabilities. It didn’t have marketing automation and all the other marketing tools yet, but it was where I was managing my deal pipeline. Meanwhile, I was over here doing an email survey in a different standalone email capability. Knowing like this is generation one, disparate systems disconnected but start doing the things over time.
By their second year of business, third year of business, we were ready to move on to HubSpot, primarily for the sales CRM capabilities and basic marketing capabilities, but with a vision for more sophisticated marketing automation as we continue to grow. Of course, our web systems and other things were evolving at the same time. And so we’re our client services. So fast forward today. We’re running our organization on HubSpot and we’re at the point, as a six year old business where we really need to drive operational efficiency in the business. Things that used to be done manually in documents and sheets while our CRM and marketing was here have to now start to flow. Relationships and data need to flow. And so now we’re working by streamlining everything into workflows and automation points for our employees and our candidates.
We run our candidates through a CRM workflow and pipeline and our prospects and clients. And we do our client services through our HubSpot CRM and all of our marketing and marketing automation. So we’re finally just starting to realize the true value of CRM as a central source of truth and of automation to make us all more efficient. So it’s a really exciting time. But this is the point where we’re starting to say what else needs to connect to? How do we get all of our cloud based accounting systems, time management systems, payroll, everything is flowing and we haven’t reached the I’m not at the I couldn’t have answered the question like, our CRM is perfect. I actually have like, I want to come work for you, whoever you are, because you figured something out, right? Ours is never perfect.
There’s always a moving target. But that’s the story of how we’ve been adopting and adapting as we go.
CRM Recommendations
Angela Pointon: Love it. I love the future. Thoughts around how it’s going to work even better and better. I just wanted to add one more story, and then we’ll go into Q and A. So if anybody has any other questions, please pop them in there. I had the great pleasure of working with a company called Culturewise. They are both a software and consulting services company. They provide services around culture for organizations, as you could imagine. And they implemented HubSpot. They shopped around different tools, and HubSpot was the one that they selected. This is going back maybe five, six years ago now, and they have really grown the tool with the organization.
One of the things that I think that has benefited them the most is about two years ago they hired that champion that I was talking about, and I was just looking in the attendees to see if Tyler was on today, but he’s too busy building things in HubSpot, so he’s going to listen to the recording. Apparently he did register. So Tyler is the champion. He’s the digital marketing manager over at Culturewise, but he is intimately aware of everything going on in HubSpot. He, of course, attends the marketing meetings, but he also attends operational meetings as well as sales meetings, because there’s reporting that’s coming out of the tool that’s informative for those departments, and there’s a reporting being asked about in that meeting that doesn’t exist today, that he then goes back and builds.
So some of the information that organization has grown because of is an intimate awareness of the types of marketing that influence their customers to buy. And so one of the things that we do is every single month we report on what were the influencing attributes of marketing that led to closed won opportunities for that month. Was it a webinar? Everybody who closed attended a webinar. Was it a case study? Was it a video on the homepage? Was it all three of those things?
And so having that intimate pulse on how the marketing is impacting on a real time basis, rather than, let’s look at last year, right, but in a real time intimate basis, really helps us move an ebb and flow quickly as well as I mentioned, from a sales perspective, reporting on, you know, how many calls were made, how many meetings were secured. We know that there is seasonality within a business, both at a macro level because of events like inflation that we’re all dealing with, and interest rates and buyers really locking down on spending money. And there’s also seasonality that might be true for your own business, where you can look at how the summer went last year versus this year. Were people just on vacation and they didn’t want to buy anything or what was going on.
And so that kind of reporting can really help inform forecasting and projecting for future revenue in the quarters to come. Those are just two tangible examples. But there’s many, many that have come out of my awesome pleasure at watching this organization just grow from first implementation to how they use it today. Okay, so we’re getting some questions coming in. The first one, I’m going to pitch it to Bill because, Bill, but Jennifer, feel free to chime in. Bill, you have mentioned a couple. What are some of the best CRMs that you’ve used?
Bill Poole: Whoops. We use HubSpot, similar to, I think both of you all do, which is we have it customized. It works great for us. But I mean, I hate to answer a question with, it depends, but it kind of depends, you know, if you get a CRM. I mean we use, I was with, a long time ago, I was with the business doing, I was selling and we use that early version of Salesforce. Well, it was out of the box. It was not customized and it was not useful. It was, it was really, really clunky. It was, did not make my life easier at all. But it probably wasn’t really targeted for the type of business that I was with at the time. Right.
I was with an agency of a large size, selling as an agent for a large organization and it was their CRM. And again, it just wasn’t functional. It didn’t make my life easier. But Salesforce is if integrated properly in the right environment and hum, it can really hum and do good work. So I hate to say that it depends, but it really depends if Salesforce is wrapped around your business and integrated great. That’s a great CRM. Money.com dot it depends on the circumstance. Money.com is a great CRM, a place to get started for businesses out there that don’t have a CRM and need to get started. And it has out of the box, it has some really good functionality. So it depends.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, it does depend. I mean, I spent 15 years actively selling and using Salesforce.com and I have seen all the ways that it can be absolutely brilliant for organizations small, medium and large. And I’ve seen all the ways that it can be really clunky too because it is the Cadillac. I mean it has all the bells and whistles and you need to know how to use what you need to use there. What I can say is that since starting Authentic, I’ve definitely noticed a trend. We serve small businesses, five to 100 million in annual revenue. Almost all of our clients are choosing HubSpot.
What HubSpot did differently in the game is that they were born first as a marketing platform that added CRM, whereas all the other players that I’m familiar with were born as sales force management tools that added on or acquired marketing capabilities and bolt onsite. And so really, ultimately it comes down to what is driving the needs of your organization. And if you’re going to have robust marketing capabilities, if you want your CRM to also be a place where you’ve got integrated email, integrated landing pages, potentially web capabilities, automated workflows and campaigns, then working on a platform that natively knows how to manage that and make it user friendly makes a lot of sense. So it does depend. But now I have a bit of a bias toward HubSpot, particularly for the kinds of clients that we serve.
Angela Pointon: Very good. I’m going to flip it over to the chat and Brian asks, how can you force, without forcing non sales employees to integrate with your CRM and educate the managers to insist upon it? Any experience with this shared would be great. We have 100 to 130 employees, 20 sales, and the rest are all support non CRM users. I think there’s a number of ways to do this, and I’m open. Bill and Jen, if you have any others ideas to add, if it’s been running for a while and there just isn’t adoption across the organization, then perhaps the leadership conversation coming from the higher ups to the organization about the vision for the CRM, what it’s not today, and what it should be for the organization, is probably appropriate.
Again, as Bill was saying earlier, so that everybody can see what’s in it, not just for the company, but hopefully in that messaging also for me, how it’s going to make my job easier and better. It’s a difficult conversation to have because it can easily come across is that big brother? We want this data. We want to see how many dials are made, we want to see how many customer service contacts are made. But that is only part of the story. So if intentional thought can be given to how is this going to help us grow as an organization together, and how is it going to help each department operate more smoothly, I think, you know, my recommendation would be to try and articulate that dialogue.
Jennifer Zick: Yes, I completely agree. This is one of those instances where you cannot drive that change from the bottom up or from the sales team outward. This needs to be a company wide initiative. That’s embraced at the very top. And it’s not so much about compliance, it’s more about what gets measured, gets done. And so to motivate teams to adhere to CRM best package practices and interface with it and manage the data there, you have to incentivize them and motivate them in that direction. In my world, in my small business, that means I’ve had to communicate the vision for how our business is going to scale and grow and how people create growth opportunities in their roles by creating efficiency and laying down smarter pipes as we go.
To do that means we’ve had to make decisions along the way where we’re no longer going to allow Google sheets to sit out here for this function, we’ve built the process and now it’s centralized to HubSpot. This is how your job will be done now. And so what is getting measured and managed is what gets done. So we’re just using CRM as a magnet, but I’m the CEO saying, the central source of truth, our business relationships. If it’s not in HubSpot, it doesn’t exist. I don’t want to see any more sheets. That’s just not acceptable. So you got to get your C suite on board for that.
Bill Poole: Yeah, it’s tough building on that. There’s a question in there, Angela, that’s having some issues regarding keeping the CRM updated constantly. That’s the same answer. Right? It’s. If you’re not, if you expect it, then inspect it.
Jennifer Zick: Right.
Bill Poole: Which, you know, a lot of times, if you got a sales manager that’s having one one sales meetings without the CRM open, that’s not a good message. And then there’s no, there’s got to be top down buy into using the CRM should be, the dashboard should be open during a one on one, during a sales team. So a lot of times, if one of the challenges with keeping a CRM updated consistently is because there’s not that leadership buy-in to actually using the application when LMA.
Jennifer Zick: Well, and I think a lot of businesses I’ve seen over the course of the CRM evolution, a lot of business leaders have been really afraid to let go of top performing salespeople or high performing employees who just are mavericks and they don’t want to participate. But eventually you have to make a decision, if you’re a growing business, about whether the health of the organization and the value the business is creating is what’s important. Because if you allow for non support and you allow mavericks to be mavericks, it creates a culture that is divided. Right. So sometimes you got to make hard decisions. Sometimes people are not going to be part of the change. That’s true with every innovation in growth in business.
Q+A
Angela Pointon: Absolutely. Okay, so let’s move on to another question from Claudia. Hey, Claudia. She asked this in the Q+A. Q. We are a small startup and use HubSpot. One of the things I struggle with as the CMO is data integrity and having too many cooks in the kitchen never experienced that. Yeah, we got you. Do you have any tips on how to manage others in the organization, especially at the C suite and founder level? So I think the root of the question is that sometimes reporting cannot be relied upon. And when multiple people are either logging calls, not logging calls, marketing is touching the CRM. You know, you got a lot of hands in the CRM that data integrity becomes a little unwieldy in ensuring it is done as so and so.
You know, one thing that I have seen, quite honestly, other clients do, so this is not like angela would recommend, but I’ve seen the benefit of other clients doing this is running some not, you know, secret reporting, but running some reporting to just do a gut check on things like leadership is questioning whether anything is working to close sales. Okay, so let’s run some reporting. How many calls were made to a prospect? If HubSpot is telling us zero calls, bringing that to the person who owns the prospect and saying, did you make calls and they’re just not logged, or did you not make calls?
Jennifer Zick: Right.
Angela Pointon: So doing some of those spot check reports can help reveal some of those holes. It won’t reveal all of them. But if I feel that and have seen this work, that if people feel like they’re not just putting in data and nobody notices, so why put it in? But if people are looking at the data at a more micro level, they will be more motivated to make it accurate. No CRM is going to be 100% squeaky clean and representative of everything. And even some of the best organizations that we see utilize tools will still have anomalies in the reporting. And it is frustrating, but trying to be diligent at least once a month of running some reports where some information might be revealed to you that you’re suspicious about, I think will help motivate others to keep it clean for you.
Jennifer Zick: And if I can point out a couple of data integrity stumbling blocks that I’ve noticed along the way, especially small startups that are trying to run fast and in a lot of different directions and sometimes changing directions, some of the issues I’ve seen that cause a lot of data integrity issues are like mass list imports without management, failure to use required fields, failure to agree on what fields should be required, or how you’re going to manage attributes at the contact level, the deal level, the company level, what do you need to know to run a functional business using your CRM?
So just a couple of best practices would be to work with your executive team and your sales leadership to literally put together an agreement as to what we expect at the bare minimum for the requirements, do we allow for anybody to do list import? Under what circumstances? How are we appropriating global admin rights so that there aren’t too many cooks like in the actual engine? And how are we going to use required fields to make sure we are capturing what we need to manage? And then who in the organization owns deduplication and data integrity and cleaning? And how often are you spending time to make sure that you’re refreshing that? Because I can’t remember the statistics. It’s pretty mind blowing actually, the percentage of data that expires on an annual basis.
As people change roles and things shift, there will be a lot of things that need to be cleaned up over time.
Angela Pointon: Very good. All right, I’m going to stick with you, Jen, for our last question, and thank you for the others, Mickey and Bill helping to answer some questions in the chat. Our last question on the Q+A is could we go over again how we can use CRM for marketing? So I was wondering if you might be able to talk about enclosing a little bit of what you do over at Authentic.
Jennifer Zick: Well, let me count the ways. Well, first of all, I think it’s important to differentiate between two common tech stack components, CRM and marketing automation. These two worlds have really blended together in a lot of ways, and HubSpot’s been a really big driver of that. But marketing automation would be a platform that’s all encompassing of things like just to simplify it, not just email blasting, but thoughtful email and campaign automation and segmentation and breaking apart. Who are we reaching with what messages, at what cadence, on what trigger points managing from initial engagement all the way through the lifecycle of that relationship? Marketing automation itself is a very sophisticated engine that is around marketing campaigns and conversion through content and interaction and engagement.
You can overlay that on top of CRM so that you’re working through the whole funnel and not just a traditional funnel where marketing is working from initial engagement through those conversion gates down to now, we have a handraiser lead and it becomes a deal, and the deal becomes a win. But with marketing automation overlaying your CRM, you’re following that customer beyond the win, beyond the point of conversion to becoming a customer, to now, marketing can nurture that relationship with continued engagement and content, with sales and collaboration with sales, customer service support to make sure that marketing is playing an active role not in just demand gen, but in retention and advocacy, building and account based marketing and deepening of relationships. So that’s like the simplest way to paint the picture.
But now let’s say that you have a CRM that doesn’t have a marketing automation component, but you do have a marketing team. The marketing team still needs to be able to. Let’s just use simple explanations. Let’s say they are putting on hosting a trade show, and sales is going to attend the trade show, and marketing is supporting the trade show, and you’re coming back from the booth with a list of leads. In the past, there’s some finger pointing because marketing will import the leads and say, we just gave sales a bunch of leads, and sales spends time and says those leads were garbage and marketing’s not doing their job right.
So there’s data sharing, but without data standards that you’ve agreed to, that sharing can get really messy really quickly because a lead’s not really a lead until it goes from being a suspect to somebody with a need. Right. So anyway, I could go on and on about how CRM can be used to support marketing and back and forth, but they really work in tandem. How would you add to that, Angela? Anything?
Angela Pointon: Oh, we could talk for hours. That’s a webinar topic for sure. You did a beautiful job. Yeah. I mean, to talk really tactically. CRMs that have marketing integrated can do email automation. They also can do social scheduling. So like a hootsuite you might be using individually. Usually modern CRM can handle that sort of thing as well as revenue attribution. So what, again, what marketing influenced, what file storage. So if somebody downloads a document, the CRM knows that they downloaded that document. So there’s all sorts of more tactical components as well. All right, I think we have addressed everybody’s questions. Thank you, everybody, for joining today. If you want to share today’s webinar, it will be recorded and sent out within the next day or two. Thank you so much, Jennifer and Bill, for joining me on this panel today.
You both were awesome and I think gave a lot of informative information to our attendees here today. That is all we’ll let everybody carry on with their day. Have a good one. Thank you.
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