A Customer Relationship Management System or CRM system contains all information about your prospects, leads and customers. Modern CRM systems are linked with your website allowing to identify information like which page was visited by who, who opened our newsletter or who downloaded the latest brochure.
Furthermore, a CRM system will allow you to build a sales pipeline and map your revenue streams. In a nutshell, a CRM system is the beating heart of your commercial organization.
Salesforce, Hubspot and Teamleader are the best known and maybe most used CRM systems in Belgium. But other less known systems like Copper, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Pipedrive and Zoho might be a good alternative for you as well.
Where most systems allow you to document your contacts, the main difference is which type of features they have available. As a result we will see that some CRM systems are more marketing oriented where others are more sales oriented.
Which CRM system you choose is an important one, but as important is how you configure it and how you include it within your daily operations.
Almost all providers of a CRM system will allow you to test their system for free with a limited amount of contacts. This trial period with a free account is however too short to make a fair evaluation on what the system has on offer. And once you get started with one system it's hard (but not impossible) to migrate to another system.
What to take into account?
We would recommend every business to ask for professional support when selecting a CRM system. Look for a party who has experience using several systems, because most organisations get a commission when you select a system from within their partnerships pool. So not every recommendation will be neutral.
You'll have to identify the different stages of your marketing & sales process and construct a sales pipeline!
The power of the pipeline is that it will allow you to measure the amount of people moving from one stage to another. That movement between stages is called conversion.
Starting to measure these conversions will give you clear insights on where your marketing & sales process is lagging and where you should apply focus to improve.
Sounds easy, but it isn't.
Interested to start using a CRM system?
Or do you have one, but you don't see the benefit yet?
We would love to peak along and see how it can be improved.
And this, we do for free.
So get in touch and complete the form.
