What Is a CRM? Definition & How It Can Help You
At Service Provider Pro, we’re well aware of the term CRM—and every business owner has most likely come across it, too. What does it stand for, though? Let’s take a look at what a CRM is, if you should make use of it, and how it can help your business.
What is a CRM?
CRM is short for customer relationship management, and refers to the process of managing client relations. The goal is to track your leads, ensure that they become a paying customer; and also to improve customer satisfaction.
To achieve that, most companies use a CRM, which is special software that is designed to facilitate this process. Cloud-based CRMs usually contains a database holding customer information such as name, email, billing address, purchases, and more.
One thing to note is that CRM is commonly associated with software, not the process of managing relationships. With that said, the functionality of a CRM is used differently across teams.
Here are a few examples:
Sales teams can check lead information and activity before reaching out.
Marketers can track results about past campaigns and make adjustments for the next one.
Customer support agents can access customer data in order to provide correct information.
With the sheer amount of information a business collect these days, it’s important to organize it correctly so nothing gets lost. From interactions via social media to calls—everything should be saved on the client profile, so it can be remembered and accessed. The more information is available, the better you know your customer, increasing the chances of client retention.
Benefits of using a CRM
Implementing a CRM offers numerous benefits for businesses. It enables organizations to streamline their sales, marketing, and customer service efforts by providing a centralized platform to manage interactions with customers and prospects.
A CRM helps improve efficiency, increase sales performance, and enhance customer satisfaction through features such as lead tracking, automation workflows, and personalized communication. Additionally, it provides valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions and tailor their strategies accordingly. This leads to increased revenue growth, improved loyalty, and ultimately, a competitive edge in the market.
Who should use a CRM?
Any modern business should choose to use CRM software, especially if they have sales teams, marketing experts, or recruiting people, as it’s the main point of truth. All relevant information about leads and customers can be easily accessed by the entire organization. Customer relationship management tools also connect to other applications, so data can be pushed to it, making sure that you always have up-to-date information at hand.
The resulting benefit is that it’s easier for your team to collaborate with each other, plan marketing campaigns, upsell clients, and scale the business.
Those who think a CRM is too complicated to set up, learn, and maintain don’t have to worry. There are CRM tools for every need: some are very basic and perfect for small businesses, others are feature-rich and can be extended with an API.
One thing is certain, efficient agency account management wouldn’t be possible without a CRM. To win new clients, upsell existing ones, and reduce churn, you need an app that centralizes your customer interactions, their transactions and goals.
Common features of a CRM
A Gartner study shows that every 4th business has outdated or inaccurate contact information, finds it difficult to remember who to follow up with (19%), or struggles to interact with leads (15%). They also rarely know if a colleague has already interacted with leads or customers (15%).
To resolve these pain points, a CRM should have the following features:
Third party integration to receive and push data to other tools.
Workflow automation that allows you to set up custom rules.
Lead management to help you identify leads and track them across the sales cycle.
Analytics which offer insights into client data so that you can make better decisions.
Reporting so that your sales team can check the results of their outreach efforts.
Email integration to redirect incoming emails and reply from the CRM.
Measurement capabilities of customer satisfaction scores.
What does a CRM look like?
As the market and demand for CRM software is growing, more and more tools are popping up constantly. What do they look like? Let’s look at a few popular solutions, as well as newer apps that try to mix things up.
Service Provider Pro
SPP.co is a CRM for agencies who are looking to get all information about their clients into one system. While not primarily a customer relationship platform, Service Provider Pro has powerful CRM features that save every little detail about your clients, from their address to payment information.
You can also use CRM fields to save custom data about your clients, leave notes, and update your client information via Zapier. With the API, you can connect to your existing tool stack and ensure that all data is piped into SPP.
Keap
The CRM Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) targets entrepreneurs who want to convert leads into clients. This becomes immediately evident as you open the dashboard, as highlights the number of new leads, quotes sent, sales and broadcasts. You also have an overview of upcoming appointments, tasks, and reviews.
The general design is modern, and the developers managed to keep everything well-structured without overwhelming new users. The main features can be accessed from the sidebar.
Wobaka
Wobaka is a CRM platform targeted at small teams. Compared to industry veterans, it has a very different look: everything is minimalistic, the developer has focused on colors that don’t strain the eyes, and the UI doesn’t overwhelm new users.
We’re here to change things. We believe CRM systems should be as simple to use as spreadsheets but still give you superpowers. Wobaka is the CRM system that has all you need, and nothing you don’t.
The minimalistic approach doesn’t mean that it lacks features. Wobaka has everything you’d expect from a CRM tool, from sales pipelines to a Zapier integration and tasks.
Hubspot
Hubspot is one of the most popular CRM available—and it’s free. Compared to the other two solutions, it targets a broad range of businesses that have many different teams: sales people, marketers, customer service, operation managers. This means that there’s a bigger learning curve as there are many different features.
While free, the most interesting features are locked behind the paid upgrades. However, smaller businesses can get started with the free version, and upgrade later if necessary.
What does a CRM cost?
Cost is a major barrier to adoption of Customer Relationship Management software, as the above-mentioned Gartner report demonstrates. 33% of the respondents would like to spend less than £10 per user per month; another 33% are willing to go up to £50, while 24% would only consider a free CRM.
The need for a free tool is understandable, after all, small and medium-sized businesses often have a tight budget. Some are still managing customer relationships with pen and paper, spreadsheets, or rely solely on email communication. But how much does a CRM really cost, and are the free tools a real solution?
Let’s look at the starting prices of a few popular CRM solutions (using monthly billing options).
| CRM software | Price | |
|---|---|---|
 |
ActiveCampaign | from $15/mo |
 |
Keap | from $129 /mo |  |
Wobaka | $19/mo per user |  |
Pipedrive | from $19.90/mo per user |
 |
Close.io | from $25/mo per user |
 |
Hubspot | free |
 |
Zoho CRM | free |
 |
Freshsales | free |
CRM implementation challenges
Implementing a CRM can be challenging due to various reasons. One major obstacle is change management: convincing employees to adopt new processes and technologies requires significant training and buy-in. Another hurdle is data quality issues: integrating different systems and cleansing existing data can be time-consuming and costly. Additionally, user adoption rates may be low if the system is not intuitive or user-friendly.
Another common issue when it comes to implementing a CRM involves cultural changes within an organization, such as shifting from sales-driven to customer-centric approaches. This requires leadership commitment and clear communication to stakeholders.
One thing to look out for before committing to a CRM is what kind of migration options are available. Is it easily possible to import existing data? For instance, in SPP, you can easily import your existing customer accounts via a CSV file. If not, does the CRM company offer a migration service?
How SPP integrates with your CRM
Regardless of the type of CRM you’ve chosen, Service Provider Pro will become a vital part in your tool stack.
We already integrate natively with ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp, but if you’ve set your eyes on a different CRM, you can use our webhooks module to send data to it—from newly created accounts to paid invoices.
Improve your customer experience by sending relevant data to your CRM so that you can access all information in one place.
The best of all, we have a native CRM feature that you can use to save all your data. There’s no need to get an external CRM any longer if you run your agency operations with Service Provider Pro.
Summary
Customer relationship management is a topic any agency should take into account if they want to improve their processes. CRMs allow them to save any kind of data about their customers, from purchases to branding guidelines.
By making use of that data, agencies are able to give their sales team better data, which lead to better conversions. Once the leads made their purchases, they can be kept happy, improving customer satisfaction, and increasing their lifetime value.
