In the pursuit of growth and more customers, the single biggest improvement you can make is by implementing a CRM (customer relationship management) software.
CRM software that tracks every interaction you have with prospects and customers. A properly deployed CRM system is an immensely useful tool, integrating data from various sources into one central place for marketing, sales, and service teams to access.
READ: Marketing managers guide to HubSpot
According to HubSpot, the benefits of implementing a CRM include:
- The use of CRM can increase sales by up to 29%.
- Sales teams that use CRM can increase productivity by up to 34%.
- The average return on investment for a CRM is $8.71 for every dollar spent.
- Organisations that use CRMs have increased rates of customer retention and satisfaction.
- CRMs improve data accessibility. And data accessibility can shorten the sales cycle by 8-14%.
TL;DR 😉
Want to increase sales by 29% and productivity by 34%? Great, then get HubSpot CRM! Here are 7 more reasons:
- It automates your customer data collection
- Use built-in pop-up forms to supercharge your lead gen
- Enhance your buyer personas with data enrichment
- Use lists to segment your audience and provide personalised lead nurturing
- Track your website visitors to improve decision-making
- Create better customer experiences by centralising your contact data
- Use AI-powered lead scoring to prioritise your leads and focus on those that are most likely to become customers
There are a whole bunch of CRMs out there but as the title of this article suggests (because not all CRMs are created equal and they don’t all offer the same features) we’re going to take a look at the HubSpot CRM and the ways it can improve your customer acquisition.
READ: An honest review of HubSpot Vs. SharpSpring
1. Automate your customer data collection
Sales teams spend a lot of time doing things other than sales. According to HBR, their time spent on pre-sale and post-sale activities has increased by 15% and time spent on non-sales activities (i.e admin) is up an incredible 21%.
READ: Customer Acquisition Cost: Why it’s so important for your business
This includes things like replying to emails, creating tasks, updating contact records, and gathering the internal resources to support their deals.
Currently, sales teams only spend about 39% of their time doing actual sales-related activities like presenting and negotiating deals.
With HubSpot CRM, you can automate data collection by tracking emails, website interactions, and allow your sales team to create tasks directly from a contact’s record.
This means sales teams spend less time doing admin and spend more time engaging with prospects and creating deals.
2. Use pop-up forms to supercharge your lead generation
There has always been a lot of debate around pop up forms. Most people agree that they can be annoying but it’s hard to argue that they aren’t effective.
In a study of nearly 2 billion pop-ups, they found that the top 10% averaged a conversion rate of over 9% while the best of those exceeded 50%.
READ: 10 conversion optimisation techniques to boost your leads now!
HubSpot CRM allows you to create pop-up forms triggered by either length of a scroll, visit duration, or exit intent. This gives you the flexibility to test various offers and CTAs with your website visitors as well as the timing of your pop-ups.
3. Enhance your buyer personas
Understanding your buyer personas is a critical aspect of any customer acquisition strategy but ensuring you continue to enhance that understanding is just as important for long term success.
Corel Software, the company behind tools like CoralDraw and WinZip, saw their revenue increase by 106% by enhancing their understanding of their customers.
There are two ways to do this with HubSpot CRM. The first is to analyse your database to getter a better understanding of who you are engaging with and use the info to improve your buyer persona definition.
READ: What is inbound marketing?
The second is through HubSpot data enrichment which enriches each record with dozens of useful details about a contact and their company.
This additional information ensures you continue to develop what you know about your customers and use that information to inform your customer acquisition strategies.
4. Segment your database for more personalised lead nurturing
Personalising your communication is an essential element of a successful customer acquisition strategy.
According to Accenture, 43% of customers are more willing to make purchases from companies that personalise their experiences.
One of the ways to do this is by creating lists in HubSpot based on different contact properties. You can segment your audience by industry, company size or job title or base it on behavioural metrics like lead status or go even deeper and segment according to pain point or challenge.
Once you have segmented your database you can start creating lead nurturing strategies for each of your lists, taking into account their specific needs, and providing a personalised experience.
READ: How to convert free trial and freemium users into paying customers.
5. Make better decisions by tracking your website visitors
One of the ways to improve decision making is to gather more data. According to Mckinsey, businesses that focus on data are 23 times more likely to acquire customers.
A big challenge to data-based decision making is collecting the right data. If you are focusing on acquiring new customers, understanding visitor behaviour on your website can give you important insights into a prospect’s readiness to buy.
READ: 8 Strategies to improve your landing page conversion rate (with examples)
HubSpot CRM tracks all your website activity and connects it to specific contact records, giving you a clear view of your prospects’ behaviour.
This can be used to determine a visitor’s intent allowing sales reps to act quickly and engage customers when they are ready to buy.
6. Centralise all your data for a better customer experience
A significant benefit of any CRM is that it centralises your customers’ information which acts as a roadmap for the needs of each of your prospects.
Since interactions are stored on each contact’s centralised record, sales reps and customer support teams can analyse past engagements to determine the best method for approaching a customer.
READ: Do you know what your NPS is? You should.
This is particularly valuable from a customer experience perspective. 68% of people say that they would pay more for a better experience and that by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.
7. Prioritise your efforts with AI-powered predictive lead scoring
Timing is everything.
Reach out to leads too early and you could scare them off. Reach out too late and they might head off to one of your competitors.
According to research done by Close, the chances of engaging with a sales qualified lead is 100 times higher if you reach out within the first 5 minutes, after which the drop is significant.
The key is measuring a prospect’s sales-readiness and understanding what actions might indicate they are ready to buy.
READ: 5 Reasons why link building is essential to marketing success.
HubSpot CRM, with the help of machine learning, uses predictive lead scoring to build a custom model and scores every contact in your database, telling you who is most likely to buy.
It gathers information from your website, emails, and social accounts to prioritise leads and make sure you don’t miss those magic moments to convert prospects into customers.
