As you invest in publishing content, engaging with sales leads, and tracking marketing efforts, it’s important to keep track of how well every effort is performing.
More importantly, you need to see how all your efforts are working.together to increase your growth. Using software can help streamline the process. We’ll Let you know your best options.
Jeff Lambert: Hello everybody and welcome to Inbound Academy, brought to you by Rizen. I'm your host, Jeff Lambert. Customer Relationship Management Software. We're going to talk about why it's an increasingly popular option for businesses so they can handle tracking all of their marketing and sales and conduct management and kind of break down how it may be a smart option for your business in terms of adoption. To walk us through this pretty highly technical topic, I've invited Will Avila, who's the COO at Rizen. He's going to talk to us about his experience with CRMs and give you some practical advice about how you could implement this with your own business. Will, thanks for coming by again.
William Avila: Thanks for having me.
Jeff Lambert: Let's talk about CRMs. That is a term, if you Google it, thousands of articles pop up about it, we hear this, that it's a good option for businesses to start using. If we can start off at the basic level, can you just explain what a CRM is?
William Avila: Sure. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management.
Jeff Lambert: Okay.
William Avila: Okay. It's basically software, whether it's you pay a monthly service or you have it installed in your office, and it's used to manage all your company's relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers.
Jeff Lambert: Okay.
William Avila: All of your company's relationships. You're talking to John Smith who is the customer and he called in and he wanted to inquire about your other service that you offer.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: And or it could be a prospect, like somebody who calls in and they are interested in your product or service. That's what I mean by managing the relationship. All right.
Jeff Lambert: This software, it kind of tracks all those items and just keeps it all in one place essentially?
William Avila: Yes. It's stored in a database, that's what it's called technically, and it's basically a hub of all the information for these different interactions. The software support, sales management, marketing actions, deliver actionable insight. For example, let's say they came to your website 30 times and your buy page, right, depending on which software you're using, of course.
Jeff Lambert: Right.
William Avila: Integrates with social media and it overall facilitates team communication. If you have a CRM and you have five sales people and then one leaves-
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: You don't lose those pending sales because versus using Excel, which is Excel can work, but you lose a lot of the power of having it all centrally organized where the person leaves and you grab all their leads and then you read all the notes and you pass it on to the other sales people or the new salesperson.
Jeff Lambert: Got it. Okay. So, we're taking the binder at the desk essentially that sometimes...
William Avila: Sure.
Jeff Lambert: A sales person has, the guy retires and hands it off to the young kid who just stepped in or there's two separate spreadsheets in two different departments-
William Avila: Right.
Jeff Lambert: Keeping track of the same stuff, but it's a little different.
William Avila: Yeah.
Jeff Lambert: This is kind of all bringing that together-
William Avila: Correct.
Jeff Lambert: In a digital way.
William Avila: Correct, yes.
Jeff Lambert: Okay. Why don't we talk about the benefits of using a digital solution like this. What are some of the main reasons if I'm in an office, if I'm in a specific industry setting and I need to kind of unify those efforts a bit more, how can a CRM help me do that?
William Avila: Okay. I'll just kind of list the different benefits. It's going to save you time.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: When you save time, you save money. Versus for example, using Excel and then the Excel was incorrectly updated.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: Or somebody overrode something and you have to spend two, three hours figuring out what the correct data is.
Jeff Lambert: Sure.
William Avila: That kind of uniformity of data will save you time, but not just with that, it'll save you time on, for example, let's say you want to post on social media and one of the solutions offers the ability to do that.
Jeff Lambert: Sure.
William Avila: Instead of having to go to Facebook and then log in and everything else, you can just do that within the software. You know some of the softwares allow you to send emails versus leaving the different platform and it controls all that data.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: There's a lot. I'd say it also organizes your marketing strategy. Say you launched a campaign to attract more, say sales for impact windows and you have a special, a prehurricane special.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: And you are going to email people, your prospects within that database, you're going to start show them a landing page-
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: Of the offer with a special code.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: You're going to announce it on social media as well. You're going to track to see how many people opened the email, how many people actually contacted you back, how many people became customers.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: And you organize all that data into one platform. It organizes a strategy and then I think it's all tying back to saving time and money.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah, sure. And like you said, convenience. If I'm in a situation, like you said, I'm broadcasting on five social media networks, I'm logging into Twitter, I'm logging into Facebook, I'm logging into LinkedIn, I'm looking at all the stats there and I'm posting new content, I'm logging into Mailchimp for email marketing.
William Avila: Right.
Jeff Lambert: I'm going into all these separate platforms.
William Avila: Yeah.
Jeff Lambert: And that takes a lot of time-
William Avila: Yeah.
Jeff Lambert: Especially if you forget your password or something like that.
William Avila: Right.
Jeff Lambert: So you're saying with the CRM, that's really all integrated if you choose one that offers those integrations, you can potentially just have that all under one username?
William Avila: Yeah. They're all different. You're going to find that you may need to log into to something else for certain things.
Jeff Lambert: Sure.
William Avila: All right. Like If you[inaudible 00:06:04] for now at least, today you cannot respond to a... if you have a Facebook group, you cannot respond to a Facebook group within many of the softwares, I think. I don't think any software right now actually.
Jeff Lambert: Right. Yeah.
William Avila: There's still something you have to do.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: But it'll eliminate a lot of other things that can take a lot of time, take a lot of softwares, cost more money.
Jeff Lambert: Right.
William Avila: And just make everything more efficient.
Jeff Lambert: Okay. Can you talk to me a little bit about database management because I'm coming from a situation that I remember where I worked previously, we had two buildings and we were using Legacy Microsoft Office. We're talking-
William Avila: Sure.
Jeff Lambert: About like outlook with contact-
William Avila: Yeah.
Jeff Lambert: With filing but it wasn't integrated in the cloud.
William Avila: Right.
Jeff Lambert: You could have Mary Williams three times on one database-
William Avila: Right.
Jeff Lambert: And twice in the other, and none of the emails are the same, none of the phone numbers are the same.
William Avila: Yeah.
Jeff Lambert: Can CRM help me with my contacts, my database?
William Avila: Yeah, especially now I'm seeing features where CRMs are making catch duplicates, for example. Getting out of these legacy systems, older systems or offloading these Excel documents, there is a technical process to getting it all organized. That is something that we do a lot for-
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: Our customers but once you get it in there, you have that database in there, you have one central system for all your information.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: Right. And It's just very critical to keep everything as uniform and as clean possible because especially as you grow, the problem is not when you have 50, 60 people. The problem is when you have 15,000 people, 20,000 people, thousands of clients, hundreds of prospects. You start making mistakes and errors, your organization is larger, so you really want to have a good database and use a good system-
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: And have good processes in place.
Jeff Lambert: Going back to what you mentioned, the ability to see,like again, Mary Williams, just as an example, she opened the email last week.
William Avila: Right.
Jeff Lambert: She downloaded an offer three days ago.
William Avila: Right.
Jeff Lambert: You can kind of track her interest and her interaction with your brand-
William Avila: Sure.
Jeff Lambert: When using a CRM?
William Avila: Yeah.
Jeff Lambert: That's got to be valuable?
William Avila: Yeah. What you're describing is a cookie tracking. Basically, you came to our site, you filled out your information or you didn't, you navigated through 80 pages.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: Looked at my case studies, looked at my reviews, read a bunch of blog posts and you left. And then you came back a month later and actually filled out the form because you're ready to speak to somebody. Right? You have the power.
Jeff Lambert: Right.
William Avila: Because of that cookie, that tracking capability, I can now see what you did in the past and kind of gauge where you are, how you're doing and not all the softwares offer that capability, that's a good one I'd say. I think something else, just going back to CRMs in general, CRMs are able to work with other tools, so there's a lot of integrations. Mid size businesses have many softwares.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: Whether it's 10 to 40, I think I was reading, but you're paying for different subscriptions. The more that you can get to integrate and talk to each other, the easier it's going to be and maybe you could even cut out a few softwares with a more centralized one, a CRM technically.
Jeff Lambert: Sure.
William Avila: And just to give you an example, say you are a business who depends on, well it depends on who values a phone call as a lead as well as a form.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: Right. And these CRMs aren't going to track the phone calls, so you want to have, lets say something custom, but most of them aren't, so maybe you integrate with a call tracking technology that tells you, "Hey, this call came in." And basically, these two softwares are talking to each other all the time. That's just one example of an integration. You can integrate Mailchimp... integrations are countless really.
Jeff Lambert: Sure. All the while, all of these integrations are saving me time?
William Avila: Sure.
Jeff Lambert: They're giving you a more accurate picture, I think you could say.
William Avila: Yeah. Because you have all the reporting in one spot and these CRMs get all the data in one spot, it's easier to get the data and read the data and gather insights-
Jeff Lambert: Got it.
William Avila: Much faster.
Jeff Lambert: Okay. You're making a lot of sense in terms of the benefits of using a CRM.
William Avila: Right.
Jeff Lambert: Why don't we go ahead and jump into talking about maybe some options that you would recommend? You mentioned there's lots of CRMs out there to choose from. Do you have any guidance on, if I'm a small business, if I'm a law firm, if I'm an installer for construction products, if I'm in a startup?
Speaker 3: Go back.
Jeff Lambert: How much?
Speaker 3: Right to where you started that...
Jeff Lambert: The new question?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that new question.
Jeff Lambert: Okay.
Speaker 3: Can you explain to me how... yeah-
Speaker 4: Yeah, what happened?
Speaker 3: Right before that.
Speaker 4: Did the mic drop?
Speaker 3: Something went out.
William Avila: [inaudible 00:11:01].
Speaker 4: But we're good now.
Speaker 3: Sound good.
William Avila: Do I sound like I know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think so. I think it's going fine.
William Avila: I do.
Speaker 3: I don't know what happened, but I lost the sound on it.
William Avila: Okay.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Jeff Lambert: Nicole brought her slim ball, right?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Jeff Lambert: We're not using them obviously.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we decided to just go...
Jeff Lambert: Is that my slim ball?
Speaker 3: No, that's mine.
Speaker 4: Nicole took it[inaudible 00:11:23].
Speaker 3: No, Nicole took it. Took hers yeah.
Jeff Lambert: Okay.
Speaker 4: All right. So yeah, we'll keep going. I'll find a way to cut this in.
Speaker 3: Alright.
Speaker 4: Just start question three.
Jeff Lambert: Okay. I can see overall the benefits of jumping into a CRM. But you did mention there's a lot of different options to choose from when you're looking for the right fit. You have any advice or guidance on how do I choose the right CRM for me? Or are there CRMs that you've used that you recommend?
William Avila: Every industry, every business is going to have different needs. You want to make sure that you researched the best options for you. For example, a law firm may have different needs versus a contractor, versus somebody who was selling products online. Right? And there is, I don't want to say there's one solution, I would say go through all the tutorials. Number one, do all the demos.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: And every single one of these... Most of the major software, I think all the major softwares, have training tutorials and actually go through them from the beginning to the end, know what you're getting yourself into.
Jeff Lambert: Sure.
William Avila: I think it's important that you get also buy in from your team. One of the biggest funnels is adaptation because you have to learn a whole new system. It's a very painful process. So a large percentage of businesses that cannot convert, right? Whether it's a software wasn't right or whether management didn't help, didn't implement it the right way.
Jeff Lambert: Sure.
William Avila: And I think those are important considerations. Having said that, there are free solutions out there and as of... And these commodities are constantly evolving. I would say for a general one, one that we use that we recommend is HubSpot.
Jeff Lambert: Okay.
William Avila: HubSpot starts of free and as you grow you it's a very scalable solution. Now, I did say its HubSpot, but there are many other companies out there. As the readers or listeners are probably aware of, there's Zoho, Infusionsoft, Salesforce, there is SugarCRM, Pipedrive, all these and I think, like I said, you should look at ones in your industry.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: First and foremost.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: And really understand what you're getting yourself into and understand that you may outgrow a CRM.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: Right? We've done transitions for example, from Zoho to HubSpot, right? Where when we connected two different softwares instead. You need to figure out where your goals are.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: What your challenges are and take a look at all the different benefits, see what's going to resonate most with you.
Jeff Lambert: Sure.
William Avila: And keep... Stay informed of the industry because even though we recommend HubSpot and initially we were not using HubSpot and I am probably one of the more difficult people to convince to change any kind of software.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: Because usually as operations I'm the one implementing it or within project managers. Usually the team I work with is the one having to learn to use these softwares. Not to say that HubSpot is the best, it may not be the best a few years down the road.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: I just want to kind of clarify on that point and be clear to research it. But yeah, that's probably what I recommend.
Jeff Lambert: Okay. And I guess as we wrap up, how do you feel using a CRM Has helped Rizen overall? Where are some of the return on investment items that you've seen over the years?
William Avila: Right. Yeah, I mean we are going... We cannot work with somebody who doesn't have some kind of CRM in place because if you don't have a CRM in place, you don't have your database organized. Right? And what work is, will help someone get on CRM for example. But CRM saves time. I mean, I've been doing this for over 10 years and when CRMs were not as mature as what they are right now and you... these softwares can cut your time by a quarter or half depending on what the task is. And it's a tool that is going to provide transparency and it's going to provide insight much faster than before versus using many different tools and really having a solution that is going to adapt to your business as you grow.
William Avila: You want to think about how you grow, and we found HubSpot's been growing well, and it connects marketing and sales, which is important.
Jeff Lambert: Overall it's been worth the switch?
William Avila: Yeah. I mean there's other features. We could get into features, I don't know if features is important so much, but like, this takes HubSpot will provide SEO guidance, you want to make sure that the softwares talk to each other and you really want to ensure that you have buy in. I think is the biggest thing-
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: Aside from what I recommend. And even though we implement this one, I think that there are different ones for different people.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah.
William Avila: And different budgets. Absolutely.
Jeff Lambert: Overall I think the message that we're trying to get out to listeners is that adopting a CRM is a smart move, especially for a 21st century focus business and it's going to help you grow, but it's important to do your homework in making sure you choose the right one for you.
William Avila: Yes, absolutely.
Jeff Lambert: Okay. Will, thank you so much for coming by to talk about this and we'll certainly keep our users updated as we go through our own CRM experience[inaudible 00:17:35]. Like we said, HubSpot's the right option for us and we would recommend them now, but five years from now, we see where the market goes and we see where the software goes and It's always important to keep changing and updating.
William Avila: You have to.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah. That is the...
William Avila: Must grow[inaudible 00:17:49] to grow.
Jeff Lambert: Yes.
William Avila: And learn.
Jeff Lambert: If we do not grow, we die.
William Avila: Correct.
Jeff Lambert: Yes.
William Avila: Or fall behind.
Jeff Lambert: Right.
William Avila: Or out of business.
Jeff Lambert: Or out of business. And we certainly don't wish that on any of our listeners.
William Avila: Exactly.
Jeff Lambert: We want to see everybody grow.
William Avila: Correct.
Jeff Lambert: And to our listeners and viewers, thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode. Remember we come out with a new episode on a weekly basis now and it's always going to be filled with information that is going to help you grow your business. If you would like to partner with an organization that could help you with your marketing efforts, and they're experienced and they know what they're doing, and they have a great attitude about building a relationship with you, check out Rizen Inbound. You can follow Rizen on social media at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn by searching for the username Rizeninbound. That's one word, Rizeninbound. And remember, if you want to help us out a little bit, please go on the podcast app of your choice. Leave us a review. It always helps us be able to find new listeners and to grow our podcast as a whole. Thanks again for your support. We'll see you on the next episode.
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