On Tuesday, we gave you an inside look at the HubSpot CRM, HubSpot’s biggest product release coming from INBOUND 2014. As Brian Halligan, the co-founder and CEO at HubSpot, mentioned on stage, the HubSpot CRM is a platform built to do the work for you. It takes the busy work and data entry out of a salesperson’s day, freeing up time where they can be more effective and productive. Like us, we’re sure you’re super excited to see this platform in action!
But from a marketer’s perspective, I’m the most excited for my sales team to have a platform that incorporates the work we’re doing on the marketing side, and empowers them with information about their prospects that will help them have more meaningful conversations and close more deals.
What’s so special about CRM integration with your marketing platform?
For current HubSpot customers who are using a separate, potentially more outdated or data entry-driven CRM, with HubSpot’s CRM is that we don’t have to worry about external integrations or APIs needing to be used to have your marketing and sales platforms talk to each other. All of your data lives in one portal; the interface operates the same, many of the contact properties are the same and you can even see a prospect’s digital body language (the ways in which they have engaged with your content) all in the same place.
For the folks who aren’t currently using a CRM, this is the platform you need. Not only is it robust and powerful, but it’s easy to use AND will save your sales team hours of works wasted each week on manual data entry.
In fact, as HubSpot was developing the CRM, they conducted an internal study and found that on average their sales reps were spending 1.5 hours per day entering data into their CRM. That’s a total of 7.5 hours per week, which practically equates to an entire day’s of work. Just entering data. And the opportunity cost of them entering all that data? They’re not selling.
But when they are selling, you want that time to be the most productive it possibly can be and you want to arm them with the information they need to make the sale. With the HubSpot CRM, your sales reps will have this data at their fingertips.
Every touch they have with marketing collateral - including your website, blog, social media, content offers, and more - will be housed under the prospect’s contact record in the CRM. Your sales reps will be able to actually see what their prospects are interested without ever picking up the phone. And when they do finally pick up the phone, you know the conversation will be tailored to their needs.
There is no other platform that empowers both your sales and marketing teams like this. It fosters the unification by keeping both departments on the same platform, speaking the same language and seamlessly sharing information to help both teams succeed.
With the ultimate goal being to grow your business, HubSpot is the tool that will help you get there.
Who can you expect from HubSpot's CRM?
Of course, we know there are many widely used and successful CRMs available to businesses trying to organize their selling process. But while they are versatile, these CRMs can be expensive on a per-user basis and also have a sharp learning curve. By adopting the HubSpot CRM (which is free for all customers - that’s right, free), users can get the same organizational system without having to pay for functionalities they may never use.
In its current state, which we know will just get better as the product evolves, the Hubspot CRM is perfect for small and medium size businesses looking to turn their organization into an inbound selling machine, but may not need or want to invest in an enterprise CRM. There is a huge advantage in efficiency for small business owners to adapt the new CRM:
- The CRM will have relatively little learning curve because its UI is very similar to that of the marketing software.
- Contact information and task assignment can be edited and referenced as you search for it; query response time is much faster than the competition.
- The Tasks organizer is perfect for the small business owners that have to be doing a little bit of everything, it gives them a complete schedule of sales contacts.
The presentation feature is also an incredibly innovative tool (no other CRM has this tool). Not only is it great for sales reps to leverage content during the selling process; it also gives quantitative feedback to the seller about the content in the presentation. The tool records the number of views on each slide as well as the time spent on each slide.
Hubspot has, from the start, strived to automate the lead generation process as much as possible and make reporting easy. The new CRM is a welcome addition to an already stellar platform!
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