A simple, easy-to-use piece of technology that maps the entire customer experience – from when someone is first contacted to when they close as a paying customer – has become the cornerstone of a successful sales strategy. Software can really help SaaS companies scale up and measure growth.
Customer experience is paramount to everything we do, especially with selling. Whether your goal is to improve brand recall or increase leads via your website, building a relationship and connecting your brand to your website visitors is key.
Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage and analyse customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. A successful CRM improves business relationships with customers, assisting in customer retention and driving sales growth.
CRMs are designed to compile as much information as possible across different channels between the customer and company. A good CRM system will map important touchpoints (e.g. your website, telephone, live chat, direct mail, marketing materials and social media) to form a comprehensive understanding of your customer. In your CRM, you can see the history of a contact, including personal information, purchase history, buying preferences and any other important details.
So where are you at with mapping your business goals and customer touchpoints with technology?
HubSpot's growth stack is an ideal way to help B2B SaaS businesses grow with a clean way to reach, connect and sell and service a customer. You can send and track emails and follow a contact's journey from when they view content on a page to when they're ready to try or buy and till after they become closed revenue. At its core lies the ability to create a smooth, hassle-free experience for the buyer.
Here are 8 steps to get you started with HubSpot Sales and CRM so you can sell better:
The inbound sales process simplifies how you think about getting a sale. The start could be to create a simple process map that clearly outlines customer touchpoints based on the buyer's journey.
Identifying what causes a prospect to become closer to closing will draw out the steps that help your conversion rates.
Once you have a sales process, you now want to look at creating pipelines that work for your business. For example, we recommend having a warm leads pipeline, hot leads pipeline and a cold leads pipeline to help deliver the necessary actions that move a lead through the sales funnel.
If you have used excel sheets or another CRM before using the HubSpot CRM, you'll need to get a CSV version of all your data. Note that the HubSpot CRM has Contacts, Companies and Deals that are distinct instances, so you'll have to create individual CSV files for them.
Make sure you associate contacts to their companies if you have the automatic association turned off.
Now that you've defined your sales process, it's time to set up your CRM with deal stages for that pipeline. Each deal stage should map to your sales process. Add your first deal for a company and associate a contact to it.
You might need more than one pipeline depending on your workflow.
People often confuse sales pipeline stages with tasks, but they're different. Tasks make the sales process easier and help your salesperson move the deal or contact closer to a sale. They are steps that your sales team needs to perform effectively to move a lead down the funnel.
You can quickly and easily add more contacts to a call queue and get your sales team to complete a list of calls so that you're always moving toward your targets and business goals.
Make your emails work for you. Use templates with personalisation tokens to personalise your messages every time. This simplifes the process and also makes emailing scalable.
You also have the neat ability to schedule and automate so that your timing is spot-on. Timing is everything with making a sale. Make it easy for you and those in your team and increase engagement with your emails.
Your complete system to reach and connect with a prospect or lead is ready to go. Take it out for test run and make some calls or send out some emails. Track all the important details and use technology to achieve your business goals.
If you're not sure where to start learn more about our CRM workshop and see if you'd want to work with us on creating your scaling up system.