A CRM Is A Very Simple Concept That Will Help Generate Revenue, Here's How – Episode 98

There will be people listening to this who are seasoned CRM pros who could teach us a thing or two about CRM, and they're probably thinking, for God's sake, guys, this is pretty basic stuff. This podcast, this episode of the podcast, like many of our podcasts, is aimed at people who are not using technology, whether it be, you know, digital marketing techniques and tools. And CRM is at the heart of a lot of the work that we do. So it's really, we're keeping this simple to make sure that everybody grasps how, just how simple a CRM is, what it actually does, but how incredibly powerful it is.

Yeah, how life changing it is because I think, yeah, to that point, I mean, we know life changing.

Well, Jesus.

Business life changing, I don't know, you know, what I'm trying to say. It is transformative.

Ah, that's the word I was I was thinking, is he gonna say transformer?

Yeah. I think it is profoundly transformative if you get it right.

Okay, welcome back to Digital Marketing from the coalface. Um, we're gonna do some podcasts, um, over the next week or so, a couple of weeks about rev ops or revenue operations. Um, but what we thought would be good is prior to getting into talking about revenue operations, rev ups, um, it might be good just to kind of have a bit of a chat about some of the key components of rev ops, um, and probably the key list of key components.

If that's a thing it is, we'll roll with it.

Um, the key ist component, um, arguably is a customer relationship management system or CRM. Um, so what we thought we would do with this podcast is, um, have a bit of a, an irreverent Crawl through the idea of a CRM. I think most businesses have either flirted with and abandoned the concept of using a dedicated CRM, or in some instances, people have cobbled together a CRM that isn't really a CRM using spreadsheets.

By any chance? Yeah, that sort of thing.

Um, other people, uh, like us have bought into the idea of a CRM, started using it, drifted away from it, come back to it, tried it again and realised just how useful it is. Yep. Um, it surprises me how often when we talk about, um, a CRM with customers and potential customers, they kind of are not that sure. Or they don't think it's right for them or they're a bit confused. I mean, you know, occasionally still you'll say, do you have a CRM? And the response will be, what's one of them? Yep. And that's fair enough. It's not a dumb thing to say. It's, you know, it's, it's like, you know, it's, it's perfectly reasonable not to know what CRM is. Um, I, you know, I don't necessarily think that it's a complicated concept. It's really just a, a single view if you like, and hopefully comprehensive view of customers. Yeah. And that helps with communications. It helps with revenue generation. Um, it helps company wide better understand, um, what's going on with the particular customer and um, how to best serve and get the best revenues from those customers.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really tempting when you're talking about CRM to sort of distill it down, isn't it? And just be like, well, you know, how is it any different from a spreadsheet, for example? You know, it is effectively a collection of all the sort of leads that you have, all the people who've got in touch with you or who are potential targets for your sales team or whatever. Yeah. And a lot of organisations will be doing that with spreadsheets to a degree. This is just a sort of shiny interface on a spreadsheet really, isn't it? I think at its core. No, no. Fair enough. Well, yeah.

Well, yeah. I mean, yeah. If you think of if you think of a spreadsheet as being a source of data. Yeah, then yeah, it kind of is. But I guess just to outline, uh, in very simple terms how we use our CRM, we use HubSpot CRM. And if you're not using a CRM at all and you want to, um, use a CRM, I would strongly recommend taking a look at HubSpot. It's very simple.

It's free.

Very easy to use. It's very free, very free.

If such a thing exists, they'll pay you to use it.

Yeah, you can obviously pay an upgrade and do all sorts of things. Um, but yeah, it's, it's certainly something they use as a loss leader. Um, it's a powerful piece of kit, right? So let's just talk through, um, the process for us, let's say we're doing some, you know, we've got some organic search, which is working well, or we're running some paid search. Somebody's trying to solve a business challenge, um, that we are in, in the market to help them solve. They find us on Google in an organic search or in a paid search. They click through to a web page, they read the web page. They think to themselves, these guys look like they might be able to help us. And on that page, we've got different ways of getting in touch. Like click an email, uh, start a live chat.

Mhm.

Or fill in a form. Yep. So let's assume this person fills in a form. First name, last name, email address, and a bit of information if they want, about the kind of help that they're looking for. The click a button. What happens next? Alex?

Well, all of that information gets automatically imported into our CRM.

How does that happen?

That sounds.

Like magic.

It does sound like magic, doesn't it? Code geek stuff. I don't really understand any of that bit, but it's dead simple.

The way the way you can do it. Lots of different ways. But the way we do it is the forms that sit in our web pages are actually.

HubSpot.

Forms. Yeah. Um, which means when you're filling in one of those forms, you're not filling in a Joomla or a WordPress form or whatever, which then magically gets squirted across using Zapier or some other clever stuff into the CRM. It is actually a HubSpot form on our website that people are filling in. So just think, um, it's just like it's kind of embedded. Yeah. It's not kind of embedded. It is embedded. It's the HubSpot form is embedded on the web page. People fill it in and then they then appear in our CRM. They're in our CRM. What else happens?

Um, well, HubSpot does a load of other stuff, doesn't it? So it pulls in data, I think from their URL about their company, if it can. Um, and brings all that in. Um, what else does happen? I mean, in HubSpot, one of the things I really like.

What happens at red evolution.

Oh, you look at them and it's always you. Unfortunately, I'm.

Thinking we're simpler because that isn't true, is it what you just said?

Is it not?

No. What else happens?

Um.

Does it magically appear in Slack? So everyone in the organisation can see that John Smith from Wiggins Engineering has just sent us an enquiry.

That's true. Yes.

Why do we do that, Alex?

Uh, so that we don't miss them, but also so that everyone's got visibility over it and everyone knows what's happening. And it's not just sort of. I think it's good.

That the team can see that John Wiggins from can't remember the name Acme engineering wasn't was it?

It's always Acme engineering.

But I think I said something else then. Anyway, it was John's. No, it was John Smith from Wiggins Engineering, not John Wiggins from Acme Engineering. But yeah, we've got visibility. So we get an email, um, which doesn't just go to me, it goes to you as well. Yeah. But basically and it goes into Slack so that the rest of the team who are not receiving those informal emails can see, oh, there's been an enquiry, which is nice because, you know, that's a result of the work that they're doing. So it's good. And then it's in the CRM, right? I'll stop talking for a nanosecond. Go on.

Well, I was just going to say that critically as well because, you know, even if you take all of those integrations out of the picture, the fact that it goes into HubSpot portal that anybody can log into is also really important because I think most of the people listening to this, the process currently is somebody feels in a form on your website and somebody, probably only one person gets an email and that, you know, even just at that level, HubSpot or CRM, a good CRM puts you kind of miles ahead because the amount of clients we talk to where they're like, oh yeah. And by the way, can you add another email address onto our forms? Because at the moment they're only going to John in business development and he doesn't tell us what, you know, enquiries we've generated and that sort of thing. The one of the main selling points, I think, of something like HubSpot is that anybody can log in and see exactly what's happening at any one time. It'll tell you how many conversions have come from a specific page, how many form fills have come from a specific page, and if it's been driven by an AdWords campaign, which AdWords campaign and what keyword and all of that good stuff. So I'm probably skipping massively ahead. But I think, you know, on the subject of sort of visibility, that is the key selling point to it really in my eyes from.

Any, any, uh, fellow pedants listening to what Alex just said, who also picked on the thing that he said there, which was an amount of clients instead a number of clients then yeah, I'm with you. I was letting him, I was letting him run with it for a while. Just just to, uh, just, just to humor him. But yeah, I didn't miss it. Don't worry.

Good. You and the other pedants will be happy.

Right. So clarity founders somehow might have been word of mouth and on a web page. HMM, this sounds interesting. Type type type. Click a button. We now have them in our CRM. Our CRM is hooked up to Slack off. All the team can see as an enquiry come in from whoever. *boof* We get an email. We can then go into the CRM and start a conversation with this potential customer. We can mark that customer as an opportunity or a lead or anything you want. Really. We can decide what they are. Um, and we can then start a conversation with them by offering a Zoom chat or a face to face chat or a phone call, whatever. And that can be done within the CRM.

Yeah. Well, that's the really nice.

Why don't you do it that way then? Because you never.

Do. Because I'm awful and old fashioned and go straight to my email inbox. But it is a really bad habit because if you do do it in the CRM, it means that everybody else can see exactly what conversation you've been having, and they can see all the messages listed out. And to be fair, I think with HubSpot, you can integrate it with your gmail, can't you? So that automatically.

It's not just gmail. I mean, if I reply, um, if I start an email conversation in HubSpot and then continue that conversation in my email, HubSpot has been set up. So it actually intercepts and that information. Why is it a good thing that the conversation I'm having say, it's me with this, you know, John Smith from Wiggins Engineering, why? Why is it a good thing that that conversation is in the CRM as opposed to in my email inbox?

There have been situations, for example, because David is, as you all know, if you listen, notorious for just sort of jetting off to play golf in the middle of the day and not doing any real work where one of us is out of the office and somebody else has to pick up the threads of a conversation, and instead of guessing or asking the client, you know, oh, you know, where are you with this conversation? You can literally just see what's the last message that David sent was last message he sent David and just sort of pick it up seamlessly.

And even in a small organization like us, there's only ten or eleven of us, um, eleven. You know, even in a small organisation like us, it's good that people can actually see what's going on with the conversation. You know, it takes a little bit of time for people to get switched on to the idea that that conversation is in the CRM, and so they don't have to send you an email saying, what's going on with this client? What have we said we'll do for them? What are they looking for? I can maybe help or whatever. It's like all in that one place and that's good. So the conversation starts. And what else do we do at that stage using the HubSpot CRM? It just say, if you don't know, you probably don't.

Know I do. Please, sir, can I go? Um, so the, um, there's also a deals dashboard or a sales pipeline in HubSpot CRM. So you can just take a contact and say, you know, this, this person from this company is actually a prospective client. We've sent them a proposal, there's a deal on the table and bring them into your deals pipeline, which just lets you sort of see, you know, these are all the proposals that we've sent out. This is where we are with them. So like we have our deals pipeline broken up into the specific stages that we go through, like having sent a proposal, having had a discovery, having won the work, that sort of thing. And that's all highly customisable. So you can set that up however your business works basically, and then everybody again can just see at a glance, this is how many sort of proposals we've got out. This is where they are. This is how many deals we've got coming through. Yeah.

And I think that's um, there will be people listening to this who are seasoned CRM pros who could teach us a thing or two about CRM. And they're probably thinking, for God's sake, guys, this is pretty basic stuff. This podcast, this episode of the podcast, like many of our podcast, is aimed at people who are not using technology, whether it be, you know, um, digital marketing techniques and tools and, um, other things. And, you know, CRM is at the heart of a lot of the work that we do. So it's really, we're keeping this simple, um, to make sure that everybody grasps how, just how simple a CRM is what it actually does, but how incredibly powerful it is.

Yeah. How life changing it is because I think yeah, to that point, I mean.

Life changing.

Well.

Jesus.

All right.

It's not life changing.

Business. Life changing. I don't know you know what I'm trying to say. It is transforming.

Aaaah. That's the word. I was I was thinking, is he going to say transformatory?

Yeah.

Buzzword bingo. I think we've just about ticked. Ticked them all off. Now through the ninety seven previous podcast. This is number ninety eight, I think.

Um, but no, I think it is, it is profoundly transformative if you get it right. And I think what's really interesting is the number of clients and this isn't, you know, we're not having a go at anybody because it is difficult if you don't know about.

This stuff.

Clients, it is an amount of clients. Yeah. Um, if you don't know about this stuff, it's really hard to implement obviously, but the amount of clients we talk to who just aren't doing anything, um. Who aren't doing anything of the sort and then do have loads of sort of visibility problems. They're not sure how many you know, people they've got on various hooks, how many proposals they've sent out. They're not sure what sales are doing. They're not sure what the marketing team are actually doing or what conversations are being had where. And it just sort of eliminates all of that really.

Yeah. So going back to what you said about, um, you know, the conversation is started, we'll then, you know, very easy click create a deal associated with that contact. Once we understand what they're looking for, we'll create a deal, um, that goes into the deal pipeline. You can set up the stages as stages are very simple. Initial conversation provided proposal, ongoing conversation, win lose. You know, it's that kind of thing. You can make them as convoluted and complex as you want.

People do. They have.

Multiple.

Stages.

And they have multiple pipelines for different types, different aspects of the business. And that's all fine. But the important thing is, sorry to hog the microphone just for one second. The important thing is that you get an enquiry. That enquiry goes into the CRM, which is a database of people and business and companies. You then create a deal so that you now know what that person is looking for. And, and that then starts in, in. It starts in progress. That's the word I'm looking for. Starts in train, in transit, in what's the word I'm looking for? It starts, it starts a series of events that will help you either, you know, find, you know, secure a new piece of business or establish that you're not a good fit for that, uh, person that made the enquiry and, and treat that accordingly.

Yeah. And critically also lets you reflect on the sort of aftermath of that too. I mean, one of the things the end of our pipeline is a kind of win lose thing is so that we can see really quickly, you know, how many deals are we winning, how many are we losing? And, you know, and then you can also very easily go through the ones you've lost and say, okay, are there any kind of commonalities here? What are all these jobs? You know, what similarities can we see that tell us that actually we shouldn't bother next time. Sending a proposal for a job that fits those criteria or whatever, so you can learn interesting lessons from it. But no, the other the other thing I was going to say about it is that we don't really because we're quite sort of hands on about managing it. But you can automate all of those stages of deals pipeline as well, can't you, in most CRMs, so that when you send out a proposal, they automatically get moved into a certain place.

And you can also set them as whether you automatically move them from one stage of the pipeline to another stage of the pipeline, or whether you just drag and drop them manually. That can also trigger actions. So if, for example, uh, we move, we could have a stage that like moves from, you know, initial conversation has requested proposal when you drag it to has requested proposal, a certain person gets emailed with all the information and said, please send the proposal. So it really is visible visibility. So from, from the kind of coalface aspect, uh, it helps you get shit done. Um, from, uh, a senior management level, it lets them drop in and say, what's happening? What enquiries are coming in? Where are those enquiries? How much potential work have we got coming through? What does the pipeline look like? All of that stuff is dead easy to do using this free HubSpot CRM. There are other CRMs available, like Pipedrive and Salesforce.

Yeah.

What else? Other other ones. Anyway, there are other, um, plenty of others. But the reason we keep harping on about, um, about, uh, HubSpot is because it's free and it's good. It's simple, it works. It's not hard to get your head around it. You're literally talking like invest half an hour. Yeah. And you'll, and you'll kind of get your head around it. Now, that's not to say that there isn't, there aren't loads of other things you can do with it. There are. And you can certainly finish up with, with a, you know, a more involved and complex, um, set of, uh, pipelines and processes and things. Um, but essentially, you know, you've got this database of people, you know, who they are, where they work. You can assign a buyer persona to them. So you know the kind of information that you might want to feed. You might want them to put, you might want them. You might want to put them in a marketing automation thread so that you start drip feeding them information if you wanted. If you want to do that, sorry, what hiccups?

That's I think. Yeah. Because I think that's the other thing that an awful lot of people use these CRMs for very successfully is the whole like nurture process, right? So it's like if you're going to drip feed people information, if you're going to send them sort of automated emails that are designed to encourage them to engage more and more frequently with your organisation, it's really good for doing that because it lets you very quickly sort people into piles and say, okay, this person is in a large enterprise level, you know, engineering company, send them this sort of information, and this person runs a mom and pop business, send them this kind of information. So yeah, yeah.

It's good. Um, so. What other information do people need or care about in this kind of high level. You know, the reason that we're doing this little chat about, um, customer relationship management systems CRM just now is because we're going to be moving on to talk about revenue operations, rev ops. Um, what else do people need to know?

Well, I think without putting too much of a downer on it, the thing that's probably worth talking about is what they can't do, right? Because we've talked a lot about automation. And I think one of the things that we come up against sometimes is when you tell people about CRMs and what they're capable of, they get very excited about it, and then they go ahead and set it all up. And then they don't sort of use it in anger, as you're quite fond of saying. They what they won't do is magically sort of win you business or, you know, take all of the work out and automate every part of the process. You still have to be in there and you still have to be thinking about things. I mean, you say that our sales pipeline is quite simple now, right? But it's gone through multiple iterations and it has been much more complex in the past. And I think that process of kind of continually using the tool, making it part of your everyday process, remembering to log in and look at things, remembering to assign things and and reflect on whether or not things are working is like a really important part of the process. They're not magic by any stretch of the imagination.

No, no. Um, they will help you as we've just been outlining, they'll help you manage leads, put them into a process and try and get them from, you know, not knowing who you are to knowing who you are and wanting to do business with you. Just simple contact management. So it's like, you know, it's a, it's a single source of truth. Yep. Um, and it's a case of having, um, the people. All right. Peter, we're just recording a podcast. If Caron's upstairs, if you want to... Uh, right. Okay. Carry on. Just take it. It's okay. It's digital marketing from the coalface. So it's live. It's in the studio. Noise is happening in the background.

Interruption's encouraged.

So yeah, Peter, Peter from Ellington Mennie has just come in.

Yeah.

This will all stay in the podcast, by the way.

Just so you.

Know. Yeah. Um, so, you know, even basic like contact management is, you know, it's, it's this single source of truth because you're not in a situation where, you know, the sales team have got their little black books and yellow stickies and stuff like that. And the marketing team are not, not in the loop with what they say, you know, with the sales teams contact, it's like everybody has got that same group, that same database of if.

It does stop awkward, um, mistakes as well, doesn't it? Because there's definitely been times in the past with clients and stuff where, you know, the marketing team will be emailing somebody and then the sales team will get in touch to offer them a deal as if they've never heard of a company before. And it's a sort of cold introduction. And those kind of things are really jarring for potential customers, those sort of mistakes.

It's something that really annoys me when people speak to me as if, and they think they're the first point of contact with I've had with that. I mean.

Let me introduce you to my business. It's like, it really.

Doesn't make you feel valued. It makes you realise that they're just phoning it in, as you like to say, it's awful. And it kind of stops that. Yeah. I mean, you can also, I guess, you know, you could use the the contact information, the CRM data, you could use it in a way that's disingenuous. I mean, you know, John Smith again from Wiggins Engineering calls up speaks to you. You've never dealt with him before. You pull up the CRM. Oh hi John. Yeah. Good to speak to you. Hey, how's the wife and kids? I believe you. You were on holiday in Florida recently, and because you've put it all in the CRM and that. Yeah. I mean, some people do use it like that. I mean, it shines through, doesn't it, when.

People.

You know, speaking.

Absolutely. But it is really useful. I mean, like, like you say in that example, you know, if you don't get creepy with it, but you can pull it up very quickly and see that, you know, John Smith has these pain points. These are his problems. These are the solutions he's been interested in. It doesn't mean you can actually have a useful conversation with him instead of wasting ten minutes of everybody's time. So yeah.

Yeah. That's right. Um, yeah. Things like um, managing email communications with customers. Again, the email communications that are relevant company wide can all be kept in the in the CRM. It can. It can certainly assist the sales team if they're if they're using it properly. So you know, to i.e. to make sure they fully understand where the client's coming from, the kind of person they are, the best way to approach them, whether they just expect the sort of hard sell which nobody likes, let's face it, or whether, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a better approach. The marketing automation we've spoken about where you can like put people into, um, I can't even remember the name. Like, you know, like a workflow. Thank you. Yeah. You can put them into a workflow. Um, you know, there's also little things like with HubSpot, like you can, you've got all of that data in your pocket because there's an app that lets you connect to the CRM. So if you're actually out and about on the road, if you're a salesperson, for example, getting ready access to all that information is, is a really, uh, is a really good thing to have.

Well, It's also worth pointing out as well that with HubSpot and I think with Salesforce too, a lot of these platforms are sort of their CRMs also connect with a larger suite of sort of marketing and sales tools. And certainly with HubSpot, it's just really interesting and useful to be able to do things like track your how many leads your AdWords campaigns have generated, for example, in, in Hubspot's AdWords dashboard. So they do integrate with like, if you have other subscriptions with these SaaS companies, you can share that data around and use it in really useful ways.

That's right, that's right. Okay. So are we really set out to do today was kind of take a high level view of the, um, of the concept of a customer relationship management system, a CRM. Um, it's certainly not something to be frightened of. I would be amazed if you didn't benefit from implementing one if you don't currently use one. Um, like I said, we flirted with it, thought it was the best thing since sliced bread for some reason drifted away from it, maybe just got too tied up with operations and things. Uh, now it's just, it's just my go to tool. It really is. And it helps everybody understand what's going on in the business.

A question that people listening might find useful and that I genuinely don't know is how difficult are they to actually sort of set up from a technical standpoint? Like, is it very simple, like drop some code in or is there more you're doing?

Yeah. Well, when you say drop code in, you mean like if you, yeah, yeah. If you want to put the um capture forms, you don't even need to do that. Um, you can, you can set it up so that the CRM intercepts whatever forms you're using on the website right now. What I would say is, um, if you do get enquiries coming in, uh, phone enquiries, email enquiries, things like that, um, there will be ways of, you know, there are ways of importing information, etc.. And by the way, most CRMs do have a tool built into them That allows you to make phone calls directly from the CRM because most people are. Yeah, most people are using, um, voice over IP, etc. these days and using apps and things to make phone calls. And HubSpot is no different. Um, make sure when you're getting enquiries that are not coming via web forms, that the first thing you do is go and put them in the CRM. It's a very slight overhead just to sit and put the basic information in. And then from that point forward, manage the whole process. Um, the software itself, um, in with HubSpot, Pipedrive, all of these things. It's SaaS software as a service. So there's nothing to install. There's no server management, there's, there's no software updates, maintenance, nothing. It's just a case of use it. And, um, and that's, that's all it's so it is not complicated to set up. It's literally, um, sign up, start using it, you know, it's, uh, you know, we've certainly helped, uh, businesses set up the CRM and get going with it. And it's and that's, that's fine. If you want somebody to do a bit of handholding. Um, but it's, um, it's inexpensive even if you go down that route and the software itself, the basic software is free. And when I say basic software, it's kind of all you need and it's free. Um.

I don't even think we do pay for hubspot's CRM packages, CRM.

No, I don't think so. No, no, we do. We buy other things off them, but not that it's kind of, um, it's kind of free. Um, okay. So if you're not using CRM, take a look at HubSpot. Certainly take a look at others as well. Um, it'll certainly help the way that you manage enquiries. Customers, make sure that deals get attended to, don't get left somewhere accidentally and opportunities missed, etc.. Uh, any questions on this? You know, I'll get in touch with us. Um, red evolution dot com. Like I said, we're going to be talking, uh, in the coming weeks about revenue operations, Revops, and we felt it was worth just having a quick overview of crm's.

Integral to it really, isn't it?

In preparation for that, so that we can kind of steam in next week and just say, right, so you've got a CRM and if you don't know what that is, listen to last week's episode, um, and move on to talking about the broader subject of Revops.

Definitely.

Okay.

Great stuff.

Yeah. So we're just about to head into a heat wave.

We are, we are.

The sun is just coming out now here in, uh, in beautiful Royal Deeside. Um, looking forward to a weekend and in fact, a whole week next week of sun splitting the trees type weather. Yeah. So the government obviously have put out a health warning because, um people.

Can't.

Be trusted. People need to be told it's sunny. Apparently it's it's not that obvious.

Don't forget to drink water.

Yeah. Apparently that's not obvious either. Um, other than that, have a great weekend. Alex.

Definitely. You too. Thanks for listening.