COMMENTS
Make perfect sense Pete. But all of your examples point to multi-employee situations. Don't see how it applies to sole proprietorships.
I can more or less answer each of your questions to my satisfaction, I use my Outlook Contact Manager system to track most activity, and of course I have my Hubspot and LivePerson and Google Analytics to help with others.
So why am I an Idiot??
:-)
Hey Doug. I think I need to tone down my rhetoric a bit. I sound like a politician with all of these resolute ideologies.
Of course, there are always edge cases. If none of the questions above apply to you and you're killing your sales numbers, then I guess you don't have to worry about having a CRM.
However, I'd encourage even solopreneurs to consider whether they can truly predict their revenue and if not, why? I was a solopreneur and primary salesperson for 3 years in my own business. I tried to use SFDC, but didn't understand why I should, and therefore, didn't make the effort to really implement it. I too, used a spreadsheet. When I joined HS, I was forced to use it. 9 momnths in, I have no idea how I'd live without it. So, looking back, I now know that If I had better systems for follow up, keeping track of sales stages, making sure I had enough prospects in beginning, middle, end of the process, etc.... I would have closed more deals.
I haven't used Outlook in a year or so, so maybe you can do that in there. But, I think it's pretty easy to get caught up in reactive sales mode instead of proactive sales mode in an email client/calendar.
In my experience, its not that they don't know they need it. Its that they know that it requires some standardization of processes, etc. and they either don't know where to start or aren't willing to invest the time to make a CRM or Contact Management system work for them.
I think you're right, Craig. They don't know where to start or how to make it work for them. I also think they haven't thought through what the lack of having a CRM is costing them OR how a CRM could help them make more $ easier.
That's why I thought this list of questions was spot on.
There are a lot of CRM solutions out there and I am tearing my hair out trying to settle on something. Everything I have tried so far seemed to disappoint me in various ways. Anyone has suggestions on their preferred CRM?
Hi May. I am very partial to Salesforce. We use it very succesfully at HubSpot. It really grows with the organization. However, with your price point, I really am not sure it's worth it. I can't see you ever picking up the phone to sell someone on a $10/month service.
What is it that you're looking for that you're not finding?
Well, we set up the lead generation form for hubspot to track the leads, but we have several different types of leads and conversions we would like to track for an online business.
Prospect Demos / General Prospects
User sign ups
Business Created for free trial
Businesses that will pay for the software
Currently hubspot does not allow us to track these separately.
It would also be nice to have some drip email thing that automatically sends emails to clients on a free trial 7, 15, 25, 29 days into the 30 day free trial. Like something that can do email marketing as well.
I really need something that will allow me to export my contacts at any time.
I think I might have to get Dobes to custom code something into our system to track the leads and conversions separately. Currently on hubspot, all the leads are aggregated into this one long list.
Hey May. This is another issue that you should post up in the success forums. I don't have experience doing this myself, but I'm almost 100% positive that there are ways to determine what kind of conversion is occurring and then download different ones. Please post that in the forum. For your drip email, I'd encourage you to check out Aweber. You can set up HubSpot to send new emails to aweber (or custom code it) and then assign to different buckets for different drip campaigns. It's a pretty simple solution that is also pretty inexpensive.
Hi Pete,
I believe Dobes had already posted something about this in the Hubspot forum and currently there is no easy solution. Hopefully it will be a feature down the road.