CRM Best Practices: How to Choose the Best Free CRM System

Your business is growing, and spreadsheets are getting frustrating to manage. You know you need a CRM, but there are hundreds of CRMs and hundreds more features available. How do you decide which is the best for your business?

This CRM best practices guide will walk you through how to evaluate a CRM, from how it will help your business and how to map your needs to core features. By the end of the guide, you'll know how to choose thebest CRM for your business needs。

Don't waste time and energyevaluating CRMsystems and features you don't need. Get started below.

1. 什么是CRM？
2. What are the benefits of CRM?
3. 我怎么知道是否my companyneeds a CRM?
4. CRM的ROI是多少？
5. How do I evaluate which CRM is best for my company?
6. The best CRM features for small businesses
7. 查看网站以帮助您选择合适的CRM
8. What are HubSpot free CRM limitations?
9. I’m ready to move my team onto the HubSpot CRM

什么是CRM？

CRM, or customer relationship management, is a strategy companies use to track customer relationships from pre- to post-sale. A CRM system is software that stores information on client and prospect interactions with employees.

营销和Sales touchpoints (including email, phone, website, live chat, and social media) are tracked, providing customer-facing employees with detailed context on a client’s activity and feedback.

What are the benefits of CRM?

Thebenefit of having a CRM systemis having a central database for all customer information.

A business’s most valuable and important asset is its customer base. At many companies, knowledge about customers is stored in many places -- the CEO’s brain, a sales rep’s inbox, an accountant’s records, or even a spreadsheet.

As your company grows, it’ll become harder and harder for your sales team to hunt down information about customers and prospects. It rapidly becomes painful to find answers to basic questions like,When did I last speak with a prospect? How should I prioritize my leads? Which customers are ready for an upsell?追捕这些答案需要时间远离您的销售团队应该做的事情：销售。

企业通常会流出电子表格，但这只能工作一段时间。随着团队的增长，电子表格变得更加笨重，并且很快变得难以管理。

Salespeople will forget or choose not to enter details about their calls and emails to save time, and it becomes nearly impossible for managers to accurately forecast or get visibility into team pipelines. The result? Less organization, more confusion, and fewer closed deals.

CRM systems are designed to solve these problems. By organizing all lead and customer information in one place and automating data entry, CRM software makes it easy to run the sales process smoothly.

Below is a view of how a CRM dashboard displays deal forecasts, sales pipeline, and deals closed against quota for a given month.

The five major benefits of a CRM system are:

1. Customer data management.By organizing all lead and customer information in one place and automating data entry, CRM software makes it easy to run the sales process smoothly.
2. Sales reporting.A CRM tracks quota attainment and activity metrics such as emails sent, calls made, meetings booked, opportunities created, and deals closed.
3. Accurate sales forecasting.停止依靠复杂的公式或back-of-the-napkin math. A CRM system generates an accurate sales funnel for you, which makes it easier to forecast future sales and effectively manage your team’s pipeline.
4. Customer segmentation.By segmenting prospects by parameters such as location, deal size, or close date, you can identify specific regions or industries to sell into, and benchmark your average sales price and sales cycle.
5. Scaling a sales process.A repeatable sales process is key to testing new sales motions and strategies. Without the information stored in a CRM, you’re shooting in the dark. You need this data to spot behavioral patterns and trends in effective and ineffective sales behaviors. Otherwise, you won’t be able to grow your team or business efficiently.

我怎么知道是否my companyneeds a CRM?

Any company that wants to maintain a relationship with their customers will benefit from using a CRM system. Two types of companies that see the most benefit are:

• B2B公司跟踪跨越更长，咨询销售周期并通过升级路径的公司（例如，软件公司，代理商或招聘公司）bob电竞官方下载
• Considered-purchase B2C companies (for example, realtors, financial services, or landscaping services)

有许多公司可能不会属于上述群体，但仍会从CRM系统中受益。

The questions you should ask yourself when evaluating your need for a CRM system are:

• 我需要有关潜在客户和客户的信息记录吗？
• Does that information live in many different places?
• Is it becoming difficult to manage my data?
• Do my customers regularly interact with multiple people on my team?
• Do I need a better way to measure my sales team’s productivity?
• 我的团队是否会放慢脚步，因为他们必须在不同的地方跳跃才能找到铅或客户数据？

If you answered “yes” to any of the questions above, your business couldbenefit from a CRM system。Adopting one sooner rather than later will help you avoid frustration and save you future headaches.

CRM的ROI是多少？

There are a lot of CRMs to choose from, and many appear similar to each other. We’re going to dive into how to decide which will give you the most value.

A common misconception surrounding CRM systems is that they’re clunky, complicated, and tough to implement.

但是现代CRM系统不需要他们过去的困难设置。它们可以快速，直观地使用，将许多手动管理任务从您的盘中删除，并且可以在几分钟之内进行设置。

Josh Harcus, founder of marketing agency Hüify, saw huge success within just one year of implementing a CRM system.

Harcus说：“我们想快速发展，因此我们对入站销售进行了大量研究，并创建了一个有记录的销售流程，我们将其烘烤到Hubspot CRM中。”“在12个月内，我们看到了收入繁殖6倍。"

Hüify also saw a significantly shorter sales cycle after adopting the HubSpot CRM -- from nine months to four weeks.

Astudy conducted by an MIT Sloan MBAstudent found that 79% of customers using marketing, sales, and CRM software saw an increase in sales revenue within one year.

让我们看一些具体的数字，以显示简单的CRM解决方案可以节省您多少时间和金钱。

Theaverage salesperson makes $60,000 annually和每天花两个小时进入手动数据输入。Assuming a 30-day month with 20 selling days, a team of 10 willwaste 400 hours on manual data entry every month。That translates to paying your team$12,000 a month to do manual data entry。

That's 3,000 lattes.

(That's what 3,000 lattes looks like.)

Assuming an 8-hour work day, that’s 25% of each month spent on data entry. In the data visualization below, the first scenario is an ideal situation: A sales professional spends one chunk of their day doing manual data entry and can spend the rest of the day focused on selling.

However, the bottom scenario is more accurate. Out of every two hours, 30 minutes is spent on manual data entry. This results in lost productivity as your sales team switches gears from data entry to selling back to data entry. Astudy by the University of California, Irvine [pdf]发现中断后需要23分钟才能重新专注于任务。

That time should be spent selling so your business is bringing in cash, not wasting it. To sweeten the deal? Many modern CRM systems are free.

How do I evaluate which CRM is best for my company?

There are a lot of CRMs to choose from, and many appear similar to each other. In reality, choosing the best one depends on your goals.

We’re going to dive into the best practices for deciding which CRM will give you the most value.

The biggest mistake many first-time CRM buyers make is evaluating vendors before deciding their own goals. By focusing on vendors, you end up reverse engineering their offerings to define your needs, rather than focusing on areas with real business value to your company. For example, a mobile CRM sounds cutting-edge, but if you only run an inside sales team that’s on-site, it may not be the best fit.

Before evaluating CRM vendors, ask yourself these questions:

• Why are we investing in CRM?
• What operational business challenges do we need to solve?
• What processes do we lack that we should implement?
• 我希望有多少人使用CRM？
• 我们有多少客户信息？
• 我们还将使用哪些其他软bob电竞官方下载件与CRM集成？
• 我有多少预算？

According toSoftwareAdvice.com,small businesses that are first-time CRM buyers often overestimate the level of functionality they need.使用过度强大的系统意味着您必须在设置和自定义上进行更多的投资，如果最基本的CRM系统可以解决您的挑战，这将是浪费资源。bob体育苹果系统下载安装从更简单的CRM开始，然后再进行更全面的解决方案，以后更容易。

Another point of concern is that businesses will lose the data they already have on their customers when they adopt a CRM. But it's easier than ever to import data into or between CRMs (yes, even from your spreadsheets).

If many solutions look really similar, we recommend you:

• 联系供应商，并通过销售代表查看您的要求列表
• 读product reviews和ask peers which system they use
• Compare prices and focus on getting the features you need

Choose the CRM softwarethat you consider best for your needs and stick to your decision. Indecisiveness will cost a lot of time and money.

The best CRM features for small businesses

The core features of a CRM system include:

• Contact management。CRM systems provide a searchable database to store customer and prospect information and relevant documents.
• Pipeline management and sales forecasting。你的CRM应很容易想象entire sales pipeline as well as move deals from one sales process stage to another. No more mental math to figure out what’s closing this month.
• Reporting and analytics。销售负责人可以使用他们的CRM跟踪团队的活动和收入增长，以指导团队指导和销售预测。
• Process standardization。CRMs help standardize business processes through unified task lists, calendars, alerts, and templates.

其他功能CRM系统可能包括：

• Email integration。与当前电子邮件客户端集成的CRM可以自动记录潜在客户的交互，并将其他有用的上下文直接推入收件箱。这种集成消除了手动数据输入的很大一部分，这是您的销售团队是否实际使用CRM的一个重要因素。
• Email tracking。With email tracking, your reps will know when their email is opened, if a link in their email is clicked, or if a document was opened. This arms them with insights to follow up effectively.
• Call recording。Call prospects directly from your CRM to save time and log the interaction. Recording is an added bonus that makes it easier for managers to coach salespeople.
• Interaction tracking。A CRM can streamline a sales rep’s day by automatically logging information any touchpoint with a prospect (like an email, phone call, or social message) and/or visits to your website. Take a look at tracked interactions below.

• bob电竞官方下载软件集成。What software do you already use? A CRM that can integrate with your existing systems will minimize the time your reps spend switching between various apps.
• Data enrichment and collection。Does the CRM create more administrative tasks for your team, or does it automate data entry and give them more time to sell?
• 排行榜。Some CRMs create friendly competition by tracking and displaying your salespeople’s activity levels and forecasted pipeline.
• Mobile CRM。Will a mobile CRM be useful for you and your team? Are you expecting them to be frequently on the go or will they be a purely inside sales team?

小型企业最建议的CRM包括Finances Online,Zoho CRM,Pipedrive CRM,Agile CRM,Insightly CRM， 和HubSpot CRM。

查看网站以帮助您选择合适的CRM

What are HubSpot free CRM limitations?

我们得到了很多。当您搜索合适的CRM时，“自由”似乎太好了。HubSpot的免费CRMmusthave limitations, right?

We decided it was best not to answer that question ourselves, so our friends atCapterra加紧并分享了有关如何使我们的免费CRM与付费服务区分开来的有趣数据。

So, what does all of this mean? Capterra independently surveyed 135 HubSpot CRM users. Of those respondents, 20% of free users were more likely to be first time CRM users.

66% of HubSpot users reported accessing the free version every month, while 30% upgraded to gain additional functionality. Over 90% of paid HubSpot users said they integrate with another software, while that number was only 19% for free users.

Email marketing and marketing automation ranked highest for the types of software HubSpot users integrate with, followed closely by social media.

When asked how many employees free users had when they began using HubSpot CRM, 61% said they had less than 50 employees, and 15% reported growing above 1,000 employees after implementing HubSpot.

So, what was the overall satisfaction of HubSpot CRM users? We're proud to report Capterra's data gave us 4.5/5 for ease of use, customer service, features and functionality, and value for money, oh, and overall use.

I’m ready to move my team onto the HubSpot CRM. What’s the next step?

Click below to get started with HubSpot CRM. Once you create an account, we’ll walk you through the necessary steps to get set up and start seeing the benefits of a CRM immediately.

The first steps & best practices to successfully implementing a CRM are:

• 迁移您的现有数据（无论是电子表格还是其他数据库）
• Import contacts from your current database or spreadsheet
• Invite your sales team to the CRM system
• Understand how to filter your contacts for high qualityleads

Good luck!Visit our communityif you have any trouble setting up your CRM.