CRM software, or customer relationship management software, helps you to keep track of every individual interaction between your company, prospects, and existing customers. While CRM’s were once clunky and difficult to use, updates over recent years have made them much easier to implement.
Although many small businesses still use spreadsheets to keep track of customer interactions, a modern CRM is much more intuitive and easy to update. CRMs also allow multiple sales, marketing, and service activities like tracking qualified leads, sending promotional emails, and receiving and responding to support requests to live all in one place.
As a promotional products distributor, you may be managing multiple aspects of your business yourself or with a small team. Having one platform to manage every side of your business in a single place will help you to streamline operations and get more done both better and faster.
The Benefits of Using a CRM
The benefits of a CRM include better customer service since customers won’t have to endure repetitive reach-outs or retelling their stories to multiple members of your team. Customer service automation can increase customer satisfaction and retention in the long run as well.
Using a CRM may also lead to increased sales and productivity by streamlining, automating, and standardizing your sales process and pipeline. High-quality, easy-to-read sales and marketing data collecting in one central place can help inform your future interactions with potential and existing customers.
Miscommunication and lack of information between you and your team leads to time-consuming mistakes. A CRM can help mitigate this by providing collaborative tools for every part of your business that seamlessly integrate together with automatic updates to information across tooling.
Overall, business CRM software provides multiple tools for managing many areas of your business in order to streamline daily operations, improve communication among team members, and automate aspects of your outbound marketing and data entry for improved efficiency and accuracy. Here are the top options for business CRM software for promotional products distributors in 2021.
2021 Business CRM Roundup
HubSpot
HubSpot is a huge name in the CRM industry. It features three hubs alongside its powerful and easy-to-use CRM — Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, and Service Hub. This ecosystem covers every area of your business for seamless collaboration and integration in order to deliver an superior end-to-end customer experience.
Sales Hub helps you to create a sales pipeline and automatically score and qualify leads based on cumulative customer behaviors for better sales tracking. Marketing Hub allows you to manage your content marketing efforts like emails, social posts, ads, landing pages, and blogs all in one place. Service Hub notifies you of customer service tickets so you can manage support requests and complaints more easily and in a timely manner. The three together make HubSpot an all-in-one platform.
There are multiple subscription levels to each hub, allowing you to prioritize which aspects are most important to your business operations and allocate resources toward the tools you need most. New users can start HubSpot with a free version of their platform and then upgrade specific hubs down the line based on their needs.
Salesforce
Salesforce is another popular CRM software that helps you to manage your contacts and data. It also helps you to track leads and manage sales opportunities. Its ability to establish workflows helps you to automate sales communications to create a more standardized system for sales reach-outs and follow-ups.
Salesforce also allows you to customize reports and dashboards to see the information you need to inform decisions easier. It has a mobile application for added convenience as well. Salesforce’s starting price is $25 per user, per month.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is primarily a CRM and marketing platform that focuses on email campaigns. Its hundreds of pre-built automations can help companies leverage their email, messaging, chat, and text communications to create a proven sales process for team members to follow. ActiveCampaign also offers more than 300 integrations like Shopify, Square, Facebook, Eventbrite, and WordPress.
ActiveCampaign is the highest optimized option for quick responses to customers due to its automation features. It allows you to automate a personalized experience that feels authentic to customers, helping your relationships to scale as your business grows. Pricing for ActiveCampaign starts at $9 per month, paid annually.
Freshworks CRM
Freshworks is AI-powered and gives sales and marketing professionals access to the right customer insights at the right times across touchpoints. It is set up similarly to HubSpot in that it separates out different tools into “clouds.”
The Sales Cloud helps your team to attract, identify, and nurture quality leads with first-rate insights from their Freddy AI. It is a powerful tool for better pipeline management. The Marketing Cloud lets you deliver more personalized customer experiences with AI chatbots, list segmentation support, email campaigns, and automations.
The Customer-for-Life Cloud combines these two tools together for a seamless and collaborative sales and marketing platform. Freshworks CRM starts off with a free version with upgrades available.
iPROMOTEu Can Help You Implement the Right Business CRM
Choosing the right business CRM for your promotional products business ultimately depends on your strategic priorities, vision, and needs. Our advice and support for promotional products distributors can help you choose and implement the right business CRM for you. iPROMOTEu partners with our Affiliates to provide our industry expertise and superior back-end support while allowing them to retain complete independence to make important decisions for the direction of their businesses. Our back-office support, order financing, and preferred vendor program can help you to focus on marketing and sales rather than administrative tasks, freeing up more time for switching over to a CRM in 2021. Our connection with a HubSpot Platinum Solutions Partner can also prove valuable in easing your transition to using a CRM.
Connect with iPROMOTEu today to learn more or become an Affiliate.