If your organization has multiple people involved in sales, marketing, and servicing, you’re probably painfully familiar with the struggle to bring your sales and marketing together.
You may have seen this play out internally:
- Marketers complain about the follow-up of the sales team.
- Salespeople complain about the lead quality or lack of intelligence provided by the marketing department.
And you may receive similar feedback from your prospects when they choose a competitor because of a poor transition from marketing to sales.
With so many moving parts, it’s hard to keep everyone on the same page and deliver an exceptional experience for your prospects.
A Better Way to Get Sales and Marketing on the Same Page
HubSpot’s all-in-one marketing software has radically changed the way that marketing is handled for thousands of organizations around the world. By bringing essential tools together under one roof, HubSpot users have been able to significantly increase traffic and leads from their websites.
A major pain point for modern organizations, including HubSpot users, has been the handoff of prospects from marketing to sales.
To help with the handoff, HubSpot integrates well with many popular customer relationship management (CRM) systems, including SalesForce.
Unfortunately, most of these integrations didn’t include bi-directional sync (passing information back and forth from both platforms), many integrations limited the data you could pass, and every integration required the use of at least two distinct systems.
Now, HubSpot is changing all of that.
At HubSpot’s INBOUND 2014 Conference, Co-Founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shaw announced HubSpot’s new CRM on September 16th. According to Halligan,
“We started HubSpot because we felt the way consumers shop and buy had fundamentally changed. The inbound movement has helped transform the world of marketing, and we really feel like there’s a huge opportunity to transform the customer experience with sales technology that enables companies to sell more, better, and faster.”
What’s Inside HubSpot’s New CRM?
We’ve had the privilege of beta testing the CRM and are in love with this new tool from HubSpot. Let’s break down a couple of the big benefits and features for your sales team:
It’s Simpler Than Ever Before
Because the sales and marketing tools all work from the same database, all of your information is in the same place, perfectly synced, and instantly available for everyone with access.
Additionally, you no longer have to log into one tool to view your prospect’s history and then additional tools to take notes on your interactions.
It’s all in one place and it just works.
It Gives Your Sales Team More Control
With full access to every interaction your prospects have had with your organization, as well as the ability to communicate via phone and email, log notes, schedule meetings, and create tasks, your sales team has the proper context to take the lead during the sales process.
Plus, the ability to place and record calls from the same contact’s screen is very well designed and super easy to use. We love it!
It’s So Much More Efficient
With a single sign-on system and an easy to navigate layout, your sales team can be much more efficient in their sales activity.
One of the biggest things that I noticed during beta testing is that by reducing the barrier to doing things the right way, we wound up more personalized conversations with prospects, better shared information across our team, and much better sales activity overall.
But That’s Not All There Is…
In addition to the CRM, HubSpot is also launching Sidekick, a major revamp of Signals which they launched last year.
Sidekick gives you insights into your email performance by telling you who opened your emails, when they read it, what links they clicked, and how many times they took action.
But that’s just the part of Sidekick that we already came to love when it was known as Signals. Sidekick also gives you insights into the contacts and companies you find in your browser or in emails.
If that wasn’t enough, Sidekick also allows you to schedule your email send, right from within Gmail in Google Chrome, to optimize your open and click rates.
Whew, I could go on forever…
But I’ll spare you. The features are exciting on their own, but the benefits could change the way you do business. That’s exciting!
We’d love to hear your feedback on the new HubSpot CRM — leave us a comment or get in touch. You can also learn more about the CRM here.