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Your marketing department is grappling with unprecedented challenges.
Keeping up with the ever-changing trends and facing fierce competition from rival brands can be overwhelming. The constant barrage of branded content from all directions makes it nearly impossible to find a way to stand out and drive consistent traffic. Is your marketing team failing if they’re not able to generate valuable leads for your sales team?
Fortunately, there is a game-changing solution on the horizon — the modern CRM platform. This revolutionary tool has become the lifeline for numerous organizations, offering a centralized system that not only automates previously manual tasks but also fosters seamless collaboration between sales and marketing teams.
However, before jumping into purchasing a CRM adoption, you need to determine if your team is ready and whether it aligns with your capabilities, infrastructure, and objectives. Moving too quickly on a CRM might have adverse effects on your infrastructure, too. So, how do you identify the signs that signify you're prepared to take the plunge?
These are some definitive signs that suggest that your marketing team is prepared for a CRM system:
1. Lack of Data-Driven Strategies
Does your marketing team have enough data at their disposal to understand and adapt to your customers?
Without accurate customer data, it’s challenging to conduct research on ideal customers or build buyer personas, much less educate your teams on these profiles. And, even with the right analytics available, they might live in silos, making it difficult to compare data and metrics across channels.
The clearest indicator of needing a CRM solution is when your analytics cannot effectively measure the ROI of individual marketing channels or your overall marketing approach. In such cases, an integrated CRM can help you track, analyze, and deploy your customer data from one place, empowering you to embrace data-driven marketing strategies.
2. Ineffective Collaboration
One of the primary culprits behind opportunities slipping through the cracks is the inadequate communication that exists between marketing and sales teams and within the marketing teams themselves. If you’re noticing mismanaged projects, disorganized content, and a culture of tension and blame in the workplace, it might be time to consider a CRM system, particularly one that can enable frictionless collaboration with other teams to offer delightful customer experiences.
3. Poor Management of Leads
Leads serve as both the core engine and the ultimate product of your marketing workflow; if you’re unable to track and drive them through the channels properly, how can you hope to convert them to sales?
CRM tools like HubSpot provide lead management and tracking capabilities that can organize, prioritize, and engage prospects in one centralized platform. No longer do you have to worry about tracking leads through disconnected tools and databases or delivering cookie-cutter follow-up and handoff experience — a CRM system takes all the guesswork out of lead management!
4. Disorganized Marketing Assets
If your marketing assets are scattered across different platforms or not easily accessible, you won’t be able to generate any value out of them — no attracting the right visitors to your website and no converting those visitors into known leads or customers. A CRM system is your secret weapon to not only organize your downloadable content like guides, kits, templates, etc., but to increase your productivity, eliminate obstacles for users across your company, and help your team cleanly scale your content library over time.
5. Manual, Repetitive Tasks
If you’re growing quickly, you can’t afford to have your marketing team expend their time and energy on tasks that can otherwise be quickly automated through a CRM. Your team doesn’t have to manually craft email campaigns or worry about time-consuming follow-up; a CRM can leverage the ease of workflows, chatbots, email triggers, and more, to reach your target audience with personalized messages. Then, the focus can be doing high-value, strategic work that drives results instead of bothering with humdrum details.
6. Difficulty in Tracking Marketing ROI
It all comes down to returns if you want to measure your marketing team’s performance and efforts. Though there are many calculations and formulas available to help you track ROI, you also need the right resources to contextualize the raw data, which a CRM can provide reliably. A CRM can even demonstrate the details of the performance of the individual assets of your campaign - the landing pages, emails, blog posts, calls-to-action, keywords, social messages, PPC, and other components of your campaign, so you can gain a clear picture of all the components of your campaigns and how they actually impact the bottom line.
7. Inability to Scale Marketing Efforts
The biggest obstacle organizations face in scaling their marketing and sales activities is operating in silos, which means you can never pull the same number across teams. A CRM delivers a unified system for collecting and analyzing data even when your team is small. Whether you need your data in one place or you want to create department dashboards, it's vital you provide your team with a centralized location so your data processes can grow with you as you scale.
Are you ready for a CRM?
Whether you’re facing a few of the challenges or all of them at varying degrees, it might be time to consider investing in a CRM or go through a free trial at the very least. HubSpot’s free CRM tools for marketing, lead generation, and email marketing can do far more than grow and nurture your database; they can create personalized customer experiences across channels, throughout the customer journey. With so many customizable options even within the free trial, HubSpot’s CRM platform scales with your needs.
Flawless Inbound is an Accredited HubSpot Partner that has achieved over 200 technology implementations, helping businesses of all sizes achieve success, from small organizations to enterprise companies. Our team of HubSpot implementation technologists and developers is more than ready to help you with HubSpot implementations, native integration programming, support, consulting, and custom-coded integrations. Just reach out to us with any questions, and we’ll get back to you ASAP.