What is a CRM & Do You Need One? | Ep. 21

Ty Smith0:06

Welcome to another episode of the Crypto Marketing Show. My name is Ty Daniel Smith. With me, as always, is TJ Shedd and Kylie Low. And today, we are discussing what a CRM is and why you need one. So, first, I think we should discuss what a CRM is.

Ty Smith0:07

Welcome to another episode of the Crypto Marketing Show. My name is Ty Daniel Smith, with me as always is TJ Shed and Kylie Low. And today we are discussing what a CRM is and why you need one. So first, I think we should discuss what a CRM is.

TJ Shed0:23

Yeah, I mean most people, just at a basic level, it stands for Client Relationship Manager. And it can really be a lot of different things. It can be anything you use to manage those type of relationships. Like back in real estate, people talk about these things a lot. There's all kinds of purpose-built CRMs that are specific for that industry. But I used to know somebody in our office who was one of the top agents in the state of Georgia. His whole CRM was just an Excel spreadsheet. That's the only thing he managed it on. So some people, if you organize all your stuff on Facebook, all your Facebook contacts really, really well into groups, you can use that as a CRM. But then there's also a lot of things like what we use that are purpose-made CRMs like HubSpot.

Ty Smith1:10

Yeah, the CRM, the beginning of CRM was sort of like the Rolodex of contacts, so you can record helpful information about the person to help with sales or whatever it is. We should talk more about what CRM is in 2019 and 2020, which is software, really.

Ty Smith1:28

So it's essentially a database that you can store all your information about a customer. So it could be things like their name, their email address, their social media handles. That's the basic function of what a CRM is in its purest form. Nowadays, basically no CRM software only does that.

TJ Shed1:49

Right. Well, because like you said, it's basically software that's designed to help you manage a relationship. Anything you're trying to do, basically the way I look at it, it helps you communicate with a large group of people at scale or efficiently. So basically, you're using it to manage every relationship you have or every person in your life, whether it's business or professional, and then you can communicate different messages to them through using a software.

Ty Smith2:16

Yeah, exactly. So beyond just keeping all your contacts in one place, it's also really helpful for team collaboration, especially through like a sales process or a marketing process. Because if you are talking to one of our clients and you have a whole conversation, and then I'm also talking to the person about something else, let's say you're talking about sales stuff, I'm talking about whatever, a different product line, we'll have no idea that we're both having this conversation unless we tell each other. Whereas in our CRM, I could see every conversation that's going on between our team and their team. Even beyond just one contact, so you can sort by company, too. So one company could have multiple contacts, one for sales, one for marketing, one for whatever, and we can see all that in one place.

TJ Shed2:55

Yeah, and it's great for saving notes, too. Like going to conferences, we come back, you have all these business cards of people you met, you put the notes in where you met them, what you talked about, and it makes it a lot easier to follow up and just a lot of different things.

Ty Smith3:07

Yeah, it really, our CRM saves us, it pays for itself, for sure. It's expensive, but it definitely pays for itself in terms of how much more we're able to do for our clients.

Ty Smith3:17

And I mean, so I guess we have to discuss a little bit about what our CRM does, because all CRMs behave a little differently. Our CRM, which is HubSpot, we've tried a bunch, but HubSpot's what we currently use, does email marketing stuff, it can do social media posting.

TJ Shed3:35

It can do all your tasks and action plans and stuff like that to organize your daily. It does have a lot of...

Ty Smith3:40

Yeah, workflow automation. We're going to do a whole episode on just what we use HubSpot for. But you can also see things like what pages each of your clients are going on. So if we see people that are going on influencer pages, we will tailor the conversation more towards that than an SEO client.

TJ Shed3:58

Well, yeah, because basically it ties into Google Analytics, right?

Ty Smith4:01

It ties into analytics, it ties into Facebook, it ties into...

TJ Shed4:05

So we can in real time see when people are on different pages of our website, how much time they spend there, and all that's being tracked and logged into that CRM, which ties back to, again, the name, the contact, the email, and all that basically helps...

Ty Smith4:17

It gives you a full picture of the client.

TJ Shed4:19

Right, it helps you gather as much information on people as possible and keep it all in one place.

Ty Smith4:24

Yeah, and we say client, but it can go beyond that. We discuss everything in sort of a B2B kind of format, but it works for B2C just as well.

TJ Shed4:32

Yeah, or even just on a personal level. I mean, people use this just to organize, like I said, anything that you want to communicate at mass scale, this is something that you can use to do it, whether it's event planning or marketing or there's a lot of different ways you could apply it.

Ty Smith4:47

So we're starting to get into it already, but let's discuss sort of the core reasons why you would, why you need a CRM, why people that aren't currently using a CRM are missing out.

TJ Shed4:56

Well, it's leverage, really. It's like being able to get more out of your efforts and time. The more organized and efficiently you can communicate, the more you can get done, usually.

Ty Smith5:07

Yeah, and also I'm thinking back to the days, the early days of Coinbound, when I was doing everything mentally.

Kylie Low5:15

I needed to clear my throat for no reason.

Ty Smith5:19

All right, well, we'll discuss that later. Yeah, so I would do everything mentally. I would have to manually remember who I have an outstanding email from. So my way of remembering it was just leaving the email marked as unread, and then I had hundreds of emails marked as unread, and it's just a terrible way to manage anything. And then it's really difficult to, again, go back to, going back to that point of seeing all your emails in one place, because things would go across different threads. And yeah, it was, it was, it was truly, I mean, HubSpot we pay almost $1,000 per month for, it truly pays for itself probably five times over.

TJ Shed5:56

Yeah.

Ty Smith5:57

Because we, things don't slip through the cracks the way they once did.

Kylie Low6:01

And you don't waste as much time.

Ty Smith6:03

No, you definitely don't. Yeah, because you can see like exactly what everyone's doing, and instead of trying to manually go out and say, what are you interested in, you know what they're interested in. I get a notification depending on what client it is, I get a notification, oh, this person's on this page, this person's on this page, so that in real time, I know what they're interested in, what they're looking at, and then I could speed up the whole sales process.

Kylie Low6:24

And back to the communication thing, you're not wasting time trying to talk to people like, oh, you're already talking to them. I know when I was going back trying to fill in contacts in HubSpot, it was helpful to go back through conversations and find information that can help us out with marketing, sales, whatever it is.

Ty Smith6:46

Yeah, exactly. And again, going to HubSpot, most CRMs these days have some kind of automation workflow built into it. You can create properties and stuff. Like I said, we have social media handles and names and stuff like that, but you can create your own custom properties. So things like scoring, so I could say every time someone visits a web page, increase their monthly activity score by one, and that way I could very easily see who's active on our website and stuff like that. And then you could also segment. So we have lists that are all kinds of lists. For example, one would be we have crypto marketing managers. So anyone that is in charge of making marketing decisions, based on automations and things that are in their email, I could create segments for that. So if I have to send an email that only is relevant to marketing managers, it's very easy for me to do that.

TJ Shed7:33

Right. So basically, what you're saying is once we get all this information in and you can organize it a bunch of different ways, categorize it a bunch of different ways, it allows us to then take, when you say sequences, it's a lot of times it's just a bunch of email templates that then we can tailor those specifically to the group and say exactly what we need to to that select group of people. So we can have all these different active campaigns going on, like you said, one going just to crypto marketers, one going just to content creators, one going just to writers.

Ty Smith8:04

It's especially useful for people that have multiple product lines or multiple offerings.

TJ Shed8:09

Right. So that's the advantage of collecting all that information. It's a lot of work to collect it all and organize it and categorize it.

Ty Smith8:14

But it isn't always, because HubSpot, for example, not that I'm shilling HubSpot too much, they don't pay us anything to talk about HubSpot so extensively, but it is a good product, so I will talk about it. They have a Chrome browser, so you can just have it automatically log your emails.

TJ Shed8:28

You mean the extension, yeah.

Ty Smith8:29

Extension, sorry, yeah. Which is great, because I don't have to forward an email or manually enter anything.

TJ Shed8:36

No, I just meant in the sense that like you were saying, to create these custom fields and tag everybody a bunch of different ways can be a little bit of work. But once you do it on the front end, on the back end, as it grows over time, it makes your every communication you do in the future so much more effective.

Ty Smith8:53

Yeah, so much more scalable.

TJ Shed8:54

Right. It's really cool. It's a great tool.

Ty Smith8:57

Yeah, and I mean, sometimes people don't see the need for a CRM, but basically every good one out there has a free option, so they really have nothing to lose by trying it.

TJ Shed9:05

Right. And exactly, there's for a personal person who's just trying to get themselves organized, it's great to just try the free one, you can take everybody out of your phone in there, everybody out of Facebook in there, everybody out of your email, all put them in one place, and then go from there. It's pretty powerful.

Ty Smith9:21

Yeah, I think we should discuss the top CRMs and sort of ones that we've used. So obviously HubSpot, we just spoke about.

TJ Shed9:29

Quite a bit.

Ty Smith9:30

Quite a bit. HubSpot and Trello are the two things I'll never stop talking about.

TJ Shed9:36

Yeah.

Ty Smith9:37

The other one, the big one is Salesforce. Salesforce is huge, and they've actually got some involvement in the blockchain space and stuff like that, too.

TJ Shed9:44

Do they? What's their involvement?

Ty Smith9:45

They've got projects, because they're part of actually a big tech conglomerate that has a lot of different things going on. So I'm interested, they've got a lot of stuff working behind the scenes. I don't know a lot of the details, but I'll be interested to see how it rolls out. But they're basically a tech company.

TJ Shed9:59

Yeah.

Ty Smith10:00

And they are huge. They're the number one CRM for most big businesses out there. Like I said, I did it in real estate. Top Producer is a huge one in the real estate industry, and it's just kind of geared with real estate needs. I know we actually have a guy in our office here in the same building, he's building a CRM for real estate agents in South America.

TJ Shed10:19

Okay.

Ty Smith10:20

Steve is building that.

TJ Shed10:21

Oh, is that what he's working on? That's his whole project, plugging away at.

Ty Smith10:24

Yeah.

TJ Shed10:25

Another big one is Zoho. They do a lot of stuff these days. They're trying to become sort of like a mini Google, but they have a CRM that's pretty good from what I've heard. I've never used them. But one that we have used is ActiveCampaign.

Ty Smith10:35

Yeah.

TJ Shed10:36

ActiveCampaign, as compared to HubSpot, is better for the sort of marketing automation stuff, not so much the sales stuff. I definitely would side with HubSpot, obviously.

Ty Smith10:48

And Constant Contact is another one, which is pretty similar, that a lot of people use. But it's more, again, that's just targeted specifically for email campaigns.

TJ Shed10:56

They're expanding, but yeah, that is more their cellar.

Ty Smith10:58

I mean, they do, they do market themselves as a CRM, and a lot of people, when you say, oh, what do you use, they'll say Constant Contact. And that, it is, it is a good base system, but a lot more that can be done.

TJ Shed11:08

Yeah, Constant Contact is more for if your business is very email-based.

Ty Smith11:12

Right, that's what I'm saying. It's email-centric, like Mailchimp or whatever.

TJ Shed11:15

Yeah, and the issue we had with ActiveCampaign was email deliverability. It would send our stuff to the spam inbox.

Ty Smith11:20

Ah, that's interesting.

TJ Shed11:21

Yeah, so definitely play around with a bunch. Do you guys have anything else to add?

Ty Smith11:26

No, like I think the main thing is, like you said, there's a lot of free options out there, and it's worth just giving it a shot.

TJ Shed11:32

Yeah, if you have any questions about what CRM to use or how to use it, honestly, it's a big piece of software, so there's definitely a lot of questions you can have about it. One, all those things create tons of content that make it easy to onboard yourself. But we also have a marketing question dedicated Slack channel.

Ty Smith11:51

Yeah, so I'm saying jump in the Slack.

TJ Shed11:52

Yeah, so join our Slack. You can join it at coinbound.io/joinslack, and it'll bring you right to it. It'll bring you right to it, and you can ask whatever questions you have, and we're happy to help. And I think that's it. We can wrap it up. Remember to, if you found this podcast valuable, rate, review, and recommend us, especially on Apple, because we're trying to grow that a little bit. That helps out with our organic growth.

Ty Smith12:17

Give us good reviews on Apple Podcasts.

TJ Shed12:19

Yeah, would be super, super appreciated.

Ty Smith12:21

Five stars only.

TJ Shed12:22

Five stars, yeah. If you're not going to give five stars, then don't worry about it. And lastly, follow us on Twitter: @coinbound_io, I'm @TyDanielSmith, TJ is @YoungDumbCrypto, and Kylie is @CryptoKylie. That is all for today, guys. Thanks.

TJ Shed12:36

We're out.

Kylie Low12:37

Later.