Blog: HubSpot

I will be the first to admit that in the web and online marketing space, we love our acronyms and abbreviations almost as much as the military and big business. With that being said, what the heck is a CRM? CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. 

It is a database that is used to keep track of client actions, leads, and sales opportunities. Logging this critical information gives insights to your sales, marketing, customer support, and financial teams or simply allows you to help keep track of everything and adjust interactions to improve your client relationships.

CRM software is frequently confused with comparable business programs such as content management system (CMS) or customer data platform (CDP) software. CMS software is used to create and publish website content. CDP software gathers consumer data from many sources, such as web forms and social media accounts, in order to evaluate and anticipate customer behavior.

As children, we were often told the story of the tortoise and the hare. It is probably one of Aesop’s more famous fables, being made into a cartoon by Walt Disney. You recall how the story goes. The hare is beaten by the much slower tortoise simply because it keeps going while the hare stops to rest. The same can be said when doing a sales call or series of sales calls. This was one of the biggest takeaways I had from the Sales Skills Bootcamp by David Weinhaus.

You may be asking yourself how can the famous fable be related to my previous sales process. The short answer is, before taking the class I would always rush to “make the sale.” I have since learned its better to go slower and really learn the prospect’s real and true goals, not just the commoditized goal.

I've never considered myself a salesman, but that's what I've done to grow our web design business over the past 14 years. When we became a HubSpot Partner Agency in 2018, we were signing up for a platform that would help us grow our clients' businesses through great marketing & sales software and business support.

Our HubSpot channel account manager, Katie Carlin, turned me on to the Pipeline Generation Bootcamp led by HubSpot sales director Dan Tyre. If you hear us use the term "Smarketing," he's the one who coined the term that combines sales and marketing into one important team.

Did you know that only 11% of large companies have good customer experience programs. Yet one bad experience can lead to 22% of their customers decreasing spending! Fortunately you as a small business owner can learn from their mistakes!

HubSpot has an article entitled "6 Simple Steps to Build a Culture that's Obsessed with Customer Feedback".