When businesses begin their website development process, an important question to ask is, “How will our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integrate with our new website?”

Neglecting to consider the CRM is a slippery slope to start down. No business wants to realize six months after a website launch that their website does not flow well within their operations. Or worse, that their website is working against them.

A well-designed and thought-out website needs to be a part of a total business management system, and the customer relationship management (CRM) is critical to that development.

WHAT IS CRM?

Salesforce, the world’s leading CRM platform, defines CRM as:

“Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business relationships. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability. When people talk about CRM, they are usually referring to a CRM system, a tool that helps with contact management, sales management, productivity, and more. A CRM solution helps you focus on your organization’s relationships with individual people — including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers — throughout your lifecycle with them, including finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services throughout the relationship.”

HubSpot is another popular CRM platform that businesses find much more affordable. Several of the CRM platforms offer web development programs within their platform. However, well-informed web developers should make clients aware of the pros and cons of developing their website with their CRM company.

What’s the main drawback to using the CRM platform to also build the website? Costly subscription fees. Many of the CRM platforms charge costly monthly subscriptions to add a website on their platform.

The truth is that WordPress, a much more cost-effective and SEO-friendly platform, offers free or low-cost plugins that can integrate with all the major CRM platforms such as Salesforce and HubSpot.

HOW WILL MY WEBSITE INTEGRATE WITH MY CRM?

Sometimes redundancy is good, but in the case of a CRM system, too much redundancy can be wasting your clients’ time and contributing to burnout. With all the platforms and strategies out there, it’s easy to fall into burnout trying to manage all of them. You want your employees to be engaging with and servicing your clients as efficiently as possible, not be distracted by constantly updating databases and contact lists.

A well-developed website is a step in the sales pipeline that businesses often overlook. A website that collects clients’ data and submits it efficiently to your CRM system can save hours and headaches.

HubSpot CRM can collect data from your website and automatically add new prospects into your pipeline. Managers can set their email system to integrate with their CRM to automatically update the pipeline and communications. If you are constantly searching through your email or not keeping track of your clients communications, a CRM set to auto-pilot is probably a good strategy for you.

HOW WELL CAN YOU FORECAST YOUR PIPELINE?

A well-designed CRM allows you to forecast your pipeline. Prospects can be assigned values so that you can anticipate future profits or losses. Integrating this into your website is vital.

“Said another way, you can succeed with CRM by being SMART: Define a customer-centric Strategy; use appropriate Metrics ; ensure your organization is Aligned with your objectives; Redesign work processes as needed; and use appropriate Technology tools as enablers. But it all starts by putting your customers first and creating a better relationship with them than your competitors offer.” –Bob Thompson, CustomerThink Corporation

CRM is a vital tool for interacting with your customers and this tool needs to be an important consideration to integrating into your new website.

LOOKING TO INTEGRATE YOUR WEBSITE WITH YOUR CRM?

Contact Cote Media today to integrate your CRM with your website to start improving your pipeline management. Please call us or reach out to us by email for a consultation.