MBA1255 Q&A Wednesday: How do I choose the right CRM platform?

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Hey oh. Welcome to the 100 doll, the business show that keeps you in the know every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and a Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omarr.net Today's question is from Gene and Gene asks how do I choose the right CRM platform? There's so many to choose from. Which one should I choose? Good question Gene. And it's a question we all ask ourselves as we're starting a new business. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, but it's not just for customers, it's also for leads. Anybody who's interested in what you do, newsletter subscribers. It's a way for you to manage and stay in communication with these people. And when it comes to CRM software, there are tons. So in today's lesson we're going to talk about the big players, the options that I recommend, and how to choose one that's best for your business and your needs. Some of them are going to do a whole lot more than what you actually need, and there's no reason for you to pay the big bucks for that. And some of them are so simple, it's not really a good choice because you're not going to be able to grow into it. And moving over to a new CRM is a little bit of a headache. So you want to choose one that you can grow into. We get into all these details and my recommendations in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to start by saying that I've tried several CRM platforms and made the switch a few times, but I'm also quite familiar with most of the big players. Why? Because we have to know a little bit about them, because we have to integrate with them with our software webinar Ninja, my company, which is a software company, and one of our features is direct integrations with these CRMs. So I have accounts on a lot of these different CRMs. I've been inside their dashboards, I've used them, we've tested them, and I know the founders of a lot of these companies. Now, you might be wondering, why are there so many choices? Well, it's a good business to build. CRM is a good software to build because it's a very sticky software. It's a little bit inconvenient. I say it's quite inconvenient to move off a CRM software. So when they get a customer, you're pretty locked in for life because it's just a lot of headaches to migrate to a new one. It's not impossible. You could definitely do it and some, like ConvertKit will offer to do the migration for you. But overall, people do not want to switch to their CRM if they can help it. So we're going to begin with today's answer to Gene's question. Which CRM should he choose with? What are your needs? Now, I'm talking to Gene, but I'm talking to everybody who's listening. What do you actually need? Most of us, we need the basics where we are able to collect email addresses with an embed form. We're able to organize these email addresses and maybe even label them based on what they have signed up for, whether it's a newsletter or they're an actual customer. You're probably going to need a way to broadcast an email like a newsletter. And you're probably going to want some statistics on how active each of these members in your CRM. All these emails, how active are these people? Are they opening your emails? Are they actually responding to your emails or are they dormant? That's really the basics. A database for all your contacts leads customers a way to kind of understand their statistics and how active they are, as well as a way to send a message to certain people, certain lists, certain segments. All CRMs will offer this, from the cheapest to the most expensive. What you need beyond that is really going to depend on which one you choose. So if this is all you need, if you're running a blog and all you want to do is send emails out in a newsletter and you don't need anything else other than that, then I'd probably suggest that you go with the cheapest option or even the free option, which is Mailchimp. Mailchimp has a free plan, up to 2,000 subscribers. And Mailchimp is pretty basic and it's going to fulfill those needs. It does other things and you can upgrade to other things. But, but this is where it starts. Now if you're running a business where you have customers and you want to onboard them, you want to give them an automation sequence. Emails that go out to them automatically when they sign up, whether they're welcome emails or tutorials or instructions, or ways for them to get familiar with your product or service, then you're going to need a CRM that's going to offer automations. Now many of them will do automations, some of them will do them well, some of them will do them so well. If you want a way to trigger emails based on actions which are called automations, like when they buy, I want to send them a series of emails with certain time delays between or when they click on this link, I want to send them this email, things like that. You want to look for CRMs that have automations. The one that I recommend, if you don't want a lot of bells and whistles, but you want automation and you want to have some sort of post sales sequences, you want something that looks good, that's easy to use. I don't recommend ConvertKit. I know the founder personally, Nathan Barry. Nathan's built an amazing software, it's quite affordable and their customer service team is really well known for being helpful. Their brand or their niche is email marketing for bloggers. But even if you're beyond a blogger, you're selling courses, you're selling books and you need automation. ConvertKit does it, they do tagging as well and it's really one of the easiest software to use. It's really well put together. And I say that because we've worked with a lot of CRM companies again to integrate with our webinar software, Webinar Ninja, and our developers had the easiest time with ConvertKit. Most of us will be okay with this level of CRM. Now if you want one place for everything, your shopping cart, checkouts, your payment integration, everything, you're gonna need something a little bit more expensive, a little bit more complicated, something like Infusionsoft or a higher tier in ActiveCampaign or Salesforce. These are really, really robust pieces of software that big Fortune 500 companies use because it does pretty much everything. In fact, they have to hire consultants from that company to show them how to use it. So confusing. Now, having said that, we use activecampaign. We use more of a lower tier of activecampaign because we don't need all the bells and whistles because we build our own solutions in house. We use Stripe for payment gateway and all that stuff. So we don't really need everything they offer, but we like the way they deliver emails and the way they do automation. So we stick with activecampaign for the time being. Now, if you have an e commerce business, I know that Drip specializes on serving e commerce businesses with their email marketing, this is really their focus and they're going all in on e commerce businesses. So if you have an e commerce business and you're looking for a great CRM, Drip is something that you want to look into. Now there's one more player here I want to talk about that is sort of an outlier and we use them and we're really beginning to like what they offer. But before I get there, I want to say that most people are going to be okay with the ConvertKit solution or that level of CRM. Constant Contact AWeber, you get the picture, it starts around $29 a month and you can grow with it. If you want everything that your website is going to transact with payments, landing pages, checkout pages, all that kind of stuff, then you're gonna want something a little bit full fledged like Infusionsoft or HubSpot or Salesforce. But it's a big investment and it's an investment to learn and train somebody to know how to use it. So see it as like a three year commitment if you're gonna go high end. Now about that outlier platform. This is not really seen as a CRM because it does so much more. Now while the big players like infusionsoft and Salesforce focus on sales and Transactions and all these things like that. Another player, Intercom out of Dublin, has been all the rage the last few years. And you've probably seen Intercom on so many websites but maybe have not noticed it. It's that little blue circle chat bubble on the bottom right hand corner of a lot of websites. Sometimes it's blue, sometimes it's green. You can customize it. We use Intercom and Intercom is primarily a way for you to communicate with your customers via chat or messages. And it's a customer service tool really, sort of like Zendesk, but they also have email marketing features in there, automations, sequences and a way for you to rate all your contacts. It also collects, you know, feedback from users about your tutorials, about their conversations with your support team, as well as how often are they on your site, how many active sessions are they active or not. We've been using Intercom for, I'd say two years now, but really started to scratch our surface on what it can do in the last six months. And we're really starting to use its automation sequences, the data that's there, and really managing the people that interact with our website in a different way. I want to say that Intercom is more of a holistic way of looking at communicating with your customers, especially if you offer some sort of support as well as if you have a software or some sort of website, like a membership website, where people are buying things and have questions about their purchases and need some onboarding, need some help, need some customer success. Intercom is really easy to use, it's super clean, they have great tutorials and it's a good package. But it's not cheap, it is pricey. It's not as pricey as infusionsoft and Salesforce, but what I love about it most is that it integrates with so many moving parts in your business with your payment gateway, like Stripe, with your actual website, with your software. If you're running a software app and selling an app, it even links up with the social profiles of the people that are communicating with you on your website, with your customers, whether it's their LinkedIn profile or their Twitter profile, it's really smart and savvy. So I would definitely take a look at them. If you're looking for a customer service tool as well as a CRM, let's just say recently we've been using more and more of Intercom and less of activecampaign, which is a traditional CRM. Since it's so well integrated with everything else we do.

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To answer Gene's question, which CRM to choose? Find out what your needs are and go with what is best for your needs. If you're looking for something middle of the road, I would take a look at convertkit. Go to convertkit.com if you want something totally robust that's gonna take care of all your payments, your gateways, your checkout pages, refunds, all that stuff. Go with something like Infusionsoft or HubSpot or even Salesforce. If you're looking at something that really combines communicating with your customers that's integrated into your website as well as a great customer service tool and knowledge base for your customers. I really like Intercom. Now most of these companies have a free trial so there's nothing wrong with you kicking the tires. Taking a look at the interface, seeing if you would be happy to use it, playing around and trying to integrate it with your website. If it works out for you, great. Go all in. I like to use the stuff that I like to use. What does that mean? That means that if you use it, if you find it easy to use, you'll get the most out of it. So go ahead and give those a try. Alright, that wraps up today's lesson. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Even though I mentioned in the beginning of the episode it's hard to move from one CRM to the next, it's not impossible. We've done it a few times. It's a little bit of a pain in the butt. There's a few things you need to make sure you cross your T's and dots your I's and make sure that you didn't miss anything. But it's definitely doable. If you sign up for something, you use it for six months and realize, you know, it's not what I need or I outgrew it. No problem. You can always switch. It's not the end of the world. It's just a little bit difficult. It's just gonna take a little bit of your time. All right, thank you so much for listening, and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode.

I'll see you then.

Take care.

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