It’s really not rocket science – the heart of every business is their customer base! No matter how amazing a product or service might be, your small business won’t survive without a strong customer base. This is why it’s so important for small businesses to invest time and energy into the best CRM tool to keep track of and maintain a healthy and profitable client relationship.
Watch our latest YouTube video on why Hubspot is the best CRM tool to use with your Virtual Assistant or keep reading for an in-depth review of Hubspot and why we recommend it to small business owners.v
How to choose the best CRM tool for your Virtual Assistant?
One of the most effective ways a small business can stay on top of their client relationships is by choosing the best CRM tool and assigning a CRM Virtual Assistant to run the system for you. But how do you decide on which CRM platform and what is suitable to use with your Virtual Assistants and business as a whole?
Your CRM software should have the following functions as a minimum:
- Easily collect leads: Your CRM platform should have integrations that allow you to automatically collect data from your leads
- Provide follow-up automations and reminders: Instead of manually sending out reminder and follow-up emails, your CRM should provide you with solutions that allow you to nurture your leads automatically
- Allow you to qualify and filter your leads: On top of just allowing you to leave call notes and information about your leads, you should be able to set-up categories to help you filter and sort your leads by information such as country, company size, industry and where they are in your sales funnel.
- Be user-friendly: Your CRM system should be easily accessed and easy for both you and your Virtual Assistant to use
In a nutshell, you need to choose a user-friendly virtual solution that effectively manages leads and helps you move them up a funnel and turn them into clients. In fact, one study showed that businesses who use the right CRM for their business generally get $8.71 dollars back for every dollar they invest into CRM platforms and systems.
Need to hire a Virtual Assistant to manage your CRM?
Book a FREE Discovery Call with our Outsourcing Specialist today and we’ll help you recruit, hire and train the perfect Virtual Assistant to manage your CRM.
Why we recommend Hubspot as a CRM platform for your business and Virtual Assistants
As Australia’s leading Virtual Assistant company for over 10 years, we have tried almost every CRM tool you can think of! But the platform that has ticked all the boxes for our Virtual Assistant Business is Hubspot.
Hubspot is a full marketing platform that provides all kinds of solutions for sales and marketing technology activities, including website building, social media management, chatbots, customer service dashboard, and many others. But one of the best business and Virtual Assistant tools in the system lies in its CRM platform.
Here’s an example of a Hubspot Sales Deal that our Operations Manager, Richard Phu, created to show you all the features that you can see at a glance:
You can see from the example above that the following information is available at your fingertips:
- Deal type
- Deal stage
- Close date
- Communication channel
- Source type (how they found us)
- Upcoming tasks (e.g meetings, reminders, follow-ups)
- Deal activity
- Email correspondence (synced to email platform)
- Notes
This is one of the many great benefits that make Hubspot’s CRM tool our recommended CRM platform for small businesses and Virtual Assistants… let’s dive into all the other reasons why!
Hubspot offers free CRM and Marketing Tools
You’re probably wondering how much it costs for a CRM tool like Hubspot and you’ll be glad to know that Hubspot offers a range of free tools that already provide a great deal of amazing features for small business owners and Virtual Assistants. This includes:
| Free CRM Tools: | Free Sales Tools: | Free Marketing Tools: |
|
|
|
With all the features included in the Hubspot free plan, as the business owner you’re able to have full team visibility while running a CRM workflow with very little to no limitations. The features that the free plan provides should be more than enough for a small or medium-sized business to work effectively with a CRM Virtual Assistant.
Hubspot allows you to easily set tasks and notifications
The last thing you want to deal with is having a CRM system that is so complex that it eats up all of your time! User experience and intuitiveness are very important factors when choosing your CRM tool and being able to easily set tasks and notifications can make a world of difference.
Hubspot allows you to create tasks that show up notifications when you set task reminders. Here’s an example of what a task looks like in Hubspot:
Every task allows you to input the following information:
- Assigned to
- Due date and time
- Type of task
- Priority
- Reminder
- Queue
- Created by
This is a really effective way to manage any upcoming tasks with your CRM Virtual Assistant. These tasks can include things such as: creating proposals, setting meetings, providing case studies, and so on.
Hubspot has tools to capture more data from leads
Hubspot allows you to create lead capture forms to collect general information such as their name and email address.
In addition to this, if your lead opts-in using your Hubspot form with a company email address that contains their domain name, Hubspot will use a third-party automated data scraping system to pick up all kinds of relevant data including:
- Annual revenue
- City, Country
- Industry
- Number of employees
- Website
- Social Media Handles
This opens up so many doors for your CRM Virtual Assistant enabling them to keep your leads warm and well nurtured by:
Doing further research about the company and background to give you insider information to help you close the deal
Connect with the leads on social media using your Social Media Business accounts to stay top of mind
Collect data on your target audience and customers
Add this information to your remarketing lists if you’re investing in paid advertising
Hubspot Academy offers online courses and training
Something that we always emphasise here at Outsourcing Angel is the importance of training your Virtual Assistants. One of the reasons that sets Hubspot apart from other CRM platforms is its extensive knowledge base and resources available in their Hubspot Academy.
In fact, Hubspot has its own set of free courses and certifications that you can assign to your CRM Virtual Assistant to broaden their skills including:
- Set-up your Hubspot CRM for growth
- Setting up your CRM
- Closing sales in Hubspot
- Building custom reports in Hubspot
See all the Sales related online courses with Hubspot >
As you can see, there are so many great tools and resources that can help anyone learn how to use Hubspot to its full potential and close more deals.
Want to train yourself on how to hire the best Virtual Assistants?
If you want to hire your own CRM Virtual Assistant, we offer a self-paced online training course based on 10+ years of outsourcing experience on how to hire and train your own Virtual Assistants
Hubspot allows you to organise your deal pipeline
One of the first things you’ll need to set-up in your sales process is your deal pipeline. Think of it as your board-like dashboard where you can enter leads and then move them to different stages along a pipeline as the relationship progresses.
Hubspot allows you to split these basic progressions of a deal pipeline into the following parts:
- Discovery Phase: When a lead becomes aware of your products or services.
- Inquiry Phase: When a lead becomes a prospect and inquires about what your company offers
- Proposal Phase: The time you send a proposal to a potential client
- Negotiation Phase: The part of the process where you land on the rate you and your client will agree upon.
- Closed Phase: When a client has agreed to the rate
- Onboarding Phase: When you orient your client and start the engagement.
With a clear deal pipeline in place, you’ll be able to see how far along each of your leads are from the finish line and assign resources and tasks accordingly.
Hubspot is compatible with many apps and tools
A major benefit of a CRM tool like Hubspot is its ability to integrate with many other tools and platforms to help you streamline your business. In fact, their app partner program is so extensive, that this is the only way we can really show you all the integrations it has to offer:
There are over 500 tool integrations available within the Hubspot ecosystem and they continue to add new partners and integrations each month.
At Outsourcing Angel, we integrate our HubSpot CRM with the following non-Hubspot tools:
- ActiveCampaign: This is our chosen email marketing platform. Since this is integrated with Hubspot, when leads are moved through the deal pipeline, this information also triggers the lead to be added to specific marketing lists and email automations within ActiveCampaign.
- Slack: This is our company chat tool where new lead deals and sales are automatically updated to certain Slack channels so we can notify certain team members and celebrate our wins together!
- Gmail and Google Calendar: Hubspot is synced to our Google Calendars and Gmail accounts allowing us to send emails and calendar requests directly from Hubspot while updating the Hubspot deal with this information.
See all the Hubspot Apps here >
As you can see, there are so many benefits to using Hubspot as a CRM tool with your Virtual Assistant. Remember, any tool that has an amazing user experience can empower any user to do more in less time.
No time to manage your own CRM system?
If you don’t have time to manage your CRM system, we can help you find the perfect CRM Virtual Assistant for your business (and one that’s experienced in Hubspot if that’s your preferred CRM platform) then we recommend chatting to our Outsourcing Specialist Heidi today.
