CRM

Hubspot

I have been searching for a cloud CRM for years, one that I would be happy with and I am over the moon to say that I have finally found what I’ve been looking for. I know, I know it sounds corny and I will have no vested interest in promoting Hubspot apart from the fact that I would love for small business owners to have an amazing experience with their CRM too.

I do not pay for Hubspot by the way, they provide a CRM for free, completely for free, let me say that another way, no money leaves my bank account every single month for using Hubspot. Yeah I know, it sounds too good to be true, well it is totally true.

Of course they do have a paid service for sure and that’s not even that expensive either. Let me describe some of the benefits I am getting for using their cloud based CRM system.

Oh I must just say that I do not engage in any email marketing, drip feed campaigning, squeeze page downloads or other spam practices whatsoever. And that’s just as well, because that means I can use the free Hubspot product.

I can add contacts, manually, upload, via email bcc and tag them.

They allow me to IMAP my email, that means when I send email to my contacts, it is synched with my normal email provider, which is Google G-Suite, via Apple Mail. Everything syncs beautifully. This means my conversations with contacts are beautifully kept together on my contact record inside Hubspot. I need this because it means I can develop a closer one to one relationship with my contact. No bulk emails from me, but of course they do it if you pay for it. I highly recommend that you do not use bulk email practices by the way.

Anyway, more benefits, the contact’s domain, if it is a company one, will automatically bring in the company details including the company LinkedIn page. Incredible!

If I send an email to my contact, it allows me to add a follow-up task inside Hubspot really really easily, which means I have no need to add this anywhere else. Really super easy indeed.

Of course then I have a task list, a deals section, lead/contact capture forms, tracking code for my website, even a cookie pop-up for my website.

It just works beautifully and fully integrated, I am really super happy with their solution, can you tell?

They are also completely GDPR compliant and the only company I have come across who actually laid out their stall in connection with GDPR, clearly and showed a roadmap of product updates and releases in order to allow us as users to be fully compliant and they did it all on time as well.

The promise is that it will be free forever, so let’s wait and see if that’s true. I guess they want raving fans, testing out the product and be so impressed with it that one day they will sign up to purchase some of the paid options too.

I’ve tried many CRM systems during my digital career and am now kicking myself for having tried out so many before finding what I am truly happy with. I love it’s simplicity, I see so many that have made it so complicated.

Happy contacting!

Michael de Groot

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Are you guilty of using the ‘sheep dip’ approach?

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 I am sorry to say, I'm guilty!

It's not that I'm not wishing to be super personal and to engage with one person at a time and appeal to their specific goals and aspirations.

The truth is there are just not enough hours in the day to engage with every new connection request and every new follower at a level that I would ideally like. So some automation is inevitable. I'm still experimenting too and have already adjustedsome things.

I'm not using autobots as such, but I am manually adding new connections to my CRM and an automated process and messaging them with the same template message. And no, I don't feel great about it, but it's working at the moment.

My goal is to be engaging and strike up a conversation, share some valuable content and information that is free and at the same time being careful not to pitch anything. Its totally not my intention to do any kind of pitching. Eventually I'd like to have a conversation, which I call a discovery call. And that again is to provide some value, not to pitch.

I have carefully designed this process after weeks of testing it and receiving some deeper level of engagement with new connections, especially on LinkedIn. Anywhere else it's much harder to do. Email is still one of our default go to apps each morning. I know it's Facebook for most too.

I state very clearly in my auto emails that my purpose is to engage at a deeper level and invite recipients to unsubscribe if they wish to and indeed some do, but not as many as I had originally expected. Maybe one every 2-3 weeks.

I do receive a fair bit of engagement from these new connections and I also notice a lot don't. I'm surprised because they asked to connect with me in the majority of cases, at least 95% of them are incoming requests. Usually with no reason given for wishing to connect by the way.

The real engagement occurs when after a few touch points, which are a combination of engaging with their profiles and sharing some content and information, you manage to get agreement for a discovery call. When you are able to engage in a conversation with your connections, more clarity about who they are and what their goals are means that you can start to look out for clues and understand better how they'd like you to engage with them in the future. Over the years I've come to realise that this is by far the best method.

The goal always is to end up having a conversation. I believe by phone and usually Skype with video is best. I'd like to try other methods too, like Facebook messenger with video, although having tried it twice, it's still a bit unstable.

If you'd like to skip all the automation and go straight to a discovery call then by all means go for it and head over here,

http://www.stayingaliveuk.com/lets-talk

in the meantime let me know how you're feeling about my automation and by all means share your ideas and strategies that are working for you? 

LinkedIn created a brilliant eBook with my favourite illustrator. @gapingvoid (Hugh Macleod) creates the most amazing messages through his illustrations. Read more about him and@gapingvoidhere: (http://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/team-members/hugh-macleod/)

Occasionally I will share one of the articles and illustrations from the eBook and give you my opinion, interpretation, insight and my meaning.

@stayingaliveuk

#contentmarketing #content #socialmedia #engagement #marketing #socialselling #sales #empathy #distraction #purpose #relevance #trust #love #mastodon #why #linkedinlectures

Online is great and talking is even better. Everyone's ultimate goal in business and life is to make real connections, where you meet someone face to face. Before that meeting a conversation is the ultimate icebreaker. I value my LinkedIn connections and realise that I don't really know you or what your goals are and how I might facilitate or support those goals. Feel free to click through and book a call with me (https://www.stayingaliveuk.com/discovery-call/). I have blocked out only Fridays each week, excluding holidays, for calls. Hope to speak with you soon.

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Is 'LinkedIn Contacts' a sign of a full blown CRM?

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20130306-192245.jpg Since the middle of 2012, LinkedIn have been rolling out new features, re-designed its user interface, upgraded the ability to include media on your profile and added more features to paid products for recruiters and sales organisations.

And now they are releasing ’Contacts’. The normal slow roll-out applies.

I predicted 4 months ago, without any prior knowledge that the natural extension of LinkedIn would be CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

I believe this is the start of it. It's a logical and sensible extension of LinkedIn, it makes complete sense. The hardest thing for sales people and marketers alike, is keeping up to date records of prospects inside customer databases, spreadsheets and address books.

Often people are employed or huge money is spent on cleaning data. There are organisations who sell directories to the most sought after professionals, like buying and HR professionals.

With LinkedIn, most business professionals will keep their details up to date. This means you have a database of contacts and prospects that will NEVER get out of date.

This is a sales professional’s and marketer’s dream. Link with this, all email communication, contact details and records of calls and interaction and you've got your dream CRM.

So now sales organisations have the triad of contact information directly inside LinkedIn, a ’social profile’, ’sales navigator’ and ’contacts’.

I can well imagine how this will develop further and do I think it would be worth upgrading to a premium account for this? Oh yes indeed I would. I am already a premium member anyway and was doubting some of the benefits, but now I can see how a premium member will receive some additional benefits in this integrated LinkedIn world.

By the way I don't think contacts is a charged product, but there are some features that are only available for premium members, what exactly I won't know for sure until I see the release.

The way I see it at the moment is that LinkedIn are the ’Apple’ of social media/networks. Facebook is the ’Microsoft’ and Twitter is just a ’News Ticker’ feed.

LinkedIn has developed a higher quality user interface compared to the others and its continuing to enhance this on their website as well as mobile.

They don't suffer from the volume of events and games invites either and now I know why they switched-off events last year. It's all making sense to me.

Their vision is right and they are doing the right things.

I am quite impressed as you can tell and I don't even work for the company!

If you want to learn how to create a great LinkedIn profile for FREE join me on my weekly surgery on google hangout.

http://stayingaliveuk.com/linkedinstinct/

If you want to swipe through hundreds of FREE insights and tips follow this link.

http://storify.com/stayingaliveuk/linkedinstinct/slideshow

Success with your LinkedIn journey, it will be worth it.