Are you running a construction business and struggling to stay organized? Does tracking customer relationships feel like a challenge? Are follow-ups a nightmare?
With the help of a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager), you can easily streamline your efforts and create an efficient workflow for your business.
In this blog post, we will learn about the best free CRM for a construction outfit and how it will benefit your business. Read on to find out more!
Benefits of Setting Up a Free CRM for a Construction Business
Construction companies of all sizes should consider setting up a free Hubspot CRM. This powerful customer relationship management tool can streamline your operations, offering major benefits to your construction business. Here are a few:
- Keep all emails and phone calls with a client in one place.
- Be notified when someone has read your email.
- Create alerts for important dates – like a one-year maintenance checkup date.
- Manage follow-ups with new leads so they don’t ever feel neglected.
- Save time by pre-writing common emails and inserting them with one click.
- Send a group email to customers all due for an upcoming maintenance or seasonal task.
This is just scraping the surface of how a free CRM can help your construction business but it is a good place to start from as these are really important parts of caring for your clients and running your business.
These types of tasks and automations can also be used for partners, sub-contractors and vendors depending on the specifics of your relationships.
By leveraging these cutting-edge tools, construction companies can optimize their workflows while also reducing wasted time and resources.
Steps to Setting up Your Free Hubspot CRM
- Sign up for your account.
- Integrate your contacts into your CRM.
- Create custom properties to better store and organize data.
- Set up workflows to automate repetitive tasks.
- Manage leads by tracking purchase dates, inspection dates, warranties and other useful data points.
Integrating the CRM with your Email
You might think that using a free CRM would be cumbersome or a difficult transition to make, but it’s not. Hubspot comes with a widget or add-on for your email. This add-on integrates Hubspot with whatever email client you use. It has amazing benefits such as:
- Sucking emails you send automagically into the CRM client record.
- Letting you insert pre-written email templates with one click.
- Allowing you to create tasks and follow-ups straight from your inbox.
- Adding tracking to see if a client has read your email.
- Seeing past activity.
Tracking leads and opportunities
Keeping track of leads and opportunities can be a daunting task when managing a construction company. But by using a free CRM such as Hubspot, it can become easier than ever before.
The CRM is great for managing your sales pipeline. If you are negotiating deals, or have maintenance contracts that need renewing, you can keep it organized in your CRM. By storing opportunities with potential revenues and the likelihood of success, the CRM will forecast out your overall revenue potential. This makes it easier to see things like, what has been aging too long, what is priority, and generally helps you understand what you should be spending your time on.
How do you get ROI from Your CRM
For construction companies looking to maximize their return on investment (ROI) in a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, setting up a free Hubspot CRM is an excellent first step.
Ultimately, putting in the work to setup a free CRM for your construction business properly will allow you to increase revenue by following up with customers at the right time, and not letting anyone slip through the cracks.
The insights gleaned from your automation processes will help you keep better tabs on profitability and optimize your operations for maximum efficiency.
FAQs & Troubleshooting Strategies for Hubspot’s Free CRM Platform
The very best way to install a CRM is to assign it to a staff member and make them responsible for the project. Outline what you want done, and what completion of the project looks like. The most efficient way for them to accomplish this is to take the free Hubspot training. People don’t realize how important this time investment is. Don’t skip it.
Hubspot has excellent customer support resources. Not only do they offer well-organized training, but they also have a comprehensive support portal. Don’t spin your wheels – if you hit a wall go straight to the knowledgebase and then straight to customer chat or support ticket. This is a straight course from A to B. Don’t waste your time.
If you aren’t already using a CRM you are missing out on a really essential tool. Talk to us about what technology you are using to run your business and we can help you decide if the Hubspot tool is the best CRM for your construction industry business. It is a good idea to look at it within the context of the other tools you are using and how your particluar business operations are run. Talk to us today!
