Danny and David sit down to discuss the increasing benefits of having your sales team use an industrial CRM, and which programs are the most popular.
Danny:
Hey, so for today's episode, we're going to talk about CRMs and which tool your industrial sales team needs to use. All right, so CRM, we're going to talk about this. This is something that we've talked about a good little bit, and it comes up a lot, because it's exciting and there's a lot of companies right now that are going through this digital transformation piece, which we've talked about a lot: not just in the operations, but also in the front office piece, when it comes to sales and it comes to marketing…and a big, big, big part of that conversation is your CRM tool.

A lot of companies are still relying on a spreadsheet, or some antiquated system or something that doesn't really talk well, and part of the problem is that with the new ways that we're going to market with the new technologies, and the speed of information that we need, a lot of these systems need to catch up. And if you have one – if you don't have one you need one – so, that's kind of what we wanted to talk about today: if I have an industrial sales team, what CRM sales tool should I use? What do you think, David?
David:
Well, I think the first thing that we hear from the marketing side is, the sales team doesn't want to use it. It's tedious, it's cumbersome. They think, “Hey, I need to be out there selling, not entering in a bunch of data.” So, I couldn't agree more, and it feels like you're slowing down when you think it should be helping you, so a lot of the tools now are making it even more easy to input that data, or input it for you, so when you're looking at Salesforce, or Microsoft Dynamics, Hubspot, they're all great tools, and even when we look at our survey. We surveyed what, almost 200 industrial organizations, manufacturing organizations, and they said 34% of them are using Salesforce.
Danny:
Not a surprise there.
David:
Not surprised.
Danny:
Big 800 pound gorilla.
David:
Yep. Then we have 12% using Microsoft Dynamics, so I'd say maybe a couple of years ago I'd cringe, and be like, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe you're using that. No wonder you don't like your CRM," but now you're seeing a lot of improvements. I think they're really trying to answer to the user that's using it, and then you're looking at, maybe a little guy that's new, still publicly traded, but Hubspot is a free CRM. You kind of eliminate your excuse for your organization, so looking at those three robust options, you kind of don't have an excuse to not use one.
Danny:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and I think especially, I think that one of the big shifts that we're seeing in this will help justify that expense and making that shift is really getting a sense of looking at that customer journey and making it really easy to buy. I think that's a... you've got a lot of competition. Maybe you've got a commodity as a product it's very hard to be able to compete on price alone and typically that happens a lot. But one of the ways of being able to answer that is just looking at your sales process, looking at your customer service, dealing with the organization. Is that easy? Is it frictionless? Or is it full of friction?
David:
Right, and that's where the marketing side of the organization. It's, how can I get more data to be able to take action on?
Danny:
Right.
David:
And get the sales qualified leads in front of my sales team.
Danny:
Right.
David: