HubSpot is an exceptional software platform for inbound sales and marketing activities and integrating your CRM is essential for optimal performance.
The success of your sales and marketing program weighs heavily on your ability to track your customer relationships effectively. Which customer relationship management system (CRM) makes the most sense for your business? By integrating your CRM with the HubSpot inbound marketing platform, you can utilize its powerful analytics to determine which tactics are most effective.
As a manufacturer of medical devices, equipment, and supplies, you need a tool that helps you track tasks, product categories, and pipeline status. You have no need for many of the features of complex CRMs. Here are our top four CRM contenders:
HubSpot CRM
If you were a small business using the HubSpot inbound marketing platform, adopting the free HubSpot CRM would seem like a logical choice. Some of its most popular capabilities include:
- Lead generation support
- User-friendly dashboards
- Drag and drop functionality
- Advanced tracking
- Templates
- Timelines
While you can’t beat the price or the user-friendly interface, the HubSpot CRM falls short compared to the advanced capabilities that enterprise-level CRMs can offer.
Salesforce
One of the most well-known brands of CRM is Salesforce. It has been a long-standing standard for sales professionals. Its complexity enables sales teams to create highly-sophisticated functionality that is unmatched by any other CRM. However, with the good comes the bad. If you intend to use Salesforce, you will also need to have an expert in-house or on retainer to manage your data.
If your team is already acclimated to Salesforce, and you are implementing the HubSpot inbound marketing platform, integrating the two will provide precise analyses for you to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
The integration’s bi-directional sync feature ensures that your sales and marketing teams both have access to the most up-to-date contact information. You can customize what is synced by lifecycle stage, account, and other important criteria.
SugarCRM
Another popular legacy CRM, SugarCRM has been able to work with the HubSpot inbound marketing platform for many years. This highly effective integration boasts about the benefits of cost-effective closed-loop marketing for sales and marketing team collaboration.
Like Salesforce, SugarCRM offers bi-directional synchronization of lead, contact, account, and opportunity data for real-time updates. However, its focus is lead generation and analysis.
Although it is a strong option for lead generation, sales process, and analysis, SugarCRM has received criticism that its user experience is not up to par.
Target Pipeline
Finally, we have a CRM built exclusively for the healthcare industry. With Target Pipeline, there is no need for extensive training or complex configurations. It provides clean-cut visual displays of calendar, pipeline, task, contact, opportunity, and account information – including internal hierarchies as well as GPO and IDN associations – on your iPhone or Android smartphone or tablet.
This is a CRM to consider and watch. Being this focused in medical manufacturing fulfills a need and strikes a cord in the minds of this industry. You can integrate your Target Pipeline data with HubSpot to ensure your sales and marketing teams are up-to-date and able run reports any way they’d like – by territory, vendors, products, lead sources, expected close date and more.
Conclusion
Although these CRMs have many individual benefits, their collective value lies in their ability to integrate customer data into HubSpot’s inbound marketing platform. Some of the key benefits this integration provides include:
- Keeping sales and marketing teams in sync
- Leveraging analytics for maximum ROI
- Incorporation of form submission data
- Tracking lifecycle events and dates
- Closed-loop reporting
If you would like to learn more about how to grow your medical manufacturing business, please contact us at KBK Communications. We are a full-service inbound marketing firm with expertise in the healthcare industry.
