Our CRM Journey

There are a lot of choices out there for Client Relationship Management (CRM). So many that it is pretty overwhelming to decide which one is right for you. As our company has evolved over the last 9 years, we have tried several different ways of managing our clients. 

Like a lot of small businesses, we started out with simple spreadsheets and email organization to manage our client’s requests. But as we grew as a company and expanded the number of ongoing clients we had, we needed a better way to manage our clients and our leads. But we also needed project management software.

Trying Different CRMs

We tried Monday.com several years ago, but most project management software at the time billed you based on how many users you had and how many projects you had. The problem we had was that we were working with dozens of clients at once and considered each of them their own project (some ongoing, some fixed). This made it very expensive to use platforms that based their price on the number of projects or dashboards we used.

Time Tracking with a CRM

Another issue that we ran into was time tracking. Our ongoing clients get billed based on time spent, so we needed an easy way for the members of our team to track their time per client. And we needed to be able to see how we were doing against the approved time. We also had hourly employees whose hours per week fluctuated based on how much work we had, so we needed an easy way for them to track their hours. Ultimately, we found a company called trigger. Their software was way more affordable than the others and had unlimited projects. We used them for years and they were great for our purposes. 

But trigger is exclusively for project management, so we needed a separate software geared more towards customer service and client management. We are a smaller company and do not have a dedicated sales team. Instead, everyone in the company helps in various ways in the sales process. So we were looking for one software that gave us a lot of benefits in one place and allowed us to pick up where others left off.

Choosing Hubspot

Hubspot offered services for client management, email marketing, sales, and a ticket queue to manage ongoing client requests. They also had a lot of integrations, so we could connect our forms with them and get slack notifications. And they had automations and workflows that allowed us to be more efficient with less people. Ultimately, we chose to go with Hubspot and signed up for Marketing Hub Starter, Sales Hub Professional and Service Hub Starter.

Stay tuned for our next blog where we will review and share our experience with Hubspot over the past year and why we ultimately switched to Monday.com last month.