Why You Must Integrate Your Business Website with a WordPress CRM

Business development is an essential activity for any (and every) business. After all, if you don’t have sales, you won’t make money, which means you won’t be able to pay yourself — or pay for any of the expenses that your business incurs in order to operate.

However, without a solid system in place for managing business development activities, you may find your days overrun with chasing sales and all the administrative details around closing them — with no time left to actually do the work that makes your business money.

This process starts with the use of a specific tool that’s designed to help you manage customer relationships.

Enter: the WordPress CRM.

What Does a CRM Do?

“CRM” is an acronym for “customer relationship management” — a term that’s usually associated with the use of a specific tool to manage this process.

Put simply, a CRM acts as a database for your business contacts while helping you track their associated stages in the sales process.

The Importance of Having a Sales Process for Your Business

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Though every business has a slightly different sales process, the basic stages are roughly the same.

The stages in a sales process include your initial efforts to find and approach prospects, having a consultative conversation to determine their needs and if they’re a fit for what you’re selling, then making a proposal for working together and overcoming objections (and eventually negotiating a closed won deal if everything goes well).

As you’ve probably learned through your own business development efforts, this process gets a bit disjointed when prospects aren’t ready to move forward immediately but are interested in staying in touch to work together in the future. Though it may be tempting to try to push the sale forward now, your efforts may turn off the prospect to the point where they’re no longer interested in working together — ever.

A better solution? Using a WordPress CRM to help manage these relationships over the long-term, prompting you to follow up with an interested prospect when they’re in a better place to buy from you.

Ultimately, it’s your efforts around taking the time to log notes around meetings, calls, and emails that determines whether or not this type of tool will be useful for your company. By keeping your CRM up-to-date, you’ll have the most accurate look at sales that will likely close immediately and those that aren’t there yet but that you can forecast as future possibilities.

WordPress CRM - WP-CRM System

Being able to forecast future sales can also be referred to as building a sales pipeline. By taking the time to determine where each prospect is at in the sales process, you’ll have a better idea of just how much work you have to do to hit your numbers — or if you’re so ahead of the game that you can take a break from business development efforts.

Popular CRM Options on the Market

Some of the most popular CRMs on the market include Salesforce and the Hubspot CRM. While both are powerful in their own rights, they’re not without their own set of headaches for small business owners who are already stretched thin.

Salesforce, for example, is expensive to customize for a small company’s particular needs — though it’s certainly a favorite for enterprise companies that have the budget to configure it properly. Salesforce offers a basic out-of-the-box solution that starts at $25/user/month, but it may be too limited to effectively serve your purposes without hiring help to personalize it (which may incur additional costs for upkeep and software access).

Hubspot CRM, on the other hand, is free to use with many customization features. That said, it becomes expensive if you want to use any advanced reporting features and functionality. Integrating the basic functionality of Hubspot CRM with WordPress will require the additional expenses of premium plugins and paid accounts with tools like Zapier.

One of the benefits of using a WordPress CRM specifically is that new contacts can be automatically logged in your system from the moment they get in contact from your website.

An All-In-One WordPress CRM Solution: WP-CRM System

WP-CRM System is a WordPress plugin offering a customer relationship management solution that lives directly within your WordPress dashboard.

In addition to offering necessary CRM functionality, you can also use it as a project management tool for collaborating with clients, as well as a dashboard from which to collect client payments.

By keeping all of these related activities within WordPress, you’ll save time otherwise spent jumping around from one tool to another during the day-to-day management of your business.

As with Hubspot CRM and Salesforce, you can customize WP-CRM System for your own specific purposes through the use of various integrations that include Zapier, Mailchimp, and Gravity Forms. If you’re a WordPress developer, you can further customize it for your unique needs with the help of existing documentation.

Final Thoughts: Why You Must Integrate Your Business Website with a WordPress CRM

Regardless of the specific solution you choose, it’s nearly impossible to run a successful business without a tool to organize your business development efforts, like a WordPress CRM. There are simply too many little details to keep track of when running a business and you don’t want to tie up your brain’s processing power by trying to remember them all without assistance!

Hubspot CRM and Salesforce are solid options for the right use cases, but if you want to manage everything about customer relationship management, from prospects in need of follow-ups, to project management and payment collection from within your WordPress dashboard — consider a specialized tool like WP-CRM System.

Check out available WP-CRM System packages to activate and power up your own WordPress CRM.

What questions do you have about integrating a WordPress CRM with your website? Tweet at @WPCRMSystem and we’ll help to answer your questions!

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Maddy Osman

Maddy Osman is an SEO Content Strategist who works with clients like AAA, Automattic, Kinsta, and Sprout Social. Her background in WordPress web design contributes to a well-rounded understanding of SEO and how to connect brands to relevant search prospects.