Do you ever wish you could hire a personal assistant? Someone who could follow you around, track of all your appointments, and keep you on task? They would contact potential clients and remind you about upcoming networking opportunities and maybe even flip a germ-infested lightswitch for you every once in a while.
It could cost you $15 per hour or more to hire someone to do your shallow work. That’s going to be around $150 a week or more. And while, yes, a person who is physically there could run errands or keep you company, they could end up being more of a distraction than a help.
Is it worth it to hire a personal assistant? What if there was a way to get the same benefits for less money?
That’s where personal CRM software comes in handy. But, wait, isn’t CRM for business teams? Yes, but it’s also for the freelancer who needs to track their clients and their marketing. It’s for the salesperson who needs all their sales, marketing, and productivity tools in one place.
Today we’re going to talk about how you can benefit from CRM and compare our top picks. Keep scrolling to find out.
1. The Benefits of Personal CRM: Master the Client Lifecycle
In an ideal world, you would make every decision for your business client-oriented. Your clients are those who bring the money, right? But that’s difficult to do if you don’t have all the correct data on your clients.
Keeping track of what stage your client is at in their journey with you, whether you’ve sent them a portfolio or you’ve sent them a proposal, is difficult. If you don’t have structure, you could forget where you left off.
Having all the information in one place helps you identify client trends. Are you attracting the right clients? At what point are they showing interest and at what point are they ghosting you?
2. Automate the Small Things
Do you feel like you waste time doing small yet important things every day? It may not seem like a waste of time, but when you can automate things like email responses, client scheduling, and daily scheduling, they become time-wasters.
If you have a software program doing those things for you, then you have more time for the deep work. Deep work is the time you spend on your product or your content. If you’re a freelance writer, your client is expecting work by a certain deadline. Meet or even preempt your deadlines by freeing up more time to work deeply.
Small tasks aren’t the only thing you can automate in personal CRM software. Your email marketing would be no small task if you had to type out every email and compile lists manually. With CRM email automation tools, you can cut your email marketing time burden in half or even more.
3. Get All the Data
Are you entirely certain your clients are satisfied? They might have said, “great work” in an email, but that was one client out of how many? What if some are just being polite to get their product and move on?
With a personal CRM system, you can craft a survey and send it to all your clients both past and present. You can use this data to improve your own services.
Having all of this data in one place right alongside all your other communication and productivity tools will save you time. You can quickly analyze your client data, find trends, and then immediately implement them within the same platform.
With CRM, there is no need to switch from one software program to another. You won’t waste time exporting data, reformatting it, and importing it into the next application.
4. Make Your Marketing More Effective
Now ask yourself, “how effective is my marketing?” How many clicks versus how many client commitments? What parts of your marketing funnel are effective and what parts aren’t?
CRM tools could help you find the chinks in your marketing armor. With the right data analytics tools in one place, you can distill the data and save time working with it.
Tools like client filtering allow you to find out what kinds of clients you’re working with. You can filter your clients by industry, geography, lifetime value, date of last contact, etc.
Most CRM software suites allow you to create lead forms for your marketing funnels. You can integrate these forms with your website or your PPC campaigns to increase the number of clients who fall into your funnel.
You can glean data from your marketing campaigns and find out what tactics are generating the most revenue. This alone could save you tons of time and money in the future.
5. Save Time Through Efficiency
Freelancing or working from home is fantastic. You get to start work whenever you like. Take breaks whenever you like. It’s the life...until you realize that every minute you waste is money lost.
Suddenly, you’re trying to maximize every moment you’re “on.” So, you look up all the productivity tools you can and pile on the digital sauce.
After a while, you realize how much time you’re wasting opening your productivity tools, setting them up, and navigating between them. It’s a mess on your quadruple screens.
What if you could streamline it all? All of your productivity tools, all of your reminders, and emails, and schedules in one place?
In a CRM software suite, all of your tools work together. Data effortlessly ports from one tool to another. Repeatable tasks allow you to schedule your weeks out indefinitely. And you’ll never lose track of client information and request thus freeing up time you normally spend looking for the right contact in the right location.
6. Increase Client Retention Rates
Being efficient, keeping track of your clients and your relationship with them, automating emails and marketing, all of these things will keep clients coming back. Clients want accurate information on deadlines and want prompt communication. Personal CRM software can help you keep clients happy.
Happy clients keep hiring you. And when clients keep hiring you, your profits increase.
The Top CRM Software for Personal Use
You’re ready to jump onto the CRM bandwagon. But there are so many choices! You only want the best. Below are our top picks for CRM software.
1. Bitrix24
Having all your tools in the same place is only useful when actually own tools. If you’re working on your car and the ¼ inch socket is missing, you might not be able to change that part out. Same goes for CRM software.
Bitrix24 is your complete tool chest. It gives you every single tool you need and some you might not have thought about using yet.
And if you’re afraid the number of tools will be overwhelming, don’t fret. You can take advantage of the Bitrix24 free tutorials and videos. You’ll quickly learn which tools fit what task and within minutes understand how it works.
Individuals will appreciate Bitrix24’s customizable workflow processes. One-size-fits all is detrimental to workflow management. Why? Because each one of us has developed different strategies and habits to tackle their workload. Why would we each want to use the same configurations as the next guy?
And if you’re looking for the core set of customer relations and lead management tools most CRM solutions offer, they’re right inside Bitrix24’s tool chest. But on top of these basic tools, you’ll find advanced features such as lead management, sales pipeline management, and online payments processing tools.
You can easily productize your services and build an email marketing funnel all from the same place.
How Much Does Bitrix24 Cost?
Unless you have a team of 12 or more, it’s absolutely free. If you don’t need 100GB of storage or the ability to conduct large meetings, you really don’t need to pay for Bitrix24.
2. Zoho CRM
Zoho doesn’t just offer CRM tools. This popular platform boasts some unique tools you won’t find elsewhere even if their other pickings are slim. If you’re looking for gamification tools to increase your productivity, lead management tools, or comprehensive reporting, then Zoho is your software suite.
It features a slick UI that’s easy to use. Their communication and social media tools are well-designed. And you can easily implement their integrations.
The biggest downside to Zoho is a lack of workflow management. Especially for personal CRM this is an important tool Zoho has neglected to add.
How Much Does Zoho CRM Cost?
While Zoho is free for up to ten users, their free tier is missing some useful tools for personal use. If you want social CRM tools, adwords integrations, email integration and workflow automation, you’ll have to pay $12 per user per month for the Standard edition.
3. Hubspot CRM
Most people don’t know Hubspot for their CRM offerings. They’re better known for their dedicated marketing software. But their CRM tools are top of the line.
Because Hubspot is primarily a marketing company, their CRM strong suit is in its ability to help you control your marketing performance. You control your content, channels and you get a full view of what matters to your marketing strategy straight from their dashboard.
And, if you already use Hubspot’s marketing platform, it’s already integrated with Hubspot’s CRM. Easily capture leads, collect data on them, and use it to improve your marketing efforts.
Hubspot isn’t big on customization. While they do allow some customization, most tools are one-size-fits-all. And unless you are going to or have signed up for their marketing suite, their CRM is fairly barebones.
How Much is Hubspot CRM?
Hubspot is what we call freemium. You can use it for free, but many of the features are add-ons you can pay for. There is an Enterprise package, but this won’t be useful for an individual.
4. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is less a comprehensive CRM and more of a sales pipeline manager. If you already have all the productivity tools you want and need a basic sales manager, then Pipedrive is your software suite.
It includes integrations with Mailchimp for email marketing. It’s super user-friendly. And what they do with sales, they do it well. You can easily keep track of what sales activities you have scheduled that day and where your leads are in the funnel.
The interface is Kanban-style just like Trello. So, if you’re a visual person, Pipedrive might appeal to you.
How Much is Pipedrive?
There are three tiers for Pipedrive users. The first is the Essential tier which costs $12.50 per user per month. It includes 2GB of storage, and everything you would need as an individual including integrations through Zapier.
5. Freshsales CRM
Freshsales CRM is well...fresh. It makes lead tracking easy and helps you manage them well. You can quickly assign importance to your leads or send them to your salespeople if you have any.
Their best tool is their email scheduling tool. It’s easy to learn and reliable. Their email templates are top notch and fully customizable. And if you’re working with a small team, then their collaborative notes feature will keep everyone connected and on track.
How Much is Freshsales CRM?
Even if you have a team, Freshsales free CRM tier is fairly useful. It allows an unlimited number of users. It’s integrated with email. And you have access to the mobile app.
But if you want the visual Kanban-style sales funnel view, you’re going to pay $12 per user per month for their Blossom plan.
Just as Good as a Personal Assistant
You might not have the money to hire a personal assistant. But why not get the next best thing? A personal CRM software suite.
Our top pick is Bitrix24. Its expansive toolset won’t leave you disappointed. Sign up for your free Bitrix24 account now.
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