Are you using a CRM?
A while ago I wrote an article covering the best CRMs for small teams. Some freelancers and agencies wrote me and told me their favorites. But others told me they didn't really want to spend any money on a CRM when it was just them and their clients. They had simple setups.
Of course as I pushed in a bit with a few of them, their simple setups were anything but simple.
When you started asking more and digging in deeper, you discovered that a CRM would be really useful. But it was clear from the size of their operations that they weren't going to pay.
So I told them about Hubspot CRM—a forever free CRM. It takes a bit to get used to, but can become really helpful for tracking a variety of customer data.
Are you integrating collected payments with a CRM?
Once you get past the initial hurdle of not using a CRM, it's pretty addicting to get and collect all your client data under a single roof. You can look for, and find, tons of useful information to help you better follow up with customers and engage them.
One of the most common things you might want to do is connect it up with your collected payments so that you could capture that data, or even create new customers on the fly without typing anything in.
I do that with another product called Zapier, which helps me connect one application to another.
Are you struggling to parse text?
If you use Zapier for your hubspot stripe integration, you'll soon discover that stripe holds the customer's name in a single field and hubspot captures it in two fields. Now what?
Well that's what I wanted to show you today. How to easily use some additional Zapier features to parse data and get everything into hubspot perfectly.
Can you use Zapier for more?
This is but one simple example. The reality is that I use Zapier for tons of stuff. I can collect and add users to my CRM if they're commenting on my blog because Zapier has an integration between WordPress and Agile CRM. I can score my leads based on their payment of invoices sent to them from Freshbooks. Or capture Stripe payments and tag customers based on which ebook they purchased.
Zapier is the connector. And their internal functions can help you a lot.
So what will you connect next?