CRM For Engineering Firms
Win more business with compelling prospect and customer management software – and more…
Every business has clients to manage, and Engineering Firms happen to have lots of them. Whether you are a full-service engineering firm or a specialist in your area, you likely work with multiple companies on projects. That creates numerous clients, which means innumerable contacts.
While you might be able to manage a few contracts worth of contacts on your own, over time, you need a tool to help you keep track of them all. A CRM solution is your ticket to keeping track of your contacts and will also help you professionalise your sales and bidding processes.
CRM software is more than an address book for managing names, emails, and phone numbers. It is a tool intended to help you manage many facets of your company. HubSpot CRM is designed to give you the functions and flexibility necessary to oversee and grow your business.
In this email series, you’ll learn how the right CRM can help your engineering firm improve all business processes. We’ll cover everything from tracking professional contacts as they hop between jobs to utilising intelligent reports to examine how you spend your time.
Tracking Prospects
Every professional introduction and business card you pick up represents a wealth of opportunities. Formalising new acquaintances as leads clears a path for you to make contact and treat the introduction as the business opening it is. Despite the benefits of tracking those new people, it’s rare for professionals outside of salespeople to take an aggressive approach with their new contacts. Your CRM can change all of that.
Entering your entire network—including anyone you've met in any context — into your management system as leads gives you and your business a better understanding of the possibilities on the horizon.
For example, in HubSpot CRM, leads can be sorted by first name, last name, date added, or most recent activity. This will help you remember to engage when the intro is fresh or recall an acquaintance by name.
You can also tag leads with custom fields to group them later in any way you want. For example, you tag a contact as "council." Later, you can pull out all of your council contacts.
Once you’ve deepened the relationship and determined what kind of opportunity that person provides for your firm, you can convert lead information into an individual or company contact card with one click.
HubSpot CRM sets prospects apart from the rest of your contacts for easier organisation. Select the Leads tab in the navigation bar, which appears at the top of any screen in the CRM and see a clean display of every lead’s contact information. Scroll over the names to view email addresses and phone numbers, or get in touch with somebody directly within HubSpot CRM with the click of a button.
Organising contacts
Contacts are leads who have been qualified and confirmed as definite business prospects. Once they have been converted, contacts need even more attention from your firm. It is essential to keep them organised. A deal may encompass many individuals, especially when your clients are businesses, each important for helping your firm execute your work.
With HubSpot CRM's holistic approach to contact management, you can create contact cards for individuals that will be linked with the company the person works for and the deals they are involved in. You can take organisation a step further and add tags that will help you recall critical information or search efficiently.
For example, attaching the tag “contractor” to any contacts with that profession will help you quickly identify any existing connections in that field. Contacts are also searchable by location. Say you’re working on collateral for a job in London.
Through this, you can pull up all of your contacts in that postcode and use the work as an opportunity to check in, let them know about the event, and inquire about future opportunities. HubSpot CRM contact cards are designed to be intelligent and super easy to use.
Contact organisation isn’t just crucial for contract execution. Each contact represents future business opportunities at the organisations they move to. With the average professional making fewer than seven career transitions, you must maintain relationships as people switch jobs. That’s the beauty of social integration. Connecting contact cards to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (X) profiles lets you stay in touch with contacts even when their business emails, titles, and cities change.
Contractors are clients, too.
Most engineering firms work with a small army of subcontractors who bring their expertise to your business when needed. Use your CRM software to keep track of them and your clients. There is no reason you should limit your contacts exclusively to the people who pay to work with you. Instead, keep all of your contacts in one central location. Not only does it make it easy to pull up contact information when you are looking for help, but it also allows you to link those contacts with the deals you’ve hired to help you within your database.
Staying on top of all of your contacts is the first step to building strong relationships. HubSpot CRM makes the data entry straightforward and lets you and your co-workers focus on the people and the deals at hand.
Managing and Improving Proposals
As an engineering firm, you receive many incoming inquiries for work and send out an equal number of proposals. Without a CRM solution, you likely rely on a combination of assorted templates, chaotic email threads, and crossed fingers. You'll be left waiting for potential clients to get back to you if you don't have a tool for organising and tracking proposals built into your processes.
Pipeline management puts you back in control.
With HubSpot CRM, you can create a fully customised sales pipeline. HubSpot CRM can adapt to fit your preferred workflow no matter how your firm moves through the client process. Just Enter the names of the different pipeline stages and order them in the best way for your business.
Let's look at a simple example of a sales pipeline. A new lead will usually be placed into the first stage of the sales funnel, "Incoming." You evaluate this lead, and if it is qualified, you forward it to the next stage in the sales process, the "Qualified" stage. Once you've gone through discovery with the client and are ready to give a quote, you can move the deal forward to the "Quote" stage. Once you prepare the price quote and send it to the prospect, you can move the lead to the last active stage, "Closure". This is where the final details will be sorted out, and the negotiation will usually occur. After the Closure stage, you will either win or lose the deal. You can then convert the opportunity into a project. In HubSpot CRM, all the stages are fully customisable to your business to reflect your unique sales process.
Document management
Using pipeline management, you can keep all documents and contacts associated with a deal in one central location. No need to dig for that one email attachment; you can find everything you need in your CRM. You can review all relevant documentation whether you are on the phone with a client or putting together a new proposal for upcoming work.
Automated tasks
A robust CRM like HubSpot CRM also helps you remember to follow outstanding bids with the Tasks feature. Select Tasks from the tool's top bar, create the to-do item, assign it to a staff member, and set a due date. The person responsible for the proposal will get a reminder in their dashboard (and email) to contact prospects when the time is right, improving client follow-up and helping you land more gigs.
All tasks are easily accessible to team members, so they know what's coming up and when.
Performance reports
HubSpot CRM reporting can offer invaluable insights into how your firm's team members perform, giving you a clearer direction for improving and securing more projects. HubSpot CRM comprehensive reports can also improve your proposal process over time. For instance, with the Deal Lost Reasons report, you can track why your proposal was declined in the past and work to improve the areas of your workflow that are preventing success.
Use the Deals Lost Reasons report to know why you're not converting prospects into clients and work to improve in the future.
A Mobile CRM for a mobile team
Engineering Firms need to have nimble tools at their fingertips. Salespeople may meet with clients in their offices, but they should also be able to access their CRM at a site or client's office. HubSpot CRM can go to all of those places and more.
Your team members can use HubSpot CRM on their platform of choice with free native apps for iOS, Android, and Windows devices. Or, if you log in to the web version of the tool, you’ll have access to a responsive design that matches the size of the screen you’re using. No matter how or where you use HubSpot CRM, your information will be there and easy to read.
The other key to a strong mobile CRM is syncing. When multiple people are working on a project, you need to guarantee that everyone has the most recent data and details at any time. It’s a must to collaborate efficiently and effectively. HubSpot CRM's apps sync automatically to keep you updated at any time and place. Always go into your meetings prepared with the latest intel.
HubSpot CRM combines these crucial mobile elements with all the great CRM features on the desktop version. Your sales team needs the best tools, but that doesn’t mean they have to be chained to their desks.
Tracking your Time
We all know some clients are more demanding than others. Some contracts take dozens of phone calls and emails to land, others require constant conversations to manage. Keeping track of the time spent on calls and emails can help you improve your bid process, empowering you to raise rates for high-touch clients and cut deals with those who make themselves easy to work with.
With HubSpot CRM, you can email clients directly from your CRM tool and record emails for later review. By tracking email volume and time spent through HubSpot CRM, you get a crystal-clear picture of how much time you spend conversing with your many clients.
By using the integrated email features, you’ll get an out-of-the-box analysis of your email activity, with reports on everything from the number of emails you make (total, per team, per user, etc.) to a comparison of email volume against the value of the deal. Not only can you use this data to set rates, but you can also improve the accuracy of your billable hours once you are in contract. Having this hard data at your fingertips can also help secure your client’s trust, which is good business for everyone.
Remember, time is money and sending and receiving emails takes up a lot of time.
CRM For Engineering Firms Chapter 6: Integrating with your tools
Whether you use HubSpot CRM alone or with one of these integrated Apps, the experience will always be a breeze.
This email series is just a glimpse of how HubSpot CRM can transform work processes for an engineering firm. A CRM should make your business operate smoothly and efficiently and support your growth over time.
HubSpot CRM is an intuitive, easy-to-use tool that takes just minutes to set up. You’ll get powerful features such as:
- Customisable pipeline
- Unlimited contacts
- Automated tasks
- Sales goal setting
- Sales forecasting
- Dynamic reports
- Time Tracking
- FREE native mobile apps for Android, iOS and Windows devices
Inspired? Sign up for a FREE trial.
Flowbird is an independent CRM and Automation agency based in Ashford, Kent, UK. We help clients with all aspects of CRM, from selecting a new system to maximising their existing system.
If you have questions about using the CRM, Flowbird has extensive support available in online troubleshooting and a team of experts to provide the answers you need.