Inbound marketing is all about achieving the strongest, most trusted leads that your sales team can use to form relationships and achieve deals. One of the most useful features of an inbound marketing CRM platform (such as Hubspot) is the contacts area. This can be used to store the data of thousands of potential customers, from your website viewers to your partners and everyone in-between. This is where you turn your leads into customers, so having an area that your marketing and sales team can share will help you find and attract your perfect leads, determined by your buyer personas.
But when adding new contacts should you be manually inputting them or can you rely on website automation? Let's take a look at our options...
Why Do It Manually
Manually adding a contact is an easy process. You simply need to click 'Add Contact' and then input all the data you have. Hit save and there it is in your contacts list. If you have a spreadsheet with all your previous clients on then it won't take much effort to transfer that data. What it will take, however, is time. While adding a simple contact is a fast job, adding a hundred new contacts all by hand will be a slow process.
That's why manually inputting a new contact is ideal for that odd person you find that could make a perfect lead! If you meet a business owner at a convention or get given a business card at an expo you can easy input the data and add them to the CRM without any hassle.
Inputting data manually:
Positives |
Negatives |
| Fast in small amounts | Slow if adding lots of new contacts |
| Very easy to do | You need to find your data somewhere |
| Ideal for leads your meet offline | Information could be incorrect |
| You have to start the conversation yourself |
Why Use Automation
Automation can allow you to build a long list of clients with minimised stress. An inbound CRM system can be set up to gather data from anyone that interacts with your website. Using contact forms, lead flows, messages and more, you can turn your website into a tool that creates, organises and prioritises contacts at any stage of the buyer journey. The automation software will even expand on the data that you receive, turning just an Email and a name into a contact that includes a business and phone number.
Automation is great for collecting and organising your contacts in an easy manner that reduces the stress and workload of your sales team. It also gathers data so that you don't have too, as well as allowing the best leads to start the conversation with you.
Inputting data with automation:
Positives |
Negatives |
| Easily add multiple contacts | Information may be incorrect |
| Reduces the stress and workload of your sales team | Takes time to initially setup |
| Data is gathered automatically from your website | |
| Expands on the data you are given | |
| Allows you to rank your contacts automatically | |
| Allows your best leads to start the conversation |
Discussion – Manual Vs Automation
Both of these methods have their own uses and can benefit you in some way. Manually adding contacts allows input data from outside your website and is easy to do. Automation allows you to gather hundreds of contacts without the need to spend time adding the data yourself. Which of these methods you believe is more beneficial for your business? Let me know in the comments!
When adding a contact gathering data can be a difficult task. Do you collect data manually and input it yourself or do you allow your website to do it for you? Both are viable options so which method do you prefer? Start the conversation in the comment section.
Automation lets your sales team focus on securing deals, while manually inputting the data can take up valuable time. Do you prefer your sales team to be making sales or do you prefer knowing exactly who your contacts are and taking things slow? Please feel free to discuss this in the comment section!
Conclusion
Here at JDR we strongly believe that automation is the future of marketing and as Platinum Hubspot partners, we are striving to help small and medium businesses all across the country get to terms with this incredible new tool.
If you would like to better understand the possibility of automatically adding new contacts to your CRM system, feel free to contact us via our website or give us a call on 01332 343 281.
