Working on a grad project - looking for CRM recs

[TrishaSeliya]

hey! i'm working on a project for grad school that essentially deals with best practices for online theatre. We want to offer some CRM recs, was hoping y'all might have some input. Mailchimp and Tessitura are most prominently used in our industry now, but are there better options? Would you consider Salesforce? Thanks for any help!

[MeginVA · Accepted solution]

Although I haven't done anything in the online theatre industry, I've worked in quite a number of other industries, using HubSpot as the tool of choice. Some things that HubSpot can do that MailChimp and Salesforce cannot (not sure of your other solution), is that you can integrate in both your marketing efforts as well as sales and operations. A quick example:

One of my clients uses HubSpot in their construction company. They track their marketing efforts, then create very high-value deals. Once the deals close, there are separate ways that they track the operations parts of their business (sending contracts, getting them signed, managing change orders, even through tracking billing and payment). Although this may not seem directly related to your specific interest, you can track nearly every element of your business through HubSpot - and integrate those parts you cannot (for instance, billing / invoicing tools).

Why is this useful? Traceability. You can see from the first social media post someone clicks on right through purchases and re-purchases. You can target your marketing efforts based on those things that have worked to bring in actual income. You can also develop and tweak processes all in one place to optimize marketing, sales, and operations. Oh - and you can integrate several different online content delivery platforms, too!

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Hi @TrishaSeliya ,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community. 

I wanted to share 2 case studies that show how using a CRM and a marketing software has helped them achieve better results: 

1. GigMasters is an event marketplace that improved customer on-boarding and increased customer retention with HubSpot.
2. Foleon is a content experience platform (CEP) that has grown significantly in its first four years as a business. They didn't have an adequate CRM and used several disparate tools (MailChimp, Podio Project Management, ...) to drive its growth efforts. 

I would also recommend checking out this blog post that explains how a company or an organisation can grow better by implementing a CRM. 

@andrus and @MeginVA would you maybe like to share your opinion here as well?

Thank you

Mia