By figuring out a simple system for keeping notes, conversations, and customer history all in one spot, your sales team will be empowered to work smarter, rather than harder. 

Before we dive into specific platforms, this resource will provide a quick crash course into some strategies to make sure your sales team is able to leverage all of their hard work towards reaching their max potential.

What is a CRM?

The acronym CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management — a fancy way of saying context and a way to track relationships with past, current, and potential future clients. 

When it comes time to sell ads, building out your CRM system can help to prioritize and streamline outreach, ensuring your staff is as prepared as possible before they hit the streets, inboxes, or phones.

Why should you use one?

1. Strengthen customer relationships

A centralized source of information leads to stronger relationships with advertisers.

The goal is building relationships, not just closing deals. With a CRM, team members will be more prepared, enabling them to tailor their pitches to specific customers, remember past conversations, and track every interaction — all of which contributes to more meaningful communication.

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2. Improve sales performance

Once established, CRM systems are known to have an immediate positive impact on sales teams across all different industries. 

According to a 2024 survey from freshworks:

• Businesses saw revenue increase up to 30% once implementing a CRM system.
• Implementing a CRM shortened their average sales cycles by 8-14 days, by streamlining and organizing the process.
• On average, businesses reported that CRMs save their sales team 5-10 hours per week.

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3. Support training and reduce staff turnover challenges

In student media, where staff turnover is constant, CRMs become especially crucial. A CRM helps to turn all of that scattered context from notebooks, sticky notes, conversations, apps and more into organized institutional knowledge. 

New team members can then pick up where graduating staff left off instead of rebuilding each year. 

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4. Better collaboration and visibility for your team

Team-wide CRM visibility can have a positive impact on your sales team:

• For leadership: Easier delegation, an organized, high-level overview of your sales team’s efforts, and a means of training new staff members that allows them to pick up where graduates left off, rather than starting from scratch each semester.
• For sales staff: Easy to quantify their personal work, prioritize customer outreach, track and take notes on all of their customer interactions.
• For your organization: CRMs collect data which can be turned into dashboards and charts that make your organization’s progress visible, and illuminate weak points that could be improved for the next semester.

What tools are available?

Free Platforms

Google Sheets

Of all the platforms in this list, Google Sheets is the most customizable, but also the most manual. A shareable Sheets template will allow you and your team to come together and build a living CRM document that you can constantly improve year over year to suit your needs. 

There’s a template at the end of this resource, and your flytedesk account manager would love to customize and workshop it with you.

HubSpot’s Free Tier

CRM functionality is available through “Sales Hub,” which has a limited free tier to get started, with additional seats + features starting at $15 per user, per month. 

HubSpot’s highlights include:

• Customizable dashboard features, like making dashboards for each member of your sales team for them to set tasks, track their own client relationships, revenue, etc.
• Customer support and training through its online academy
• Revenue forecasting
• Email templates and automation features
• AI features like insights, an AI assistant, and prioritization

Capsule’s Free Tier

This tier is free forever, while still including a suite of tools perfect for a sales team building their CRM system from the ground up.

• Mobile app access in addition to 24/7 customer support, documentation, and videos
• Outlook AND Gmail integrations (allows your team to streamline sending emails directly from Capsule, and connects to your external inbox(es) to store/reference sent mail) 
• Kanban feature to help visualize your team’s pipeline/progress
• Free tier includes 5 customizable fields (especially useful for making fields in your CRM student media-specific)

One thing to note about Capsule’s free tier: It only stores up to 250 contacts, so if you have a large list, you will be looking at the paid tiers.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM offers free tool that’s great for publishers who want to drive sales and revenue without adding another expense, while still including:

• Contact Book, for managing your customer’s information
• Email templates for your sales team to use for outreach
• Web forms, which can help to streamline your lead generation
• Analytics tools and dashboards for tracking progress

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Paid Platforms

Insightly

Insightly offers a free 14-day trial before starting at $29 per user per month. 

• Mobile app functionality
• Highly customizable fields
• Support team to help answer any questions that come up
• Diverse app integration capabilities
• Multiple “view” choices to find what works best for your team

mondayCRM

Starting at $12 per user per month, mondayCRM is cited as being easy to use, even for those new to CRM. Highlights include:

• Mobile app functionality
• Highly customizable fields
• Option to create a “lead sequence,” or a preset cadence for reaching out to new prospects that helps keep your sales reps on schedule
• AI tools for tackling duplicative tasks
• Simple-to-create automations

Capsule

In addition to the features listed under free tier, Capsule also offers paid tiers with additional features from $18 to $36 monthly. 

• Both paid tiers offer a 14-Day free trial
• Ups max contacts from 250 to 30,000/60,000 respectively (just a friendly note that your sales team will most likely not be needing to track 60,000 contacts)
• Adds email template functionality and access to a shared inbox
• Additional dashboard, goals, and reporting features
• Paid tiers begin to gain access to Capsule’s workflow automation features

Nutshell

Plans start at $13, per user, per month and highlights include:

• Email and Calendar sync, which allows for email automation and Meeting Scheduler, which lets you create and manage virtual meetings without leaving your CRM
• Automations for repetitive tasks
• Custom pipeline views which can be catered to suit your needs for moving leads towards customers
• AI tools

What’s next?

Remember, CRM platforms are not built specifically for student media. The result? You’ll likely gain access to advanced features that are more designed for large-scale sales teams.

Figure out what works best for your organization, and if that means starting small and building your own CRM from scratch, great! With that in mind, here’s a Google Sheets template to pull ideas from or make a copy of as you get started.