Your business sells a product, service, and/or engages with clients/customers on a regular basis? Chances are you need a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
Tracking your clients on a notepad, excel spreadsheet, or just in your head will prevent you from scaling your business the way you want.
What happened when you brought on another person? You found it hard to keep them in the loop as to what was going on with clients, right?
Or you didn’t document your workflow for delivering a service and everything fell apart.
CRMs let you keep everything in one place and enforce workflows that you have approval on at every step.
Table of Contents
What is a CRM?
A customer relationship management program is the ultimate tool for scaling your business.
It allows you to track anything and everything as it relates to your business.
This includes, but isn’t limited to the following:
- Accounts
- Contacts
- Leads
- Deals
- Campaigns
- Custom Items as it relates to your business
Those are only some of the modules you can track within a CRM.
How do those modules actually relate to adding value to your business?
I can only explain by giving you insight into how it’s adding value to my business, Revision Marketing Group.
Leads
Revision Marketing Group generates a lot of leads from different places. This includes our website contact form, downloadable content, event registration, podcast interviews, social media messages, and one or two I’m forgetting.
The point is we generate a lot of leads from all over the place. We need a system to push all of these leads to in order to nurture them and convert them to paying customers.
All of the leads we generate are automatically pushed to our CRM as a lead.
We track the name, email correspondence, phone calls, the campaign they signed up for, lead source, and all of our team member’s notes on each individual lead.
The most important reason we push all leads to the CRM is to have quantitative data to act on.
Are we getting leads from referrals?
Are we getting leads from paid ads?
Are we getting leads from blog posts?
What kind of leads convert to customers?
The next important aspect of a CRM is the contact and account modules.
Accounts & Contacts
An account is a different word for a company in this instance.
In our CRM, we have a one-to-many relationship between accounts and contacts.
That means one account can have multiple contacts under it.
If you, ABC Company, engaged us as your marketing agency of choice, we would do the following:
Create an Account: ABC Company
Create Contacts linked to your Account:
- James Winson – Owner
- Barry Thomas – Marketing Director
The different contact profiles would allow us to track all email correspondence related to each contact.
Then if we went to your account, it would show all the email correspondence, notes, activities, and more for all the contacts under the account.
Each team member on our team has the ability to see your full account and contacts. We also have the ability to hide certain fields based on each team member’s role.
For instance, the salesperson doesn’t need access to accounts and contacts owned by me.
And our IT Support Specialist wouldn’t need access to a deal associated with your account, which leads me to the next module.
Deals
We make sure to put all our deals or potential deals in the CRM and link it to the account it belongs to.
A deal can be a contract we’re going after from a municipality, a website design deal, a social media contract, or a system implementation proposal.
It’s important to note we use deals as a way to link to accounts and know how much anticipated deal flow we have as a company. We don’t use the deals module to write proposals.
We track the estimated project revenue, deal owner, account, what service it is, close date, and probability for closing.
This allows us to never forget where we are on different deals and automate the process of following up.
The automation can come from automatic follow-up emails, automatic creation of task to follow up, and reminders of the close date.
Campaigns
Campaigns are a way to generate leads, nurture leads, and convert leads into customers through deals.
Campaigns allow us to track marketing campaigns we have across all mediums, the cost of the campaign, and the revenue generated from the campaign.
We
Steps to Implement a CRM
The steps
- Identify the data you want to collect.
- Identify the stakeholders and everyone who will engage with the CRM.
- Identify workflows that are critical to your business’s success.
- Pick a CRM that aligns with your current business and gives you room to grow.
- Determine what additional features you want to automate processes in your business.
- Determine how you want to implement the CRM.
- Build out the modules on a base level.
- Do complete build-outs in phases.
- Integrate your website, social, and marketing channels to consolidate your information.
- Constantly improve your workflow.
Building out a client relationship management program can be a daunting task, but you have a team of specialists to help you in the process. It’s easy to just implement a CRM and take what a provider gives, but it’s harder to fully customize a CRM to automate and track what your business needs for success.
Schedule a free consultation to learn how we can help.