Having a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is shouted about all over the business world and for good reason. They are aimed at getting you or your sales team organised, more productive and focused on increasing sales. In this post, we’ll be talking about 3 ways to growth with CRM in your business
Why use a CRM in your business?
It is a tool to help you manage your customer relationships. As you get to know your customers and the journey they make in your marketing lifecycle, you can tailor your communications to be relevant to the stage they’re at in their buying process.
Once you have a CRM in place you can expect to:
- Improve organisation of your contacts
- Increase your productivity
- Close more sales
- Create fans that are delighted at every step of your marketing lifecycle
- Increase revenue and profits!
Examples of systems used as a CRM
1. Spreadsheet
The usual go-to when getting started in business is the trusty spreadsheets since they are relatively simple to create.
Although, as business develops the extra fields, formulae and reporting can make this a more complicated way to record the important details.
There’s also a lack of integrations, making it difficult to connect other tools that you may be using.
Updating and maintaining the spreadsheet is a very manual task and it can quickly become messy and tricky to find the data you need at that moment.
2. Project/ Task Management tool e.g. Trello, Asana, BaseCamp
As business, and your sales process, becomes established you may be thinking about a more sophisticated tool to organise your contacts and tasks to follow-up with them.
A task or project management tool such as Trello, Asana or Basecamp can be setup to record your customer interactions and set dates to follow-up with them later on.
This will help get you on track to keeping those relationships engaged, however, it’s still tricky to integrate other tools that you may be using.
Task and project management tools also take time to design in a way that will meet your needs and to learn how to use them as well. You may find yourself getting absorbed into the never ending design improvement to get it to fit just right.
3. All-in-one email marketing and sales tool e.g. Keap (formerly Infusionsoft)
Have you considered an all-in-one tool for your marketing and sales?
Keap is the ultimate tool for organising your contacts, following-up and driving sales.
Each and every contact has their own individual record that you can search and refer to quickly and easily.
See every communication, including email or phone call, all notes and every shared document right away.
Update the contact details, set tasks or send an email within the record, too. Saving you moving between screens or even other tools.
Getting started with automating your CRM
We are often asked what exactly can be automated. The answer (or one answer) is your CRM workflows, communications and interactions! Why? Well, to…..
- Increase efficiency and productivity with integrations including Zapier, Gmail, Outlook, and AppointmentCore
- Avoid trashing your leads by sending immediate communications that drives action or sales from every single one
- Keep EVERYTHING in one place and maintain a historical record of every contact and interaction to easily refer to when needed
Avoid trashing your leads! Send immediate communications to all contacts with automation
Tania Jones, Solofusion
Your new contact will be placed directly into your CRM once a form is submitted, which can either be internally or through an opt-in form on your website. Then the automation can get started.
Next steps
Now you have a CRM in place and a form to collect your contacts data, the follow-up can begin. This is where automation can kick off and start building those all important relationships with communications that drive action and sales.
It’s all well and good having lead generation that gathers leads but what happens after that? Do you have a follow-up process in place? If not, then your leads are just being trashed. Don’t worry, those leads can still be revived.
This is where Solofusion can help you. Together, we can map out your follow-up system, including those leads that have already been trashed, and create automation that will not only generate new leads but also revive the trashed leads and move them all forward in your sales pipeline.
Would you like to find out more? Check Tania’s availability and book your call today.
What are your thoughts on getting started with CRM?
Share your comments and questions in the comments below. We look forward to reading and replying to them.
