Your manufacturing business is booming, which can be both a blessing and a curse.
While your bottom line continues to grow, so too does your list of contacts. New customers, suppliers, prospects, employees, and contractors interact with your company each day. How will you keep everything organized?
Your ERP wasn’t designed to manage the complexities of personal relationships. Spreadsheets are instantly outdated the moment you add them to your shared drive. Email inboxes create siloed data that is only accessible to the user.
For these reasons, many manufacturing firms turn to CRM (customer relationship management) software, such as Insightly. In fact, according to a recent study conducted by Insightly, 68% of the company’s manufacturing customers believe that “contact management” is the most important feature in a CRM.
As any business owner knows, however, simply signing up for a software application doesn’t solve your problems. You need a game plan to deliver maximum ROI.
In this post, we’ll discuss four tips for streamlining your contact records via a CRM system.
- Get Your Contacts to the Cloud
Every passing moment yields dozens of new relationships for your organization. This means that your current inefficiencies are being compounded each day you fail to act. The sooner you can get your data into a secure web-based format, the better.
Getting your contacts into a cloud-based CRM serves multiple purposes. First, it creates new levels of visibility for your staff. Instead of digging through inboxes, shared drives, or business cards, team members can quickly sort, view, and edit contact records. Some systems, such as Insightly, offer free mobile apps to further enhance the accessibility of information on the go.
Your IT department will also appreciate this approach to contact management. From a risk management standpoint there’s truly no comparison. A centralized, secure, and redundant database minimizes your organization’s vulnerability to information loss. Plus, you also free up your in-house resources to focus on more value-added activities.
Before you move forward with the first CRM system you find, do your homework and consider only those which offer convenient (and secure) data import solutions. While smaller firms may prefer to manually key in records, most will need a robust data import tool. Compare data import options before making your final decision.
As an example, Insightly offers several convenient ways to input contact records. A popular method is performing a spreadsheet import. After formatting your spreadsheet, upload the CSV using Insightly’s intuitive import wizard.
Within seconds, your data is stored securely in the cloud. Now, anyone in your organization with an account can access the most up-to-date information.
- Link Contacts to a Parent Organization
Stop and think about the nature of your business relationships. From a data standpoint, what exactly is a relationship? In very simple terms, a relationship is a linkage between two or more human beings. You therefore want to pick a CRM that builds hyperlinks between contacts, organizations, opportunities, and projects.
62% of manufacturing firms surveyed by Insightly struggled with organizing information (such as complex relationships) before moving to a CRM. With a tool like Insightly, many of these difficulties are overcome through an intuitive approach to record linking.
Each contact record in Insightly can be linked to multiple records. This is especially useful for managing customer accounts with many different stakeholders (accounts payable departments, engineering, etc.). Insightly allows you to visualize your relationships and organize them in a way that makes sense to you. With a few clicks, you can instantly drill down into an organization’s contacts or opportunities. Use tags to slice and dice the data even more.
- Reduce the Number of “Touches”
Have you ever analyzed your organization’s process for managing customer information? What happens when a new customer contacts you requesting a quote? For many manufacturing firms, the process consists of a barrage of email forwards until the contact is finally captured for future reference.
A cloud-based CRM helps to reduce the administrative overlap within your organization. In fact, 76% of those firms surveyed believe that Insightly has improved the overall efficiency of their business. Such efficiency is achieved by reducing the number of “touches” before a contact’s information is centrally accessible. Instead of hoping your employees remember to save important contact information in their personal records, Insightly serves as the master hub for all things contact-related. From any web-enabled device, smartphone, or tablet, your team can enter new data on the fly. As relationships change, a full history can be instantly viewed from the same devices.
No more emergency meetings to uncover what went wrong or who dropped the ball. Everything is right in front of you.
- Build Integrations to Your CRM
Taking the conversation one step further, your CRM should also capitalize on the latest advancements in the technology world. Simply keeping your contact records in the cloud is great first step; however, you’ll want to pick a solution that continuously streamlines your workflow.
For example, let’s imagine that a new lead fills out a form on your website. For most companies, this information is often sent to a general sales inbox. This type of email is easily overlooked, forgotten, or forwarded to the wrong person. With Insightly, you bypass this issue through an intuitive web-to-lead integration. The moment a form is submitted, Insightly creates a new contact and matching organization record. Your CRM administrator or sales manager will flag this and assign it to the correct person for follow up.
In addition, Insightly’s innovative message forwarding feature simplifies the journey from inbox to CRM. Simply forward any email, and Insightly parses the contact’s name, company, and email address for you.
These types of integrations, among others, will help you gain the maximum value from your CRM.
Achieve Greater Productivity Today
It’s no wonder why the majority of Insightly’s manufacturing customers (63%) have seen at least a 25% increase in productivity since adopting a CRM. Better visibility, more efficient processes, and greater customer engagement are all compelling reasons.
Ready to streamline your contact management? Consider giving Insightly a try today.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
Matt Keener is a marketing consultant and President of Keener Marketing Solutions, LLC. Matt specializes in content marketing and strategic planning, having helped numerous Saas (software as a service) companies and other small businesses worldwide. Read more of Matt’s work, check out his book, or connect with him on Linkedin.
