Simply put, customer relationship management, or CRM, is a collection of tools to help document, organize, and analyze customer contact information and interactions.
You start with the basics…whatever information you collect from the customer in your initial contact. Typically, you ask a website visitor to trade info in exchange for something valuable: a free trial, an informative newsletter, a contest entry, or a digital asset.
What you collect may vary. Some companies ask for the full salad bar of information – name, address, company, position, phone, email. Others just want name and email. Which is enough to discover all the rest if the customer provides their primary email address.
Discover your customers
That’s the first thing in your CRM – the ability to tie minimal basic information to customer profiles all over the web. To discover information they’ve already made public without having to seem intrusive.
Make connections
Access to customer’s social media accounts in your CRM gives you the power to make connections. You can find out where the majority of your customers spend time online and concentrate your social media presence there. Find out what they talk about, and even if they know each other or are attending the same conference.
Picture discovering that several of your large clients will be attending an industry event…what a great opportunity to meet face-to-face, or even make a presentation and send a personal invitation with an invite for coffee after.
Track everything.
Get organized by integrating your CRM with your financial software, your email provider, your data analysis, and more to see what’s happening at a glance, without opening half a dozen different programs.
CRM puts all the data at your fingertips when you need it most and have the least time to find everything. Like when you’re on a call with an important client who wants answers. You’ll know the status of their last order, invoice, and what was said during the last conversation, even if you weren’t there. You’ll even know if the customer has an important event coming up, like a birthday or a speaking event, so you can throw in a warm, personal touch.
Automate tasks
Some tasks are dull, repetitive, and error-prone. And you don’t have to do them anymore. All your contacts in a single database means no laboriously copying info from one record to the next or formatting for upload.
Automating your workflow might include adding tasks to be performed when a new contact is added to your CRM, say a welcome email or a special offer, or sending automated reminders to yourself or your staff when a task deadline is approaching.
Sales management
By integrating your CRM with sales management and invoicing tools like Quote Roller or QuickBooks, you can easily follow the sale from quote to payoff…at a glance. Know where your customers are in the sales pipeline, so you can send the right message at the right time.
Tracking the source of leads in your CRM will tell you where your marketing efforts are having the most effect. So you can save time and keep that cashflow smooth.
Our opportunity reports will break it all down for you: incoming opportunities, their value, and how you performed. Did you make the sale? If not, why not? You can also see a funnel analysis, task analysis…and who was responsible for things that were completed or not.
Trends and issues
In the past, it wasn’t so easy to spot when a process or sales initiative went off the rails. With CRM, you can filter by keyword to find out the reasons people call for customer service and what their most common complaints are. When you begin to spot a trend, you can be proactive. Fix the problem, or take an interactive approach by asking customers how you can improve in this area.
Your CRM is full of possibilities, from recovering lost sales, to automating daily tasks, to informing your marketing campaigns for better results. To really get to know your customers, build lastingrelationships, and give them a voice in guiding your new products and services, you have only to spend some time inside your CRM.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
