CRM Blog Posts – Page 5

May 9, 2017

Why Closed-Won is Just the Beginning of Business

Closing a big deal can be very satisfying. It’s dinner and drinks all around when the stage of the deal is changed to 100% (closed=won).

The hard work you’ve invested in prospecting, follow up, proposals, and negotiation have culminated in this highly anticipated moment. Time to sit back and relax, right?

Wrong!

In fact, for most business models, “closed-won” is not an endgame. It’s actually the first step in an ongoing customer relationship.

In this post, we’ll explore why closed-won is just the beginning. We’ll also look at technology that can help facilitate a more fruitful customer lifecycle.

Fulfillment & Delivery Must Exceed Expectations

Soon after a new customer signs on the dotted line, reality can quickly set in. By accepting the client’s business, your company stakes its stellar reputation on delivering an unbelievable (but also profitable) experience. It must walk a fine line between capacity building and providing existing clients the same personalized service that they’ve become accustomed to.

Without the right approach, the addition of new customers can actually be quite disruptive. Unfortunately, many companies are ill-prepared for the sales growth they achieve. By overemphasizing the sales funnel at the expense of downstream fulfillment and delivery, revenue growth actually detracts from the long-term value of the organization.

A more balanced approach (especially one that views sales in context of the broader customer lifecycle) can reduce the risk of overpromising while ensuring fluid on-boarding. How can your organization achieve a more “balanced” approach to sales and fulfillment? For starters, you might try fully harnessing the power of your CRM.

If you’re already an Insightly user, you may have heard that the software facilitates sales and project management. In fact, it’s even possible to convert sales opportunities to projects.

Rather than starting from scratch in a siloed project tracking system, Insightly gives your production and fulfillment teams a seamless view of each customer. The original opportunity record is automatically linked to the new project record. Emails, files, and notes can also be copied to the project. For added efficiency, Insightly activity sets can add new tasks upon project creation or conversion (for example: review customer specs, set up billing information, send a welcome packet, etc.)

By leveraging an integrated sales and fulfillment workflow, your operational team is in a much better position to effectively serve the new customer’s needs. (They’re also less likely to bug your sales reps with redundant questions!) The net result? Less busywork, expedited delivery, and another highly satisfied customer.

Measuring Satisfaction Helps You Improve Your Game

Speaking of customer satisfaction, do have a formalized process for collecting feedback?

Some companies live by the old adage, “no news is good news.” While there may be some truth to this statement, failing to ask for customer input could cause you to overlook new product or service ideas, process improvements, upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and other innovations.

Aside from waiting for customers to complain (or share their praise), what are some proactive ways to measure customer satisfaction? Here are a few simple ideas.

Design a quick survey: There are countless free and affordable survey tools online. In fact, your existing email marketing platform might natively offer polling and surveying (here’s a popular example). Regardless of the tool you select, be sure to invest adequate time and develop a simple, yet effective set of questions. Ask customers to measure various aspects of their interactions with your company. Numeric ranking questions can be particularly useful, especially when comparing the satisfaction of multiple customers. An open-ended question or two can also help you gain qualitative insights into the mind of the customer.

Create a survey distribution plan: Does it make sense to blast the entire survey to all existing customers? Or, would a batched approach make more sense? What about future customers – should you set up an autoresponder sequence that goes out a few months after an opportunity is won?

Make satisfaction data more accessible to your CRM: Insightly users have the luxury of many integrated apps. For example, the Insightly integration for the MailChimp email marketing system can display certain campaign data, making your survey results just a click or two away.

Convert Your Satisfied Customers Into Advocates

Even the largest advertising budget can pale in comparison to the value of a few vocal advocates. Customers who are willing to speak out on your behalf create untold goodwill and help other prospects understand your offering in their own terms.

As customer satisfaction starts to flow into your organization, you’ll find yourself presented with new opportunities. How can you best capitalize from glowing customer feedback? Some common approaches include:

Testimonials for Marketing Use – Would the customer allow you to publish his or her feedback on your website or on social media?
In-Depth Case Study – Would it be possible to interview the client as the subject for a whitepaper or case study?
Serve as a Reference – When future customers ask for references, would this customer be willing to speak on your behalf?
Technical Input – Would your technical or support staff gain value by picking the brains of highly satisfied customers?
Immediate Sales Opportunities – Some customers may simply be unaware of your entire suite of solutions. A follow-up email blast or direct mail piece could generate immediate revenue opportunities with existing clients.
Segmentation for Future Marketing – Even if there is no immediate opportunity, perhaps it would be prudent to tag satisfied customers for future reference.

As you might imagine, these ideas are only a starting point. Spend time reading and comparing customer feedback, and you’re sure to generate many other creative advocacy ideas.

Closed-Won is Important, But It’s Not Everything

Winning the initial contract is an important and necessary step in the future success of your business. However, as we’ve demonstrated in this article, achieving “closed-won” status isn’t everything – far from it, in fact.

By leveraging your CRM throughout the entire customer lifecycle (from initial inquiry through advocacy), you’re bound to yield much greater value from each customer and account.

And, most importantly, your customers will love you all the more!

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.

May 4, 2017

Exceptional Service Management: 5 Skills for Strong Customer Connections

You’re invited to join us on Thursday, May 23rd from 8 – 9 AM PT, for “Managing for Exceptional Service: 5 Skills Your Team Needs Now to Create Strong Customer Connections”.

This Insightly Insider Discussion series will be hosted by Marilyn Suttle and Lori Jo Vest, Customer Service Experts and co-authors of “Who’s your Gladys” and “Taming Gladys”.

Based on their personal experiences and interviews with companies that set the bar for service excellence, Suttle and Vest will share what you can do right now to give your staff the skills they need to keep customers coming back and referring their colleagues and friends.

Participate in the upcoming customer service conversation inside the Insightly Community.

It’s free and open to all Insightly customers!

May 3, 2017

How to Convert Insightly into a Lead Gathering Machine

Your marketing efforts are really starting to pay off. You’re a lead gathering machine.

Each passing week brings in a record-setting lead volume, far exceeding your own expectations. Best of all, there’s not one particular lead source that is overly dominant. Everything you’re doing seems to be working, and that includes organic web search, paid advertising, trade shows, and word-of-mouth referrals.

As optimistic as you are about your marketing engine, you’re now dealing with a new problem: making sure that each lead is efficiently funneled into your CRM. With leads expressing interest via email, webforms, phone calls, and other ways, you need a quick and easy workflow to collect their information for follow up.

Luckily, if you’re using Insightly, you have access to a CRM that can accommodate even the most complex lead collection model. In this post, I’ll share a few tips for effectively gathering leads, thereby freeing up new resources for engagement (and bypassing all the administrative nonsense).

Start by Connecting Your Website to Your CRM

You’ve invested significant effort in your web marketing initiatives. A lightning-fast website, a new content team, and a revamped CPC bidding strategy are just a few of the priorities you’ve deployed this year.

These programs have your website buzzing with new inquiries. Prospects seem to be particularly fond of your whitepapers, eBooks, and other downloadable assets. And, with each new download, your website sends you (and select members of your staff) more emails to sort through. At first, these emails were helpful and even somewhat exciting to receive. Lately, however, they’ve become a serious distraction to your operations. They’ve also been known to get buried in your team’s inboxes, creating a significant lag in the follow-up sequence.

It’s time you created a more streamlined connection from your website to your sales funnel. Insightly can help you do exactly that by means of its intuitive web-to-lead connectivity. Here’s how to set it up.

First, have your CRM administrator or website manager go through the simple process of generating the HTML code.

During setup, you can even specify who (if anyone) will receive email notifications upon submissions. (Note: It might be wise to enable email notifications initially, to ensure everything still works to your specification. When your team is comfortable with the new workflow, you can then turn off the notifications.)

Once the code is embedded into a webpage, form submissions will start to appear as new leads. Best of all, they’ll be assigned to a specific Insightly user, ensuring the lead is contacted sooner rather than later.

Already invested in a third-party form builder? No worries, as Insightly connects directly to several of the leading online form builders (or indirectly via the Zapier platform). Check your tool’s integration options to see if an Insightly integration can be enabled.

Build a Workflow for Inbound Calls

Despite the many resources and webforms on your site, some leads just prefer to speak with a human being. That’s fine, as your inside sales team is happy to help.

Unfortunately, there’s no consistency in how your phone bank tracks caller information. Some reps prefer handwritten notes, while others create their own spreadsheets. Still others submit call summary reports via email. This inconsistency creates unnecessary confusion, and in some cases, has caused certain leads to be completely overlooked.

You need a more reliable method for capturing and tracking phone inquiries.

There are several possible ways to use Insightly for solving this problem. Of course, you could require each agent to be logged in to Insightly and add lead records for each incoming call. Adding new leads from the user interface is relatively straightforward.

Alternatively, if giving your phone agents CRM access seems like overkill, you could build a web-to-lead form specifically for their use. Generate and embed the code on a webpage that’s only accessible to your reps, bypassing their need for user licenses. Adding new leads becomes as simple as visiting a webpage (which, by the way, could be set as the default homepage on their browsers) and submitting a form.

For additional efficiency, consider enabling a workflow rule. As phone calls are converted to leads in the system, the workflow can ensure that specific users are automatically assigned or follow-up actions occur.

Supercharge Your Team’s Inboxes & Browsers

Although web traffic and phone calls account for a large percentage of your inbound lead collection activity, even the most automated systems have outliers. For example, your staff may occasionally be on the receiving end of:

Inquiries sent to your company’s general inbox
Unsolicited referral emails from existing clients
Responses from automated nurture sequences or newsletters

Again, Insightly can prove to be an invaluable tool for these types of unpredictable situations. For starters, each Insightly user has a unique mailbox address. When a message is forwarded to such an inbox, Insightly does some pretty nifty work behind the scenes. The system takes a look at existing contacts, searching for matching records. If there’s not a match, Insightly automatically creates a new contact and organization. It then links the email to the newly created records.

Although doing this technically creates a “contact” (and not a lead), it’s easy to add an opportunity to the contact for future follow up. (After all, qualified leads can be converted contacts and opportunities in a few clicks.)

If your staff checks email in a web browser (as opposed to a desktop client), the Insightly Sidebar can also be a viable option. Here’s a quick demo for setting that up.

By leveraging the Insightly Sidebar and/or mailbox tools, you’ll make it easier for staff to manage one-off leads (that might otherwise get lost).

Create Fingertip Access for Outside Reps

Before we wrap up this article, let’s not forget about your team out in the field.

Even if your reps spend most of their time calling on known accounts or existing customers, they’re always on the lookout for new prospects. By attending client meetings, networking opportunities, and industry events, your outside reps serve as a reliable source of new leads. Therefore, it’s important that you make it easy for your sales team to capture new lead information.

Since reps are usually away from their desks, be sure to invest time training your sales team on the Insightly mailbox. To further simplify the use of this feature, you might even have your IT staff set up contact entries for each rep’s unique mailbox address. (Tip: include an easy-to-remember keyword in the contact’s name, such as “Insightly” or “CRM.”) This way, when a rep is crunched for time, he or she can simply forward the email and start typing the name of that mailbox as the intended “contact.” The inbox should recognize the contact being referenced, pulling up the Insightly mailbox address.

For added firepower when on-the-go, the Insightly mobile app is also a great tool. From any web-enabled smartphone, your team quickly can add new lead records, notes, and other related information. Better yet, Insightly allows you to record and attach audio notes (up to 60 minutes per recording) to any lead record. Voice notes can serve as an excellent way to capture in-depth information, which would otherwise be difficult (if not impossible) to create with two thumbs and a smartphone.

And, once your reps have installed the Insightly mobile app, they’ll also be able to create new lead records simply by scanning in business cards. No more fumbling through a briefcase for the three dozen business cards gathered at a trade show. Scan them in with a few taps, and Insightly transcribes and saves the information in your CRM forever!

It’s Time You Turned Insightly Into a Lead Gathering Machine

Using your CRM primarily as a lead collection repository is a good place to start. However, the name of the game is to convert leads to lifelong customers – not to simply store their information in a database. By reducing the time and effort involved with lead collection, you’ll free up more time to actually engage with prospects.

As an Insightly user, you have access to a dynamic suite of lead gathering tools. Put this toolbox to good use and maximize the ROI from your CRM investment!

April 25, 2017

Why HBO’s Pied Piper Needed a CRM for Startups

silicon valley HBO cast crm for startups

HBO’s hit show Silicon Valley is a biting mockery, a satirical exaggeration of the very worst of everything about America’s entrepreneurial hotbed. But, it’s also a tale of everything that can, and often does, go wrong with a great idea when launching a start-up without a CRM.

In the last season, we watched as Richard and team took on venture capital for their revolutionary data compression solution and were quickly, well, beaten into submission. From newly installed CEO Jack Barker, who cared more about selling any product than the product itself, to the entire sales team he puts in place, everything goes terribly wrong for Pied Piper. By the end of the season, their only choice is to pivot to Dinesh’s chat platform.

The most painful part was watching along and knowing that if only the Pied Piper team had a CRM for startups at their disposal, they could have saved the company and turned things around. Just think—what if the Pied Piper team had Insightly and hadn’t bungled their way through their capital? How different would things have turned out?

Here’s how we think Insightly could have helped some key players in Pied Piper Silicon Valley’s unfortunate downfall:

Richard Hendricks

As founder and the original CEO of Pied Piper, Richard is constantly struggling with the demands of the business world, preferring instead to disappear into the coding of his application than those more outward facing tasks traditionally handled by CEO. He’s your typical, socially inept geek. While he realizes he must do more for his team to keep them on schedule and meeting development project milestones, time and again he retreats to his code.

The product feature that could have saved Richard: Automated workflow webhooks

If only Richard had Insightly, he might have kept his team on track. Webhooks, which you’ll find in the best CRMs for startups, are like smart robot assistants that live in your account. You tell them what to do, and when to do it, and they take action when you specify workflow. You can share data with other applications and automate the internal management tasks that you might otherwise forget while buried neck deep in code.

Laurie Bream

Laurie is the new CEO of Raviga Capital, the investment firm behind Pied Piper, and the replacement for Peter (Thiel) Gregory. Like her predecessor, Laurie is highly intelligent and socially inept, but she appears to rely more on tangible metrics than Peter did. It’s this business-centric approach that leads her to terminate Raviga’s investment into Pied Piper, all while avoiding eye contact at all costs.

Which product feature could Laurie have used? Custom business reports and metrics

Pied Piper HBO’s downfall in season two came from every imaginable direction it would seem, but perhaps Laurie could have helped save the team from themselves with custom business reports and metrics. After all, it’s harder to buy fake customers when you have someone tracking them.

Jack Barker

Let’s face it, Jack Barker is former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: a “Salesman without a Product Vision“. As the newly appointed CEO of Pied Piper, he relies on sales over anything else and hires a huge sales team, much to the team’s dismay. And then, instead of pushing to sell the revolutionary data compression tool Richard and his team have built, they look to sell whatever would be easiest to sell, which turns out to be a box that does absolutely nothing at all.

The ideal product feature for Jack: Sales opportunities and lead generation

With lead management, you can keep your product in mind while finding the perfect people and businesses to pitch it to. Instead of taking your B2C vision and scrapping it because it’s easier to sell something that does nothing to a business than something that does something to a consumer, you can find the right consumers to buy your product.

Erlich Bachman

Oh, Erlich. He’s often just so high that he is clueless to remember how he met important people. More often than not for Erlich, it’s open mouth, insert foot. He’s a loveable idiot with gaping holes in his pockets when it comes to money, yet he stunningly manages to help Richard raise a seed round by smooth talking a bunch of investors.

Product feature for Erlich: Customer relationship linking

With customer relationship linking, Erlich can keep tabs on his relationships. Customer relationship linking lets you add links to a record, creating connections to represent relationships between people, sales opportunities, projects, communications, and other Insightly activities. Watch more ways he could have managed his business contacts.

Monica Hall

Monica is a busy bee. She’s always either in a meeting or scheduling one. Handling the day-to-day duties of Raviga’s tech investment business, she is often fielding pitches and working directly with tech folks—all under the watchful demands of Laurie Bream.

The product feature designed for Monica: Team task management

When Monica drops the ball, it affects everything around her. With team task management, she can not only keep herself on track, but help the team around her. Insightly’s team task management feature is like a shared Google calendar, but with all the insight of Insightly!

Pied Piper’s Lesson: The Best CRM for Startups

If any of this hits too close to home, as great satire sometimes does, bear in mind that suffering to the extent of Pied Piper isn’t necessary, or even desirable. Real-world startups benefit by lessening—rather than exaggerating—costly errors. Even if you choose to kick holes in doors and wear rad pajamas to work, the more nefarious outcomes of Season Four can be avoided with Insightly, and your sanity saved to boot.

April 17, 2017

10 Most Important CRM Reports & How to Use Them

With Insightly, you have nine core Legacy reports built into the platform to make managing your business easier. A few clicks and you’ll have a graph with the information you need. If the Legacy reports don’t provide enough information or are not specific enough to your business needs, you can create custom reports to meet all your needs.

Here’s what each report shows and how you can use it.

Opportunity Category Breakdown

The Opportunity Category Breakdown report allows you to see how many opportunities you have in each category in an easy-to-read graph. You can configure opportunity categories under Settings > Categories. You can assign a category to an opportunity when you create the entry or add a category later.

You can choose a number of filters such as the date, pipeline, tag, responsible user, state, and currency. You can also sort by predefined filters including: this month, last month, last quarter, last year, and all time.

This report is particularly useful to help you see where most of your opportunities are coming from, so you can focus your efforts on your most successful categories. You can also see where you are struggling to gain opportunities and adjust your marketing strategy to better target those areas.

Reasons for Losing

This report helps you see the main reasons you are losing opportunities. The graph shows the number of opportunities you lost and the reasons why. You can configure the distinct reasons for losing opportunities under Settings > Opportunity State Reasons. Each time you change an opportunity state to “Lost”, you can assign a reason to make reporting easier.

Report filters include: Pipeline, tag, user, state, category, and currency. You can also set a custom date range or use the predefined parameters as seen in other reports.

Use this report to discover areas of your business that need improvement to avoid losing opportunities in the future.

Pipeline Stage

This report lets you see when your open opportunities are set to close during the next quarter. You’ll see a graph with the number of opportunities in each stage of your pipeline, filtered by your forecast close date. Use this report to tell if most of your opportunities are in the preliminary stages of a pipeline or if they have progressed through the later stages closer to closing.

Report filters include: pipeline, tag, user responsible, status, and category. You can set the date range, or use predefined date filters.

If you find a large number of open opportunities are not set to close within the next quarter, you can develop a plan of action to move things along.

Funnel Analysis

The funnel analysis report shows your full opportunity pipeline as well as the number of opportunities that passed through each stage. Use this report to determine where opportunities fall out of your pipeline. It will help you visualize which stages you must pay more attention to keep winning more opportunities. Date filters for this report are limited to the date the opportunity was created.

Report filters include: pipeline, tag, user responsible, and category. You can set the date range, or use predefined date filters.

Responsible User

With this report, you can see which one of your salespeople won the most opportunities within any date range, and which of your salespeople generated the most revenue.

Report filters include: pipeline, tag, type (either the number of wins, or the value of wins), and category. You can set the date range, or use predefined date filters.

Use this report to find out who your most valuable team members are and who on your team is struggling.

Organization

This report will show you the contacts that generate the most revenue, how opportunities originate, and where potential opportunities are lost.

Report filters include: pipeline, current opportunity state, tag, category or currency. You can set the date range or use predefined date filters.

This can help you see where you need to focus more effort to avoid losing opportunities.

Custom Field

This report provides a breakdown of the number of opportunities with values set for custom fields. If your business uses custom fields, this report makes Insightly work better for you.

Value of Incoming Opportunities (Total Incoming)

This report helps you see how many opportunities each of your salespeople created within a certain time period, so you can see the overall value of all opportunities in any pipeline. This report is useful to see how hard your sales team is working, and get a potential total revenue amount for a particular time frame. While there’s no guarantee you will land all the opportunities, it will help you refine your focus on based on potential revenue.

Value of Opportunities Won

This report will help you see which one of your salespeople was the most successful within any given time frame. You will see the total value of opportunities won, broken down by responsible user. This report is helpful with revenue forecasting and rewarding your most active sales people.

Completed Task and Events Report

The completed tasks and events report will show you which users have completed the most tasks within the selected timeframe. You’ll also be able to see which opportunities required the most phone calls and created the most work in terms of follow-up. You’ll be able to compare orders from prior months or from one year to the next.

You can break it down either by responsible user, organization, opportunity, project, or in total by month over a period of time.

Custom Reports – Advanced Reporting Features

The custom reports feature allows you to create reports specific to your business needs. On the left-hand side of the screen, you’ll see a folder structure, along with report templates to help keep your reports organized. You can quickly and easily create reports using one of the starter templates related to the task or category. Share reports with an unlimited number of team members, and run them as often as necessary.

Here’s how it works:

Click “New Report.” If you want to create a project based report, choose “Project Report” in the report type section. Then, click “Create Report.”

Next, drag and drop the report fields you want to display in each of the reports. Set the parameters according to how you want to filter the data. Save to an appropriate folder, and you’re done.

If you are on a paid plan, you can schedule custom reports to run whenever you need them.

At this time, custom reports do not include the graphical representation features, but they will be added in the future.

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.

Share love, share Insightly: Refer Insightly, Receive a Reward.

April 12, 2017

Save Time & Increase Productivity with Workflow Automation

There’s just never enough time in the day! From busy sales reps who are constantly trying to follow up with leads to project managers who are juggling multiple deadlines, we’re all familiar with this saying.

We’d like to challenge you to think less about needing more time, and more about being efficient with the time that you do have.

How can you save time and increase productivity?

Join Insightly Insider Presents on Thursday, April 13 at 9am PT for a live, hour-long discussion on Workflow Automation. It’s free and open to all Insightly plan customers.

Alyssa Andrade, Customer Success Specialist at Insightly, will be live in the community, taking questions and sharing professional tips.

During this session, you’ll discover how to spend less time updating Insightly and more time growing your business by automating email delivery, updating records or adding new tasks to your to do list.

Understand What is Consuming Most of Your Time at Work
Encourage Consistency and Reduce Mistakes
Improve Communication and Streamline Notifications

Alleviate your need to perform repetitive tasks and concentrate on other value action items such as prospective client meetings or closing major deals.

How can you join the discussion?

Sign in to our Help Center or create a Help Center account (if this is your first time visiting). If you’re unable to attend during Thursday’s live event, the discussion page along with Alyssa’s Q&A will remain in the Community to reference anytime.

Subscribe to future Insightly Insider Series events

Each month, an industry leader or an expert from our Insightly team hosts a discussion around a specific sales, marketing, small business or CRM topic.

Don’t miss out on discussions! Subscribe to our Insightly Insider series page by clicking the”Follow” button.

April 10, 2017

Turning Your Contact Management System Into A True CRM System

There’s a difference between high school and college, just like there’s a difference between the minor leagues and major leagues in baseball. Both represent a whole other level of performance. A high school diploma is good, but a college degree opens many more doors. Playing in the minor leagues is an accomplishment, but being a major league baseball player is a truly remarkable. The same goes for your CRM system.

Most of our clients own CRM systems, but they’re not truly using them as CRM systems. They’re basically just advanced contact managers. They’re databases – glorified roledexes, that in the best cases have not only demographic information about customers and prospects but also track some activities, notes and emails. A few, however, use their CRM applications like a true CRM system. One of these companies is called Smith Supply (I’m changing their name for the purposes of this piece, but they are real).

Smith Supply distributes parts to industrial equipment users and manufacturers and also provides maintenance and repair services. They have taken their CRM application from one that is used by just a few people to a mission-critical system that is relied on by their entire fifty-person company. How did they make the leap from contact management to true CRM? They did these three things.

They use CRM for both sales and service.

Many people think that CRM systems are just sales and marketing tools. They are right – a good one gives a sales team the ability to track contacts, accounts, opportunities, quotes and forecasts. But smart companies, like Smith Supply, know that only using a CRM system as a sales tool is just like using half the system. CRM is customer relationship, not prospect relationship. Of course, Smith has prospects in their database. But they also have customers, active or inactive, there as well. At smith, every interaction by anyone in the company is recorded. Customer issues, complaints and questions are logged into the database with worfklows designed for follow-up and resolution. The system is used for maintenance and service calls. Alerts have been configured if customers have certain problems or there are delays. Reports are generated daily that show management customer calls and resolutions.

A great CRM system is used by the entire workgroup to provide a 360 degree level of communication and service to the customer, from the time of first contact to the time of last thing done. Nothing falls through the cracks. Everyone in the organization has access to every customers’ interactions.

They have a quarterly plan for their CRM system.

The executives at Smith know that their system is constantly evolving. To that end, they’ve assigned a CRM “owner” and a three-person team representing sales, service and administration to work with that leader. They meet twice a quarter to evaluate how the system is going and to set objectives for things they want to do with the system in the next quarter. They look to expand the use of CRM for sales, service and marketing. They review how users are doing and focus on those that need more support and training. Throughout the quarter they query users about their use of the system and how it can be improved. They attend conferences and stay current on what other companies are doing with their CRM system. They bring in their CRM vendor and outside consultants once a year to review changes in the product and solicit advice for making the system better.

CRM systems aren’t static. The more people that work with the system the more issues, suggestions, improvements, problems and opportunities will be created. Smart companies know that their systems will evolve and put in infrastructure to support those changes.

Finally, they invest in the system.

A college degree is expensive. A major league career requires a lifetime of investment. A true CRM system requires resources to make it valuable for a company. Smith Supply knows this. They spent money to get their system up and running. And they have an annual CRM budget, shared by their sales, service and marketing departments, to ensure that the system not only continues to run but grows and evolves with the company. They’re paying for the time incurred by their CRM administrator and team. They’re paying for continuous training and consulting. They’re paying to integrate their CRM systems with other systems. They pay to send their CRM team to conferences and to subscribe to materials. They understand that for a workgroup system to properly serve the team, they must provide the resources and time needed.

Like anything good in life, CRM systems require investment.

Do you use a customer relationship management system or is it just for contact management? In either case, as long as you’re getting value and you’re satisfied, you’re fine. But if you want your team to be using your CRM system at a major league level like Smith Supply, you’ll have to make sure you’re using it in all aspects of your business – sales, marketing, service – and that your investing and evolving the system throughout the year. Just remember – a college degree is expensive and takes a lot of work, but the long term benefits significantly outweigh a high school diploma.

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.

Share love, share Insightly: Refer Insightly, Receive a Reward.

About the Author: About the Author: Gene Marks is a small business owner, technology expert, author and columnist. He writes regularly for leading US media outlets such as The Washington Post, Forbes, Inc. Magazine and Entrepreneur. He has authored five books on business management and appears regularly on Fox News, Fox Business, MSNBC and CNBC. Gene runs a ten-person CRM and technology consulting firm outside of Philadelphia. Learn more at genemarks.com

April 5, 2017

5 Steps to Budget Smartly for Your Small Business

A smart budget is how strong business owners persevere through hard times and accumulate capital during prosperous times.

Read the full article at: startupnation.com

April 4, 2017

What To Expect When Applying or Working for a Small Business – Small Business Can

Small businesses provide young career professionals with an excellent opportunity for growth, and experienced veterans with unparalleled leadership potential. A sole proprietorship, corporation or partnership qualifies as a small business based on the average number of employees in the past year and average of annual receipts over the past three …

Read the full article at: www.smallbusinesscan.com

April 3, 2017

How To Choose The Right Pricing Model for Your Small Business

It can be challenging to know whether your products/services are priced too high, too low, or just right. Here are tips to make pricing less of a headache.

Read the full article at: www.blackenterprise.com