CUSTOM CRM DEVELOPMENT
(AN EPISODE OF THE DIGITAL STRATEGIST PODCASTING)
[00:00]
You are listening to Web Strategy Viking podcast, in the series we are talking about CRM, Customer Relationship Managers, and what one does with the CRM is organize leads. In the last few episodes, we have talked about how we can really use one, the impact, the time spent, the money and energy saved, all these excellent things were discussed.
[00:29]
More specifically now, we are talking about Zoho CRM as a solution. We have cover about 5 CRMs that are both free and easy to develop custom (open source), but one that stand out among the custom development companies for CRMs and does not take a long time is ZoomingSales CRM. They are local Minneapolis company that does custom sales development for us. I am a bit biased here because I am a client of theirs, I am also a fan of the Zoho Suite and their unique angle is not that Sales Force is massive or they are competing, or they are not preventing anyone from doing data entry (that is what Copper do), they can help with everything you ever want and have it look exactly as what Sugar CRM will be. Zoho is all the box CRM that you can use and custom it in a way that help you to rapidly get a point where you can start to see a lot of 25 excellent result for your business. And what they look like on the field is your business’ process mapped into different modules, different step by step processes checklist but digitized in a way that anyone looking into it in a system will be able to pick up what was put down previously. Which is the goal of a CRM but a lot of CRM that you are paying $10, $20 a month require you to bend yourself to the tool. A lot of these tools don’t necessarily support the thing that you need for your business but in a bid to custom develop that can take months. But with Zoho, you just press a few buttons and start with it like 5 to 10 minutes. I have used Zoho myself even I am a client of the company that make some, they integrate and do the development work, which is mostly just design and improving a process, but my criteria for evaluating a CRM is to save me time, money and energy. If I can make ten times as many calls and email as before, is it what will do well for me? But the question is if I make able to set 25 more appointment through phone calls and able to send about 500 email messages a week previously but now can send 2000 email messages per day, will I not get cold opportunities from that? That will blow up my opportunities and allow people not only to work with me but also be able to know exactly where each step is. That means I am dealing directly with the person that have paid or ready to pay need to know when to start.
[04:50]
That is the impact of a CRM, and in Zoho, all the box solves most of the problem of automating a lot of processes. But sincerely, I might make you see as if Zoho is easy but there is no documentation on how to custom a lot of these things. There is only two Zoho partners that do development, but just one is within Minnesota. And as a software developer and marketer that want get a CRM working for him, when diving into it may seems like it will take several hundreds of hours to get a big picture of where to start and that is a hurdle that most small businesses don’t want to cross. Hundreds of hours to figure out how to use features to connect social media, LinkedIn and others is a lot of time for a small business, but with about $30 or $75 a month you get access to every set of tools in their database.
[06:34]
But here is a thing, being able to see the big picture and understand the processes, understanding your client criteria, keeping your data organized, these are something that really speak volume to myself and that is why I reach out to a custom CRM company in Minneapolis to take that next step. Some things to consider are the truly wireless steps needed to work with Zoho initially, what are steps that Zoho can do? What are the processes involved in rapidly building this up in four weeks? Some things to consider is having the design process in mind. Wayne Remirez who I have the pleasure of talking with today have this conversation kind of sound like “Where are you at with your process? How do you typically bring in a sale? What do you wish that you have your sales process do?”. And I said “Well, this is what I wish I had, this is what I currently use, and these are some other thing I want to try”, and he said “okay”. It was a 90 minutes conversation, it was by far something that I took a lot of value from, I learn about what I do as a company and as a marketing company. I was humbled by his experience within marketing, he is a bit older, enriched and experience fellow that have been doing sales with IBM for a long time, so he understands. He is very gracious and patient with my traditional and stereotype sales personality, so I appreciate that.
Some other things to consider though, that we examined is what do we what to get to? Which is a form of consulting, it is not about just buying anything, but about this solves your problem by this amount. That is, using a CRM will increase your sales typically by 10 or 20 times, right now when I start using a CRM, I have close 25 more appointment in the same time frame. And while I have not done that with Zoho, I do know that having a centralized place will make my process 5 more faster, not just 25 more efficient but 5 more faster. So, not only am I saving time, it is 5 times faster of doing 25 times more efficiency when it comes to my business process.
[10:08]
I am not trying to sugar-coat a 125 time multiplier on my effort but if you are not simply duplicating yourself as 3 or 4 people doing the same exact task and saving yourself a hundred of hours a day by using a $10 per week soft tool, you are really handicapping yourself when it comes to what every other small businesses is doing to grow and gain sales.
[10:31]