HOW A CRM WORKS (2/4)
(AN EPISODE OF THE DIGITAL STRATEGIST PODCASTING)
[00:00]
You are welcome back to Web Strategy Viking podcast. In this podcast, we are going to be talking more in-dept into what a CRM is and what a development of one looks like and again a CRM is a Customer Relationship Manager, and it is used for businesses that involves customers management, manages customers’ expectations that need to have a relationship in any way. So, profit managing donor manages on e-commerce source managing sales, an attorney managing their client list. The deep level of impact that the CRM solves will be discussed in this 10 minutes podcast.
[00:47]
So, my name is Jake Goss-Kuehn, I am the local digital strategist at Web Strategy Viking company and I was interviewing and working with Wayne Ramirez over assuming sales CRM. A lot of local businesses owners know, love and support Wayne Ramirez, also known as Wayne the Cookie guy, who might not be on this podcast but will be on other videos that we have on YouTube and LinkedIn.
[01:24]
One thing to consider though when using a CRM is to again define what a CRM is. When people think of a CRM, they think of a rolodex, it should not be used as a rolodex. If rolodex is by themselves a place where people store their business cards and does not necessarily create the impact to an organization. I firmly and strongly belief that a business should have some system that produces dividends, that produces results in the form of saved time or decreasing cost. If a company can manipulate time and money right, then that is a business that have economic value if they can create more time for people or reduce the time spent by people greatly. If it can be used to increase number of sales a company makes by keep all the sales nurtured (so to speak), to keep a sale relevant or to keep sales from falling out which happen often or to decrease the chances of a sale fall, these are opportunity that bring a lot of money. If it is something that can save a lot of expenses which if you are paying for app like Mailchimp or QuickBooks or a premium feature of a lot of business applications, to be able to have these applications all in one place doesn’t only save you on money, it also saves you on third resources, on energy. I am not talking about vitality, I am talking about willingness to accept change and to work with will-power. There is a study that shows students that have access to cellphone side by side with student without a cellphone and how much information they retain while they study, showing the result of them basically cramming for a test. Obviously, the student that have more distraction by switching around, going through the phone, checking social media, checking their email do not do well unlike the other student who is settle on their book, working on one set of note, reading comprehensively. Another study makes the student study for 5 different tests, divided up in two groups, one group did one test at a time and the other group did 5 test concurrently. The students that did one test at a time did better but did not retain the knowledge after, but they did do better, it is a bit of very specific case. But the student that study everything (the 5 tests) over a weekend or a month’s time were able spread out their time to study for all the different things, but they spend more time studying to retain different knowledge because they have to switch from their History book to their Math book to other books.
[05:56]
Likewise, think about it to be in your broad business, if you are hoping from task to task, one moment you are being super responsive to everything you have been doing; if you are working with a client and after the client, you got phone call with another client, after that you discover you have to go do some book-keeping and after another client calls for lunch. This is not a good and efficient use of your time, it also places an energy drain on yourself because not only are you struggling to keep everything on one place but draining yourself of energy as your mind lingers along a lot of task. These are what sales people and technical people, two different set of people, one is very people oriented and the other task oriented. Sometimes, I see sales people doing really well doing when they stick with their sales, while digital consultant doing the technical work are really good at doing all the technical but when they switch to the sales mode, they have to sync and change system, sometimes they figure out of the sales mode, they think about sales processes and at the same time think about the project that they on. So, they are stressed out about the project that they are touching and sales that they are supposed to be following up on. It is training both they are suffering in both, they are doing a little bit more remarkable for a small business to support that, but what they can only focus on is very specific service, very specific process, only on that and become an expertise on that. But if you are book-keeper and all you are doing is not doing one small aspect of that (maybe you are optimizing a client book or you are doing banking reconciliations), you are making more efficient use of your time if that is what you are focusing on because you are doing the same thing and you don’t have to recall what you are doing.
[08:37]
In the next podcast, we will be talking about more than one different form of CRM, how you can basically get one for free and some hire ones that have more features, to make things more efficient, not necessarily keeping things simple for you. Thanks for listening, we will talk better in the next podcast.
[09:11]