HOW TO USE A CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGER
(AN EPISODE OF THE DIGITAL STRATEGIST PODCASTING)
[00:00]
Welcome to Web Strategy Viking podcast where we talk about creative list to grow your business in this 10 minutes hosted by webstrategyviking.com agency. We will be discussing about the CRM (Customer Relationship Manager), its advantages and why it is important for you as a small business owner to utilize it.
When you are a small business dealing with consultancy or freelancing, you will be dealing with a lot of people, not necessarily customers yet, prospective or even suspect, people you might not even know. But when you have all these names written in notebooks or on index card or just on spreadsheet, and then something tends to fall through the cracks because you are not able to record phone calls, maybe you are not able to jot down enough notes in an accessible way, maybe you are not able to recollect keynotes, update your team, host projects, and all that you need to do to fully leverage your business. Right? A lot of people use CRM or hear of CRM and think “Oh, A rolodex” and why CRM should not be used as a rolodex but to save a lot of time when it comes to cbuilding out your processes, automating and making your time more efficient. I have seen a CRM increase work efficiency upward of twenty-five (25) times, which mean that if I was able to close a sale a week, I am now able to close and nurture 25 people toward that goal. Now, working within technology and within digital already gives me that unfair advantage but now being able to allocate resources do not only increase the numbers of sales that I touched but the number of opportunity increases and the number of people that don’t just get left behind. Opportunity that are not left on the table are now dramatically decreased because of the people I am not talking to or it takes some time to reach to them or may have forgot, which completely reduce the sales. There is a chance of them getting e-mail message (automated messages) to schedule a meeting and add themselves to the calendar when I could be in a beach in Hawaii on vacation and I get a notification on my phone for a 3 O’clock meeting on Monday. These are the importance of CRM that a lot of people think it is impossible and don’t get. But, once you figure out a way on how to grow your business, you will understand there is always a great way to grow and scale and to tap some opportunity that you aren’t using before. If you are entering a new market, all you must do is to just be there, and our company will be the one to help keep going with something like that. I understand the value of digital developing company, Wayne Ramirez is the lead consultant strategist in his own company, and he consult on how to host CRM and to do custom development, not only all the package but you get something that fit your business. Your business is processed in a way that you operate. It is also scalable for you to handle something yourself, be able to learn and grow and have an asset that you are proud of. It helps you to move from A to B all the way up to Z because you have something in place that your team can understand and use.
[04:26]
Within the next few podcast, we will be talking on more in-dept features that CRM has and why it is very impactful for business with the implication of not having one. And if you have been told by someone that “you have to call this person” and you just never did. It is not the lack of anything other than having the process to be organized with it. CRM help to prevent having regret on what to be done because it is incorporated into the code of what I do. And the client and customer can get the same outcome because my team is able to come into the same environment, which is so easy, just a matter of following the check boxes, asking someone to “Hey, do you like the webpage”, “Can you prove it with a text in this form”. If they can go about it like that, it is going to create consistency and branding and assure the client that this is a company they should be doing business with. It does so much more to it than that. Customers will recommend potential clients to you because you are organized, efficient and you are able to do 25 things more than your previous one hour of time.
[06:22]
Now, this is just me gushing because I am a client and I strongly believe that organization help business growth and if you are not organized, are you really running a business, or you are owning a job. And this is a bit hard news to bear but over this podcast, I will be talking a little bit more about how some business takes time in literally putting off a fire caused by not being organized. Personally, I have this feeling that business owner jump into a new business without starting up with a business plan and all they do is hand their business plan to someone who have zero ideas of what the business is, talk of how to run the business. Ideally, if you can hand up a 200-page document on how to run your business and you can go to any other area in the world and you will still be happy knowing that the business plan is still be used to run the business without being there, then that is ideal. A CRM kind of does that, technically it is built into the processes. If a new opportunity comes into a business and they must find their need discovered, met and expectation managed, so they can present to you call referrals, and to make sure that the operation of the service continues, then you are going to do nothing but succeed because now you have a process that is automated. And it is straight-forward to get something like this designed and do into the process of designing drafting phase of the business considering the impact the business can truly get. If you are using some sort of CRM already, you don’t necessarily have to switch but are you spending more time doing data entry? Sometime, people do data entry and not growing their company. Are you using 30 or 50 app at a time? Or are you using 2 or 3 app? A lot of time the app that we use on a day to day are not what we should be applying.
Anyway, I will be looking forward to continuing the series of CRM podcast. Let keep going.
[09:35]