Being able to easily share the same client contact information among your employees is a great benefit, but there are many other advantages to using a centralized CRM system:
Pursue every potential sales opportunity
- Maintain daily call lists for your Sales Reps and follow their progress
- Send email newsletters or direct mail to customers and prospects and improve targeting of marketing campaign activities by pre-qualifying prospects
- Improve cross-selling and up-selling
- Share detailed client history between employees and departments
- Differentiate and stay close to your high-value customers
Improve and measure staff performance across the company
- Keep track of all communications between your business and customers. Be aware of every targeted marketing activity, question, complaint, and the complete sales history before picking up the phone
- Anticipate customer needs based on previous experiences
- Improve customer service responsiveness when handling customer questions or concerns
- Reduce the cost of handling customer orders
- Access client contact information and history on mobile devices
- Have a secure system in place for “all corporate memory” in case of loss or theft
So what’s it going to take to make CRM work? We were taught in kindergarten that sharing is good and the same principle applies in business, at least when it comes to managing customers. Share information between staff and departments so your team can provide feedback to each other and respond to your customers in a consistent and efficient way – your customers will notice. Have reasonable expectations – not everyone is going to use the system in exactly the same way or to its maximum potential. That’s still okay. In hindsight you’ll notice you are much better off with it than without it.
Getting Started with Solve’s CRM features
Setup user accounts for all team members that need access. If you need to, separate your contact database between groups of users and setup work groups.
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Import contacts from your existing systems. Our team is standing by if you need help with this. When you import, you are given the option for the contacts to be shared by default (recommended) or private.
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Quickly take care of any customization you need in the system, including:
- Add category tags to describe your contacts as you work with them so contacts can be grouped into lists. For example you could use categories such as: Lead, High Value, Qualified Prospect, Customer, Vendor, Contractor, Conference Attendee, etc.
- Add new fields to the forms to track unique information
- Remove standard fields from the forms that you don’t need. Don’t worry you can come back and tweak this at any time!
Plan the day-to-day CRM routine
Although Solve allows you to work the way you see best by not imposing its own predefined processes, quite often sales revolve around the following tasks:
- Entering and qualifying new leads
- Making new calls and scheduling follow-up calls
- Creating and following-up on sales opportunities
- Delivering on promises (tasks to be completed)
Essentially the entire day-to-day process revolves around two simple concepts:
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Create contact records for all new leads then call on the prospect to gather information and qualify them. For each lead select the tags that describe the status of the prospect e.g. Qualified, Hot, etc. Record what has happened in the contact’s activity feed by adding a call log, documenting requirements in notes, attaching files, adding tasks to complete, scheduling follow-up calls and attaching all email correspondence to the page for future reference.
If you generate leads from your website use a Wufoo form to automatically create the new contact record, which will also automatically apply the appropriate category tag(s) and activity template. -
Each day open the Report & Update Activities section and review what tasks needs to be completed, meetings you need to attend and opportunities that should be followed-up on or updated. Then return to the Contacts window, filter your active prospects by their tags and work through your list again. Review prior conversations, call on prospects, send them helpful information and continue to qualify them. Remember it takes on average twelve interactions with a client to make a sale so establish a simple system to ensure the work gets done and get busy.
Responding to prospects
When the phone rings anyone can quickly and simply open the caller’s contact page and BAM!, there they have a complete 360-degree view of the caller in front of them with the detail about all prior discussions. They instantly continue the process with the prospect exactly where it was left off. Just outline what needs to be done next and record the outcome of the call. That’s personal and attentive service!
Integrate a VoIP application like RingCentral to automatically open the contact’s record when your phone rings.
Tell your team how they should be using the system to support your CRM routine
- Explain the tags/categories you are using and why
- Outline your lead qualification process e.g. the sequence of “helpful information” you have to send your prospects
- Describe what should be documented (call logs, notes, tasks, future events/meetings, email correspondence, etc.)