If you've been out and about you've probably heard of the term CRM or
Customer Relationship Manager (or Management) in the past. What exactly is it?
What is CRM? What does it mean to a small business?
It's quite simple. This is a piece of software that allows you track communication
and notes about your customers. A lot of people try to do this using Excel or
some other type of Office product but then they find that over time it becomes
increasingly difficult to keep track of information on their clients. In this
article we will review some key benefits that you will find with a CRM:
1. Track details about your Customer
A robust CRM and even a simple one should be able to provide you insight
into your customers behaviour. What industry do they belong to? How many employees
do they have? When is their birthday? How many contacts are there in the
organization? You should also be able to track custom information on your
customers too. For instance, what is their favourite colour? Or do they have
pets? You should be able to easily track and input information about your
Companies and Contacts with ease.
2. Quickly add Notes
With any CRM system you should be able to capture notes quickly and
easily. In many CRM's you will now find Comments or Activity Feeds where you
can quickly and easily add in notes regarding that customer. For example, you
might say "I recently spoke with John at Acme Co. He's really excited and
just wanted to let us know that our approach to working with him is
great."
Now every time you go back to that record you will see those comments
and quickly bring yourself up to speed to what is happening with the account.
3. Connected Information
Whether you're scheduling phone calls, tasks or track attachments in a
CRM, it's important you have these features to help track what is going on with
your customers' account. With most modern CRM's you can now track tasks such as
"Send out proposal" and include a due date so that the task can show
up on your dashboard. You should also be able to attach that proposal into a
Note inside of the CRM for future reference a well.
4. Integration with other tools
It's important that a CRM can integrate with other systems and probably
the most important is an email marketing tool. You want to keep your customers
informed on your latest marketing offerings so by integrating an email
marketing solution such as MailChimp or Constant Contact (or others) you can
quickly send out emails to your opted in membership from inside of your CRM.
There are a number of benefits with a CRM solution that you can help you
keep a tab on what's going on inside of your organization. It's just a matter
of finding the right product for you, being diligent to track the information
and taking advantage of the possibilities.
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