A Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) is a technological tool that allows businesses to store information on leads, potential customers and existing customers as well as your interactions with them.
It can be used to manage customer relationships throughout the entire customer lifecycle, from marketing, to sales and even customer service.
Members of your team can use its CRM to populate customer information as it becomes available. For example Telegram handle, a networking organization chapter or social media account.
Once your prospect becomes a customer, it can be used to track customer service issues or support. They might write to your business' X account and then follow up on Telegram or in private, and having a CRM lets you manage the inquiry across all channels without losing track; super useful.
My business only has four full-time employees, so I probably don't need one, right? CRMs are only for large corporations, right? Wrong! It can do wonders for you and I've found that not having one was costing me money.
You see, an incoming sales call handled by the administrative assistant can end up in information written on a notepad, for example. What if a sales rep had a visit to that customer later in the week and stored the information about his visit "in his head"? Maybe you made some notes about this customer in your Notion. See where I'm going with this?
Details on your customers can be lost, you might fail to follow up on a call and you'll end up losing sales and doing lots of additional administrative work; time that can be better used on something more productive.
Cloud-based solutions for small businesses.
The above chart has examples of solutions for large enterprises of 10,000 emlopyees and up as well as small businesses. Most enterprise solutions can cost in the range of $50 to $150 per user, per month, with some premium plans costing upwards of $300! But small businesses don't need to go over the top to take advantage of a CRM solution. We use a cloud-bases solution called Monday.com that allows us to set up different boards to classify our leads and potential customers and jot down as much information about them as possible. This solution costs about $10 per user per month and has been totally worth it
Here's how it works for us, starting with the sales funnel.
Leads and contacts board
Our first part of the sales pipeline starts with the leads & prospects board which has two segments. The first group is where we write down leads: businesses we've seen on social media, or maybe an ad agency we heard about from an acquaintance. We usually have not made contact with them yet.
We'll write down information we've found on their website, LinkedIn or a name of an existing contact that might be able to provide that referral. Once we've obtained their contact information, they'll be automatically moved to the Contacts section and they'll be associated with an account.
One of the two people in sales with reach out via email, phone call, visit, WhatsApp to try to offer a solution for a specific problem and as soon as they are interested in a particular service and request a quote, a potential deal is created.
Deals
As soon as we send a quote to a prospective customer, we create a deal item, where we can upload the quote document, any information we've provided the prospect, as well as notes on every call, email or text message we've exchanged. We also classify the deal status into
- Quote sent
- Negotiation
- Won
- Lost
We can also set a reminder that can automatically trigger an email for us, or notification on Slack, so that we know when to follow up on the deal.
We classify deal priority into low, medium and high depending on the ticket amount, customer size and other criteria such as strategic alliances.
If a prospective customer says "no" or has stopped answering our communication, the deal will be moved to lost and we can talk about what went wrong. They might be contacted in the future about a new deal. If the prospect says "yes", the deal is moved into WON status and two things are automatically triggered:
- A project is created
- An invoice request is opened
New Projects
When a new project is underway, we gather invoice information from the client as well as provide them payment options with us.
The production team also has access to this board, so they know when recording will happen, what equipment, furniture, props, and other media will be used during the session and they are also able to provide both management AND the client have the status of their recording.
Invoices
When a recording date is set with a client, an item is created for the treasurer. It says invoice pending. As soon as recording is finished, we go ahead and send the invoice to the client and get ready to get paid!
Conclusion
As you can see, It's a simple process, but it keeps everybody focused and up to speed throughout the sales, production, delivery and invoicing process. Weekly meetings (on Mondays) are kept short and to the point, as everybody knows what they should focus on. Less time is wasted and customers receive exceptional service.
What do you think? Could your business benefit from using a CRM?
All images are my own unless stated otherwise. I use Midjourney as well as Canva Pro to generate and edit my cover images and signature.
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I think it's a great tool, man. Small companies always want to grow but they want to do it without paying a lot of money and this looks like a tool that can give them that. It's definitely creative.
Yes, a lot of small business owners mistakenly think tools are only for large enterprises. I've seen huge benefits in using tools such as Slack, Canva, Monday (for project management and CRM) and others.
Parece un excelente sistema comercial ...de seguimiento de ventas, según entiendo también corrige fallas humanas está pendiente de la producción y facturas, es genial...buena recomendación 👌
Si, lo usamos durante todo el proceso desde prospección, ventas, gestión del proyecto, facturación & cobro y servicio al cliente. Super recomendado llevar un proceso detallado. Pareciera tedioso, pero cuando sabes todos los detalles de todas las comunicaciones, cotizaciones y proyectos que has tenido con tu cliente, tienes una gran ventaja :)
CRM is not just for small bussineses but it also used by big compannies like amazon. Thanks to this tool because it makes the work of the owner more easily and understandable graphs for their sales in order for them to devude future plans to there busines..🤗Greetings
Yes, exactly. The point of my post is not to discard using a CRM by thinking it's only for a large enterprise. Small businesses (Like mine) can also benefit from using a CRM and there are affordable solutions on the market.
Ok my friend, so wishing you have more sales this year and goodluck☺
I've seen a lot of Monday.com ads on youtube, but I never really understood/listened to what they were saying. I usually just skipped them. Reading your post, it actually showed that they can do a lot of things, and can help a business with their scheduling and consolidating info. I don't have a business, but I can definitely see how it can help.
There you go, now you know what they're about :) There are a few tools out there, this one just seemed to fit my workflow so I've stuck with it for some time now. Tools like this can keep you focused and achieve higher close rate.
This is amazing and can even help to foster more sales
Thanks for sharing with us
Yes, that's more or less one of the main uses for having a CRM in the first place :)
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