Brand Builders Part 26: Are You Using Your CRM?
If I say customer relationship manager to you, or CRM, you’re probably going to fall into one of three categories. You’re going to say, “what?”, or “Oh, sure, we keep our customers in an Excel spreadsheet”, or “We email people with Outlook”. Or you’re going to say, “Oh, yeah, I have a CRM. It is automated, it interacts with my website, I can track my leads with it, I know exactly what my conversion rate is and that automation saves me a ton of time, because it’s out there working leads and bringing people to me. All I have to do is close them.” So, if those were your three choices, tell me, which one of those are you and which one of those do you want to be?
If you’re in the first category; CR-what?, then let me just break it down for you. A customer relationship manager is a place for you to keep your names and numbers and email addresses for everybody that should be a customer, and the people who are already customers too. Now some people have an accounting system, and they kind of think they’re using that as a CRM, but it’s not going to have the full functionality that you really need and want. You want something that’s going to keep all your people straight, that’s going to give you automatic reporting, to tell you who’s hot that you need to go and follow up with and who’s not that you probably need to ditch and let go of or nurture along a little bit.
It’s going to have some automation, so it’s going to regularly send out things and you’re going to have the opportunity to create some “if-then” scenarios. “If” I send this to Maggie, and “then” she does that “this” should happen. “If” I send this to Jordan, “then” she does this, then “that” should happen. Those “if-then” scenarios are so powerful because they will save you a ton of time. You have to be a little proactive and kind of plan heavy, but once you’ve got it all set up, it just goes which I love so much.
You also want your CRM to work with your website, because if Maggie or Jordan visits your website, you want to be notified. You want to know what pages they went to, what did they read, how long were they there. All of that’s really going to help you. Now, you may get an analytics report every month that says you had 17,000 clicks, you had 24,000 hits. People spent an average of an hour and 37 minutes on your site. What are you going to do with that information?
Isn’t it more powerful to know that John, or Steve or Bob went to your website and what pages they went to and what company they work at? And what their email address is, so you can follow up with them? Yeah. Isn’t it way better to know that Michael downloaded this eBook? Yeah. All of that information is so powerful.
And if you were in that middle group that’s still trying to get by with an Excel spreadsheet or Outlook, let me just assure you, there’s a better way. It’s more robust, it’ll do more for you. Now, look, I don’t own a CRM company, so I’m not trying to talk you into buying my product. What I’m telling you is you need a CRM, because that’s how you need to communicate with your customers these days and turn strangers into clients. That’s how you’re going to build a better brand.
