CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It's a system a company uses to keep track of emails, prospects, vendors, opportunities, leads, projects, notes, referrals or most any other type of data. There are over 100 cloud-based CRM systems out there now. Frankly most of them suck. Either they are missing features, too expensive ah-hmm 'cough' (sales force) or the designers and programmers do not ever use the end product because they are so unintuitive that a caveman couldn't do it.
One of the most important "things" a CRM does is logs a searchable history of completed and "to do" events so you can go to say a contact and look at upcoming calls, past emails you sent, phone calls you made or tasks completed concerning the specific contact.
Why should you listen to me? I wear many hats at work. IT, Marketing, Admin, Ops on occasion. And when I list broad categories like Marketing I mean: Print, PR, Advertising, Social Media, Digital Signage, Email Marketing, Magazine, Newspaper, Radio, Video, Trade journals and so on. So each catagory is an umbrella with other crowding smaller categories umbrellas huddled together trying not to get wet.
A lot of the time I use third party outsourcing for jobs to save time and get a more professional look on projects.
Manipulating a photo to change wall color, add signage or take out shelving does not mean you are any good at graphic design. Those people are called artists and you should hire them for those jobs, an outside point of view is always a good thing.
Its important to know your limits. Nothing wrong with a Jack of all trades, just make sure you are not a "master of none"!!
Oh yea..And I have been administering CRM systems since 2003.
From workflows that send out email drip campaigns, maps within the CRM showing the location on the lead/contact/account etc and the ops in their area, email templates to save time, specified groups of leads you have data mined from your vast lead array to prospect scoring, knowing if a lead visits your website; which pages they visit and how long they are on said pages, to lead scoring and triggering events when a lead reaches a certain score.
Emails that can be tracked for opens, bounces and unsubscribes. Link clicks can be tracked and activity on your company website for individual contacts/leads etc can be tracked to email link clicks. Maybe you want to send all those who click on a link in one of your marketing emails a follow up email automatically, or depending on what page of your site they visit the follow up email changes? Yep you can do that.
You can also integrate your VOIP service! What, you mean when someone calls into my desk a window will pop up showing who it is and allow me to take notes and complete a call? beepboptwangwhinechirp (droid for yes sir!).
So that is a very broad paintbrush stroke, more like a paint roller, of what a CRM does for a company.
Oh and a CRM needs to be cloud based. Doing an onsite installation of a CRM system is dumb. Unless you want to pay a tech to keep it up and running, make changes, backups, debug code and write and/or install plugins. Sounds expensive, so $60 per user per month really isn't that much when you look at the $30k and upwards you would need to spend on someone with that IT skill set. Plus its all about the cloud now, why tether yourself to the office? Why not have a system that is available on any tablet, data phone, computer or new fangled electronic device? Coming soon to Google electronic brain implants or EBI for short.
So there we go in a rather misshapen nutshell of wisdom with a coating insults and rants, that's what a CRM does and why your business needs one. Ur Company Should Use a CRM, dummy!
What do we use for our business? Glad u asked we use.........To Be Continued....
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