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CRM 101

June 26, 2023

Are you still in the sticky-note stage?

How do you keep track of your customers/potential customers?

✔ The individual emails saved in your inbox?  
✔ Sticky notes in your office?  
✔ Your contacts on your phone? 
✔ An address book?  
✔ A spreadsheet?  
✔ Some combination of any or all of these?

If so, it may be time to invest in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. 

The Customer Relationship Management tool, or CRM, is one of the most important tools in an online business owner’s toolkit.  

 You might be asking: 

What is a CRM, and what does it actually do?

At a minimum, a CRM is a reliable filing system for contact information on your prospects/leads/customers.  For those of us old enough to remember them, it’s like a Rolodex on steroids. 

Additionally, a CRM will store important data about contacts so that your whole team can access it:
ℹ Where you found them
ℹ Pipeline status
ℹ Products/services they’re interested in
ℹ Purchases they’ve made
ℹ Payments due and payments made
ℹ Key dates (birthday, service anniversary, follow-up after a sales call)

You can add notes - maybe details of conversations, copies of emails, or reminders of next steps or questions to answer.

A nice feature is the ability to add tags to identify specific criteria, like their lead status, what product/service they’ve purchased, membership or email list subscriber status, etc… 

A good CRM will allow you to aggregate and report on the data you’ve captured to help you make informed business decisions to drive sales and improve your bottom line. 💲

If you’re still in the sticky-note stage, I encourage you to consider a more reliable method!


How a CRM can impact your business processes and systems

I already mentioned that a CRM is a key component of your filing system.   Some of the other systems that can benefit are lead follow-up, communication, and marketing.

My husband described the lead follow-up process his team used to go through before their company implemented a CRM.  Without going into too much painful detail, it involved printing notes and dropping them into a folder for a particular date to remind them to contact the lead.  

With a CRM, you take the data from the email/contact form and make an entry into the program.  If you have the right kind of automations set up, that data can be added without you having to do a thing!   The tool notifies you on the day you’ve indicated that you need to follow up.  If you aren’t able to make contact that day, simply update the record with a new date.  No moving pieces of paper around!  

Maybe you want to send targeted emails to a particular group of clients.  If you’ve assigned tags, it’s easy to identify who those clients are and send the email only to that group.  Again, you might have a tool that can automatically assign tags for you*!  

Connecting your CRM to other business tools (email marketing, invoicing and payment, for example) is another great way to streamline your systems by reducing or eliminating the need to enter data into multiple programs. 


So many to choose from!


Now that you’ve decided you need a CRM, how do you decide which one of the dozens out there is best for you?  

Do you use the one your friend told you about?  The cheapest?  The most popular?

I recommend identifying some key elements to base your decision on.  Here are a few that might be important to you:

  • What’s your budget?
  • How many people are on your team?
  • What size is your customer base?
  • What’s your comfort level with technology?
  • What functions are must haves for you? Nice to have?
  • What other tools do you need to integrate with (or do you want to implement an all-in-one platform, like Ontraport?)?


The Swiss Army Knife


That ONE tool that you can use to resolve so many issues!

What if the same software that you select for your CRM can also provide multiple other solutions?
  • email marketing 
  • Website (this one, for example)
  • membership site
  • landing and sales pages
  • automations
  • billing and payment collection
  • abandoned cart management
  • reporting

*Ontraport is an all-in-one business process tool that can handle all of this and more. Basically, you can run your entire business from within one piece of software.  

I’ve been so impressed with the functionality of Ontraport, and even more with the support from the team and the user community.  

So there you have it.  CRM 101.  If you’re ready to be more organized and efficient, in turn saving more time and money, I’d love to hear from you.
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