Business Development can be tough, you may have heard that CRM could be the answer. But how? In this article, we will be covering five ways to use CRM for business development.
1. CRM remembers all of your communications for you
Building rapport with a customer can be done through phone calls, emails, or face to face meetings, and all of this creates information that we need to keep track of. Using a trusty notepad to jot down what we have spoken about does help but if someone else is dealing with that client and they need to know what the latest communications were, a notepad won’t cut it.
Yes, emails create a digital chain that we can search through; however, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article, this information can get lost amongst other conversations – this is where CRM comes in.
Using a CRM will allow the user to store digital notes and conversations against contact records, removing the risk of losing information and on top of this reducing the time spent sifting through pages and emails.
The handy thing with a CRM is if an adviser were to leave the company the records attached to the clients are still in the system. This means that when assigning someone new to the client they can pick up where the last person left off.
This will improve the quality of time spent accessing information and allow the user to better focus the task more efficiently. Occasionally nothing beats good old-fashioned pen and paper but all it takes is a spilt drink or to be left in the back of a car to make you question, what did I speak about with that client?
2. CRM increases time quality
Time is one of the only things in our day to day lives that we cannot make more of, there is no redo’. If a process works for you, that doesn’t mean it is necessarily the most effective. So, if we had a way of reducing the mundane tasks and saving time, we will do this without question, right?
As an example, if we regularly need to search through our email inbox to find specific emails from our clients, how long does that take us – 20, 30 seconds? This may not seem much at first however if this is something we do ten times per day, 5 days per week and every month, then we end up spending 25 minutes of your working week filtering emails.
Incorporating CRM into the mix allows us to bring up any communication – phone call, email, meeting, etc. – with a client all in one place. This, in turn, reduces the amount of time spent on admin, allowing us to focus on the main task at hand.
3. CRM helps bring in more sales
Money makes the world go round and is important to any business, regardless of sector, it is what helps to keep your company moving, after all.
Over time leads and prospects begin to fall through the cracks, it could be someone from last month or even last year but how often do we look into the forgotten?
When looking for added revenue we create marketing campaigns, cold calls or build relationships while networking. Checking up on the people we may not have spoken to in a while could unlock a potential gold mine without even realising.
A CRM system can easily create a report of the people that haven’t been spoken to in a while and may have fallen through the crack. You can easily be brought back up to date with just a quick check through the notes against their record.
Doing this allows us to pick up where we left off without having to scratch our heads to figure out who this person is and where in the buying process they were. This allows us to keep all earlier information that we needed and start a catch-up conversation. Who knows, they could be ready for the services now?
4. CRM generate performance reports
Reporting is something that is common throughout business and is something that I have written about before, this can be based on how well our business development efforts are going or even how far we are underperforming. Creating an Excel spreadsheet may not be able to track all performance metrics and from a visual standpoint, is it engaging?
Most CRM systems will allow dashboard creation – if the data is in the system, then dashboards can be used to display the information from searches in a visually appealing and easily interpretable way. These dashboards help show answers to a question that previously could have been difficult to explain to the rest of the team. Reading numbers works, but is it rememberable?
As well as being able to display dashboards, the system allows users to dig deeper into the data and gain better insight into what creates that information. Let us say we created a graph to show how many prospects we have in different postcodes. We then click into a specific section to show each business associated with that postcode.
5. CRM remember all of your day to day tasks
A question that has been said by many and without some way of tracking a schedule could even be daily. We all have a variety of things to remember day to day so implementing a system to remind us of that meeting that we had set up two weeks ago will make life easier.
Within a CRM system, the user can create dated tasks for themselves and others to remind people of the activities that they need to do each day. These tasks can be created straight from the contact database or even followed up from an earlier interaction like a phone call. An initial call with a prospect has gone well, and they have asked to follow up with them next week, all that needs to be done is create a task in the CRM.
Each question is something that may cross our mind when it comes to business development and implementing a CRM solution allows us not to worry about the above and focus on what really matters.
If a CRM system is something that could be of interest, it would be worth having a discussion with our team to see what we can do to help. Then get in touch.
