CRM stands for customer relationship management. The first thing to look for within a CRM is the appropriate project management tools that you might need. You always have these little side projects going on, right? Whether it’s something you’re personally doing, or something for a customer, it could be a project you’re doing for a customer, it could just be something you’re doing yourself because you just want to do some self-development. Within a CRM, you should be able to create a project with different stages within it and tasks that need to be accomplished within each of those stages. And then you can use those templates moving forward if you wanted to, maybe it’s a project that you typically do for customers over and over again, right. Maybe it’s like a kitchen remodel, you need to do these things whenever there’s a kitchen remodel, it’s like a checklist, it’s a no-brainer. So if that’s a service that you provide, every time you have a new customer that needs a kitchen remodel, you just add that project to it and then your team can start working on it. This is really effective because it allows you to streamline and make sure that you have all of the checklists or processes built out ahead of time for all of your projects. And then if you ever need to add a stage or add a step, when you do that, it immediately is added to all the other projects because it’s a template. And so it really helps your whole team make sure that nothing gets missed along the way (ie what shopify theme is that?)
1. Company calendar
Company calendars are really nice because it helps you just see what’s going on at the company level with regards to all the events, things coming up, different customers that you’re interacting with for the day, that kind of a thing. So we all have our personal calendar usually in our email whether it’s in Gmail or those things, and that’s really good. What I’m talking about here though is a company calendar. As a team, you want to be able to see what the rest of the team is doing, and so a CRM is nice because the calendar there shows you from a business perspective what’s going on for the day for not just you but you can toggle and you can say, hey, show me everything that, all the events happening today for my whole team. And that helps you identify what’s going on as an organization, especially if you’re a manager, so you can make sure that you’re effectively managing your team appropriately.
2. Proper reporting
So CRMs are really nice because it helps you from a leadership and a management perspective see what’s going on with your organization and understand how you’re performing. So for example, you generated 100 leads this month, how many of those became accounts? If 10 of them became accounts, it means you have a 10% conversion rate on your leads. Is that good? Is it not good? That’s an area of improvement, maybe, right? But it gives you the data. You can’t improve what you don’t track. And so a CRM has all that reporting, so make sure that it has the type of reporting that you’re looking for and it has some form of custom reporting in the sense that you can build some sort of a report or a list that you can then analyze on your own (how to dropship from aliexpress and such related questions). So CRMs are very powerful for this but there’s a lot of CRMs maybe that don’t have the reporting you’re looking for so keep an eye out for that. So a couple bonus tips here on finding the right CRM would be find one that fits the cost that you’re looking for, right? CRMs can be very expensive, they can also be really cheap. Watch out for the very expensive, it might have too many features that you don’t even need, watch out for the really, really cheap because it might not be good enough, right? Look for something that fits your budget where you can add users and it doesn’t get too expensive for you. So check on that. Also look for one that has proper support. There’s a lot of CRMs out there that are completely tech-based that when you try to call, there’s nobody there to talk to you, right? It’s all online support. So look for something where you can actually talk to a human to help you do things and answer questions for you along the way. That would be really important. Also, look for a CRM that’s going to be integrated with your marketing. So you want a CRM that’s not separated from your marketing, you want it integrated into a singular platform so that you can manage your social media, and your reviews, and your marketing, and your email, and everything in one singular platform.
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