Customer relationship is crucial to business success.
If you make a consistent effort to foster a positive relationship with your customers, they are not only more likely to buy more products from you, but also recommend to others the quality of service you provided.
Find out below a few more reasons why a CRM system should be the heart of your business.
Head here and learn more about getting started with a modern CRM.
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Transcription:
Hey, what’s up guys, Peter Moriarty here, good to have you with me choosing the perfect CRM system for your business. And so that’s what we’re going to be talking about, I’m going to be taking you guys through how to make sure that you have the right setup for your business and how to make sure that you make really great choices around CRM software. So what I’m going to be covering off before I jump right into like how to choose the tool, I first going to go through some of the fundamentals of you know why CRM should really be the heart of your business. And then the second section is going to be how you can use a CRM to deliver really great customer service, both really, really important. So we are it genius. If you don’t know about us, we help small and medium sized businesses with their technology. And we’re really about helping small businesses play a bigger game. And what we mean by that is, we know that most entrepreneurs have got into business, wanting to have more freedom, more money, more flexibility in their life. But for many, they actually end up chained to their business. And so we want to help unshackle those chains by including really great technology strategy in businesses to help you succeed and live the life of your dreams. Now, how do we do that? Well, we work with Google Cloud, we’re now the number one Australian New Zealand small business partner for Google Cloud, which is pretty cool. And primarily we work with a suite of applications called G Suite or what was G Suite is now called Google workspace. We’ve grown in scale the successful business and successful team it genius run by myself, Scott Golightly and Regina most so who’s in the middle of the second photo, there are our executive team. And we’ve built up large and substantial team. And basically, we want to help other small businesses do the same. And we do that by taking businesses through the growth roadmap or the technology adoption cycle. And this is basically our way of chaperoning businesses through the growth cycle of different stages of business. And as you can see, they’re at different stages, there’s different recommendations on technology, tools and strategies. And so we want to make sure you’re doing the right thing at the right stage of business.
So let’s talk about why CRM should be the heart of your business, why they should be the absolute middle of everything that you’re doing, and why this is so important for you to make sure that you get right. Well, let’s jump into some of the things that you may get wrong about CRMs. So when we start talking about CRM software, what is CRM software? And and why is it so important? Now, most small business success is an accident. And why that’s an accident, I mean, is because most small business owners just rely on manual systems, they rely on people’s minds to get things done. And they rely on people just kind of remembering how to do certain tasks in the business. And so what happens is, quite often, when someone actually leaves the business, you end up with a big problem, because they take knowledge with them, knowledge of systems, knowledge of customers, and you can end up in a little bit of a mess. Now, it’s really important to implement technology tools to support your business processes, because that’s a key absolute key foundation in you, the business owner, getting off the tools, and actually stepping back delegating more, and having your team do more of the tasks for you. Because really, that’s the only path to freedom is taking what’s off you and then giving them to other people. And so a CRM system, you know, helps out in multiple areas of the business. And I really believe this to be the heart of the business, or what should be the heart of your business to actually help assist you in many different areas of your business lifecycle. So I’m going to take you through some of those different areas of the business lifecycle and how a CRM system can help support those. Think about the CRM as your kind of database. It’s, it’s the source of truth, for everything that’s going on in your business, and everyone really should be referring to it. So first up, when we think about marketing, I immediately think about marketing intelligence. And I think about measuring how marketing can be effective for a business.
Now, for many business owners, marketing is a dark art. And it’s kind of you know, particularly for more technical founders, or for someone who’s, you know, really strong creative, most of their energy goes towards creating the product that you’re creating, or delivering the service that you’re really good at delivering. And so to use the parlance of Michael Gerber, who wrote the E myth, you know, you’re in technician mode. And what that means is, you’re really great at delivering but things like sales and marketing and brand and actually promoting the business is not necessarily a core skill set. Now, there’s no problem with that there’s, there’s no shame in not being a whiz in every area of business, everyone has their their competencies and things that they need a little bit of help with. But for many business owners marketing is something that takes a little bit of time to get used to. Now what I learned early on is in my sales process, I really wanted to at 20th. And you know about the 8020 rule or the Pareto principle, and that is that in general, about 80% of your results come from 20% of effort. And if you look at your marketing, and you look at the opportunities that are coming to you through your sales pipeline, and you investigate, well, where are our actual opportunities coming from by identifying your different lead sources? Well, then you can get a measurement of what marketing is actually effective. And what Marketing is not very effective. So this has been something that we’ve been doing for a long time. Initially, it was just manually on a spreadsheet. But then eventually we got to the stage of actually doing that with a sophisticated CRM system. And so your CRM system should be able to take all of your sales opportunities. And it starts to give you reports on where those opportunities actually coming from. A more sophisticated system will also show you the value of deals, and importantly, the value of closed deals or the value of your successful or won opportunities, and map those to lead sources. Because you may have got like 10 leads from one lead source, but if they were crap leads, or if you didn’t sell much to those leads, then it may not be worth putting your effort into that lead source anymore. So that’s number one important thing for marketing insights from your CRM system.
Next up, let’s talk about sales. And we all know what it’s like to work with sales people, or if you are the salesperson in your business, you probably know a little bit about this, many salespeople are a little bit inconsistent on the admin side of things. And that’s not because of any fault of their own, what they really excel in is typically influence human interaction. And so you can kind of forgive them for not being the best at doing the numbers and doing the admin type work. And so what can happen is salespeople, when they’re managing a lot of deals at the same time, can start to have a little bit of a weird process for their sales. Now, if you’re growing or scaling a sales team, or even if you’re just going from doing the sales in your business yourself, and starting to delegate and hand that off to a sales team that you’re starting to create, you really need a really great sales process. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be rigid in the way that you deliver your sales conversations no matter what product or service that you’re selling. But it does mean that you need some kind of system for managing your sales, it’s going to make it easier for your staff to be set up and on boarded and trained on how you actually deliver your sales. But also, you want to make sure that you’re getting insights into what’s happening with your sales. And so some kind of pipeline management is really important to have in a CRM software, which is going to allow you to have your team take customers and prospects through a logical progression of your sales process. So you can see what kind of stages deals are up to what your pipeline is. So you can get an idea of that, but also being able to see what is the logical next step that I need to move a customer to, quite often we, you know, talk to a prospect, and we’ve got them on a single phone call. And we want to get the right to the end of the race on the first call, right, we want to sell them straight into our product. Although there may be certain numbers of stages or hoops that they need to jump through or different levels of enlightenment, I like to call it sometimes with your products that you want to take a customer through a process of and so using a piece of software to manage your pipeline can make that easier and more effective.
So next up, let’s talk about your people. And so something like a CRM system that talks to your email system, which copper CRM, the CRM system that we’re affiliated with, and happened to recommend for most businesses, automatically does this which is really great. Now, you want to track the activity of your people, so you know, who’s getting their work done, and who might be slacking off. And so a CRM system that requires you to manually enter your data can be a little bit cumbersome, because that means that you’ve got to rely on people entering stuff. And that’s admin work, which remember, salespeople are not always that great, okay. So having a system that automates this, and then gives you reports on activity makes much, much more sense. And so copper CRM automatically connects to Gmail and Google workspace. And it actually sucks in all of the activities. So the emails, the notes, the data, any interactions with your customers, and it actually brings it into their profile right inside of the CRM software. So you can actually see it inside the pipeline, which is super duper helpful. And so what that means is basically, you end up with a system, where you have people who are automatically having they’re automatically having their records updated without having to do that manually, which I love. Not gonna say Fingers crossed, and say, I love it. It’s really, really good. So we’ve gone through activity for people. Next up is insights. And this is really more in the finance area of your business. You want your finance to be able to accurately forecast. Okay, we have this much in the pipeline, we know that our conversion rate is about x. So this is how much cash we’re looking to bring in over the next 30 to 45 days. So forecasting is super important for your business. So you can have accurate reports on where things are going in the future.
And finally, what all of this is coming down to if you’ve noticed a theme in this already, it’s to bring your business to a place of making data based decisions. As I said, At the start of this program, most businesses really use button numbers to run the business or they use their gut in their field. And that’s useful in certain situations. But it shouldn’t be how you make every single decision in the business. database decisions means that you’re collecting accurate data from the way that the business is actually operating. And you’re making key strategic decisions. Based on that data and based on what that data is telling you, and so I recently was auditing one of the new businesses that we’ve started a partnership with. And we looked at all the different deals that have come in over the past 12 months. And from that lead source deal tracking, we were able to see which lead sources were more profitable than others. And something really interesting that we found was that partnerships were really low. And some partnerships had only brought in like one deal for the whole year. And if you think about the energy required to maintain and manage a partnership, it might be like, you know, three, or four or five meetings over the course of a year to manage a relationship with someone, if they’ve only brought in one deal over the course of the year, that maybe it’s not the best use of time to focus on that partnership anymore. Or perhaps it’s something that could be maximized by trying a different strategy with that particular partner. Now, the key thing is here, those decisions were based on data that we had on what the actual dollar results were on the business that was coming in, through, setting that up with tracking our sales. And so that’s what we’re looking to do here is make data based decisions. So I want to say big thanks for joining this video learning about CRM today.
If you are a small or medium sized business owner, I recommend you head along to our YouTube channel. And check out our playlists for the different stages of technology adoption, based on where you’re at in your business right now. Basically, we want to help all small businesses, whether you’re a one man band, right up to large organizations who are scaling and growing quickly to make sure your technology strategy is in place. And it’s going to help support the growth of your business. Now, we’ve got playlists set up on YouTube for each stage of business that you’re at, so you can get the best of those technology strategies. And if you’re interested, we have an exclusive transfer in offer for small businesses who are using Google workspace. And what you get access to is a google classroom with professional training on everything to do with Google workspace. Not only do you learn how to use all the different applications, and you can share this with all of your team as well, there’s also certifications there. And so the aim for this is really for you to use this for your team and for your business for you to make sure that everybody is competent with the tools that you will have already invested in. Now if you’re interested in running a remote team scaling and remote business, we’ve got all of our videos on how to grow and scale your business in a COVID world up there inside the Google Classroom available for free. We used to give those only to our customers are but we’ve decided to make those available for free for everyone. So get your get on there, get your team on there as well and get access to all of the benefits. Now what do you need to do headlong to the link here, there is also a link below this video. And that will give you access to our classroom lessons, you get access to our team, the important thing is that it doesn’t cost you anything extra. If you’re currently paying Google directly for your workspace account, you just switch your billing to us. And you don’t pay any extra we buy it at wholesale. So we just charge the same rate that Google does. And then from there, you get access to all the extra benefits of working with it genius, as a thank you for being a customer of ours. So if you haven’t already gone there, please head long. And if you have anything that you’d like to chat to our team about, you can connect with us directly via our chat. And our team will be more than happy to help you out with anything that you need in the Google world. Thank you so much, guys, we will catch you in the next one. Make sure you’ve got notifications on if you want to get in touch with our team jump on the link below. If you’ve not yet transferred your billing to it, genius, great time to do that get access to the classroom. We’re uploading new videos in there every couple of weeks. And it’s really being fleshed out to be awesome. We did last year, an eight week series on running your business remote, basically going completely open book on six years of completely remote management of our business. We now have 55 or employees across the group. And so yeah, basically we want to, you know, share with you guys how we actually run the business, how we’ve been successful, we don’t can’t promise you’ll be successful. We’re just sharing what we know, and what works for us. And yeah, all of that is inside the classroom. So if you’re interested in checking that out, well, it should be I’m sure angels listening. So if it’s not, we’ll be soon. But yeah, we just gave the go ahead to upload all of that exclusive content there. And I’ll catch you guys on the next one. Peace out and see you later.
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