CRM For Dummies
Overview
Save time, save money, and grow your business with more effective CRM
CRM For Dummies is the small business leader's guide to managing customer interactions. Customer relationship management is a critical part of any business, and it encompasses everything from business strategy and HR to sales, marketing, events, and more. Solutions exist for businesses of any size, but how do you know which one is right for you? What features do you need? Do you have the people and processes in place to get the most out of whichever one you choose? This book is designed to help business leaders better understand effective CRM and identify the right solution for their business—but it's about much more than software; effective CRM requires appropriate team structures, intradepartmental collaboration, and process efficiency. Packed with tactics and strategies that will save your company thousands of dollars and man-hours, these
chapters answer the most pressing questions that will make the biggest impact on your sales.
Building relationships with current and future customers is the critical point of business. This book helps you bring sales, marketing, and operations together to work toward that common goal, and shows you the tools and techniques that make your efforts more effective.
- Define your market segments, buyer personas, and voice
- Build an effective internal structure, and choose the right CRM solution
- Optimize leads and conduct effective email marketing
- Streamline processes, automate where possible, and employ analytics
Your customers are the lifeblood of your company; you need to reach them, engage them, and retain them—without wasting precious time or money. CRM For Dummies gets you up to speed on the latest, most effective CRM tools and techniques to help your business succeed.
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About The Author
Lars Helgeson is a pioneer in sales and marketing technology. His CRM platform for small to mid-size businesses, GreenRope, was built from scratch and has grown to include over 3,000 clients in more than 40 countries since its inception in 2011. He is a frequent speaker for small membership organizations and conferences.
Sample Chapters
crm for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
CRM can be an unruly beast, but with the right approach, you can tame it to your will. Follow the guidelines in this cheat sheet, and you'll be well on your way to a successful implementation.
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Articles from
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The best way to build a successful CRM strategy is to be ready for the things that can derail your progress. CRM requires vision, foresight, and a lot of hard work. With the information here, you can prepare for obstacles that have tripped up other people.
Not getting buy in from your team for CRM
CRM is a team effort spanning across all departments.
The success of your CRM program will be dependent on how you use your data. Many people become leaders by accident. Suddenly they’re thrust into a position of having to make decisions, and they either bloom or crumble under the pressure. If they find early success from following their intuition (and some good luck), they may start to think they’re smarter than everyone else in the room.
Web traffic is important data for CRM. Web analytics can be complicated to dive into, but your marketing team should be able to distill important factors in your marketing that can guide your strategy and policy.
Assessing SEO and PPC performance
Search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising are two top-of-funnel marketing-related activities that directly influence sales.
The purpose of a CRM is to help you manage improve relationships with customers. In order to do that, you need data. Your forms can only gather the data that you ask for. At a very minimum, your forms collect an email address. You can ask for more fields, but each additional field lowers your response rate. The easier and simpler you make your forms, the more willing people are to fill them out.
Using a CRM, you can build a team and culture that connects your sales, marketing, and operations. Your CRM is the glue that binds everything together, but it’s more than just software. It represents a culture focused on accountability, sharing, and efficiency. It creates transparency and puts the customer relation at your team’s center of attention.
Customer Service
Lead scoring assign points to contacts in your CRM based on actions those leads take. Your CRM should store both demographic and activity lead scores for each contact, so your marketing and sales teams can use that information.
Updating your CRM with lead scoring data
Create a custom data field to store demographic and activity lead scores.
Customer Service
Just because you can store CRM information in a private knowledge base doesn’t mean everyone in your company should be able to see it all. Some information you store isn’t relevant to everyone. Some is simply private information.
Separating knowledge by group in CRM
Your CRM’s group architecture is key for protecting information from various leads, clients, and internal team members.
Every method of lead capture in your CRM can and should be connected to a form of marketing automation. Marketing automation allows you to engage follow-up with leads and nurture them, and help them on the buyer journey. Lead nurturing is a combination of education and encouraging action, along with measuring what leads and customers do with your messaging.
A buyer persona is a representation of someone in your market of potential buyers. These personas are estimates, stereotypes of people who are or will be clients. As you learn about your market and gather information about your clients and their habits, your personas evolve as well.
You set up groups and processes in your CRM with your personas.
Customer Service
The first choice you have to make in your CRM decision is whether you want your software to live in the cloud or reside on servers in your office.For most businesses, choosing a cloud service, or Software as a Service (SaaS), makes the most sense for a number of reasons. If you really must go on-premise, be aware of the costs and risks of doing so before you head down that path.
Picking the right CRM vendor is important. Be careful when picking software that requires you to integrate many other tools to make your vision work. Software engineering as a rule costs two to three times the estimate you will receive.
Make sure the vendor can handle your requirements for sales, marketing, and operations.
Your CRM is at the heart of your business, with other software feeding your CRM with information. This information needs to be easy to access, both at a micro (individual contacts) and macro (company-wide) level. These software components should be connected to your CRM:
Email marketing: Newsletters, transactional emails, drip campaigns, form auto-responders.
Funnels are useful to measure the progress of leads as they move along your buyer journeys. From stage to stage, you can visualize the effectiveness of your sales process. They provide an excellent reporting overview that your team can monitor regularly. A typical funnel.
Funnels are useful for sales and marketing alike, as both interact with leads and contribute to the buyer journey at different times and in different ways.
Customer Service
CRM provides you with an incredible opportunity to expand your brand reach and enhance your brand reputation. Your organization should already have some notion of what its brand is or what leadership wants it to be. Perhaps your brand is centered on innovation, trust, or quality. Whatever your brand is, you can use CRM to extend its reach and enhance brand reputation through consistent, data-driven messaging.
Customer Service
CRM gives you the tools you need to deliver the right content. Once you have an idea of whom you are marketing to and the voice you want to use to communicate to your target market, it’s time to think about the kind of messaging you want to send.
Surveying the market for delivery methods
Most marketers call the messaging they send to their target markets content.
Customer Service
The forms you place on your website are absolutely critical for gathering contacts into your CRM and starting them down the path of becoming clients. Forms generally fall into two categories: confirmed opt-in and single opt-in.
Using confirmed and single opt-in forms to gather info for CRM
Confirmed opt-in (also known as double opt-in) forms are most frequently used for newsletters, e-book downloads, and other marketing-related content.
Customer Service
Tickets can help you gather information for your CRM. Ticketing uses forms to track an “issue” that is created by filling out the form. This “issue” could be interest in your product, or it could be someone having a problem with a product you sell. In either case, you want a person from your company to engage with the person filling out the form and manually close it.
Design your campaigns with your CRM in mind. A campaign is a programmed effort to create awareness about your products and/or services to a defined group of people with the intention of driving them toward a conversion. A good campaign is planned out, with a journey model and people to support leads as they progress through their journeys.
A workflow is an action or a series of actions. Workflows are the execution step that connects sales to marketing and vice versa. The more complete your CRM, the more powerful your workflows. When your CRM incorporates all your sales, marketing, and operational activities, your workflows can automate all of them.
Just like all CRM companies are different in the software they offer, all of them also have different pricing models. You want to look at all the costs involved with getting your CRM up and running. This concept is called total cost of ownership (TCO).TCO includes much more than the amount that you pay to the CRM vendor every month or year.
Customer Service
Leads are an important piece of data for your CRM. You can use many strategies and tactics to gather leads. At the very beginning of the process to bring leads to you is advertising, and it has two main components — awareness and perception. Awareness is letting people know you exist, and perception is the emotional feeling your target market gets when people connect with your brand.
Your ESP gives you tools to help you gather leads and feed them automatically into your CRM. Use these tools to grow your contact lists and potential clients. More leads means more potential sales, which means more actual sales, so take advantage of every means available to boost your ability to generate revenue.
Customer Service
Your CRM and online store should be working together. Many businesses sell products or raise funds online. E-commerce has been around for many years, but now with advances in CRM and marketing automation technology, you can connect your e-commerce with the rest of your business processes.
Picking a good storefront
A wide variety of storefront options are available to you, most providing at least basic functionality to display products and categories, and place items into a shopping cart for purchase.
If you want your CRM to be successful, you need IT to support the idea. Among other roles, IT serves as the gatekeeper to protect unauthorized access to the company’s network and data (including customer data) and to prevent any internal activities that could compromise security or harm the company’s reputationUnfortunately, in many businesses, IT gets a bad rap; security experts are often perceived as barriers to progress, because people who just want to get things done, such as adopting a new CRM software solution, often have to wait for IT’s approval.
Customer Service
CRM thrives in an innovative, collaborative work environment, where every member of your organization shares a commitment to serving your clients’ needs. Whether coming up with new ideas for products or services, or working together to resolve an issue, the positive environment supported by a good CRM makes the difference.
Customer Service
Lead scoring assigns points to people in your CRM based on attributes that make them a better lead. Higher scores help your sales team determine quality and interest, focusing their efforts, and becoming more efficient. Scoring identifies when individuals show a lot of interest by interacting with your brand.Lead scoring comes in two basic types: demographic and activity-based.
Customer Service
User adoption is crucial for CRM success. When you’re ready to get your team on board, treat user adoption like you would selling something outside your company. The key leaders and influencers, formal and informal, have to buy into your vision.In selling your CRM program internally, develop your pitch like you would sell a lead.
A good team knows how to use the tools they’re given, and CRM is no exception. Your users should get comfortable using the CRM as quickly as possible. You must ensure everyone is on a training plan and has access to learning resources for self-study.
Every CRM vendor offers training to empower users to get the most out of the software.
Customer Service
Process abandonment plays an important role in your CRM. At each stage of the funnel, you need to measure the time between stages and the percentage of people who aren’t advancing. You also want to set up process abandonment, so that workflows can be activated when a potential lead doesn’t advance to the next step after a certain amount of time.
When you load contacts and companies into your CRM for the first time, you likely are transferring that data from a system you already have in place. Your current system may be an existing CRM, or it may simply be an Excel file.Usually data from your current system is exported into a CSV (comma separated values) file delimited by tabs or commas.
Customer Service
Your knowledge base is an extension of the collective knowledge of your CRM team. It’s important to document anything you can, to avoid the possibility of employees taking their knowledge when they leave your company.Store publicly distributed information in your knowledge base. Public corporate documents such as your mission and vision statements, company history, organizational chart, and frequently asked questions are all useful.
As with other marketing strategies, you can use your CRM to manage affiliates. Affiliate marketing is using other people, companies, and websites to drive traffic to your website in exchange for paying for those referrals. Sometimes affiliates are paid for each inbound link; sometimes they’re paid when those leads become paying clients.
You can measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign with CRM. More than just watching individual email campaigns, you need to measure how your email marketing is performing over time. If your messages are getting more or less effective, you want to know and take action.
After you understand how your email marketing drives revenue, use your knowledge to predict when your emails create action from your contacts.
Customer Service
Your CRM can help you manage your projects. As a project progresses, your project manager reports on how the project is doing. It’s important to watch the right metrics, so your management understands the health of the project without getting bogged down in details.
Tracking resource utilization
Resource utilization is a measure of how well your labor force is being used.
As with CRM, project management can have a far-reaching influence in your organization, so you want to think about how you set it up before you start using it.
Managing projects: A case for software
When many people work together on a project, the complexities of managing who should do what and when can be daunting.
When you use CRM, you want to refer to the needs of your sales, marketing, and operations people to ensure you’re capturing and storing the data you need. These custom fields are attached to contacts and companies (also known as “accounts” in some CRM systems).
Some custom fields are restricted to a particular group.
Triggers are an important part of modeling the buyer journey in your CRM. They’re the impetus for causing you to take action. A trigger is when a lead does something that causes you to take an action in response.Triggers are possible whenever you can measure a contact’s action. Your CRM must capture these actions to be able to activate a workflow, so you must gather as much data as you can.
Do the following things before you even start looking for a CRM. You have to know how your business works before you can be successful with CRM. Here are steps to accomplish before you start with CRM.
Map your processes. Use a mapping tool such as JourneyFlow.com to document how processes work in your business.
A lot of good CRM software companies are on the market today, but they all do things a little differently. Here are some strategies to use so that you choose the best software for your business.
Do not be afraid to ask direct, pointed questions of the CRM sales team.Finding the right criteria for your CRM
Every business has priorities, and those priorities influence what you want in your CRM.
Customer Service
You can measure many aspects to email using your CRM, each of which should guide your future marketing efforts. These are a few important statistics you can track to learn what is working and why.
Measuring reads/opens
Also known as an open rate, your read rate is the number of people who opened your email compared to the total number of valid recipients.
Social media and CRM go together perfectly. Social media is a powerful platform for communicating with a large number of people and expanding your reach. One significant challenge for marketers is that the bulk of the data collected about the use of social media is kept in the hands of the social media companies.
Your CRM can help you track sources. Identifying your leads by campaign ID is critical for understanding the reach and influence of the marketing campaigns you’re running. You can also track individuals or companies who refer you business through campaign IDs. Usually these referral sources are called affiliates.
Your CRM can help you avoid content saturation. Writing a lot of content isn’t enough. It has to be relevant and useful. Every day, people and companies are posting more content, and it’s hard to stand out. To be successful, you must cut through the noise.
Use your CRM to stick to relevant content
Remember a few important tips when writing content:
Be clear who you are writing your content for.
Your CRM will be jampacked with strategies and tactics. Many people use strategies and tactics interchangeably, but anyone with military experience can tell you they’re different. Senior management usually define strategies, while middle managers and those who execute employ tactics. This section covers how to distinguish between strategies and tactics in the design and implementation of your CRM.
After people see your brand for the first time, your primary objective is to get them into your sales funnel. A sales funnel is a depiction of how your leads (people who haven’t become clients yet) move through various stages to become paying customers. The better you can categorize this journey, the better you understand how and why people buy (or don’t buy) from you.
Customer Service
When a sale is closed, you want to record that sale within your CRM. Generally speaking, sales are tracked in one of two methods: as an opportunity (used for tracking fewer, higher-value items) or as an automated funnel (used for tracking large numbers of conversions).
Selling to the business (B2B) with opportunities
Opportunities are a way to track complex sales, usually business-to-business sales.
Customer Service
When someone fills out a form on your website, that information is immensely useful for your CRM. The lead leaves tracking information: how she got to your site. The marketing system also tags each visitor with a unique cookie to follow that lead as that person clicks around your website. Your forms can also initiate other kinds of automated tasks, such as send emails and schedule follow-ups for your sales staff.
Customer Service
Most CRM and contact management systems have a way to create subsets of your contact data. Some platforms use tags, while others define campaigns, but I believe groups are the best way to segment your contacts. However you decide to segment your contacts, it’s easier to plan this grouping and tagging before your team starts using your CRM.
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