CRM / Customer Relationship Management 101 to Grow A Business

Customer Relationship Management CRM Systems For Business Growth 101

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business strategy that integrates 3 essential components; people (internal and external), processes and technologies. One CRM application includes managing a business' interaction with its current and potential customers. CRM is heavily driven by customer data. It collects and analyzes data (of all a customer's current and past interactions with the company) with the common specific aim of improving its relationship with that customer and, in turn, customer retention and sales growth. (This can be customized according to your business' unique value proposition).

A CRM system (like Zoho and HubSpot) is used in sales (and marketing) project management for tracking all interactions in one place. When kept in the cloud (ie on the internet), the CRM allows multiple virtual team members greater connectivity through real time access anywhere globally.

Uses & Benefits of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems

• It allows a business to integrate multiple functional teams (sales, invoicing, etc), ie to have a '360 degree perspective' on the customer's experience (CX). This is so because all workers use one centralized space to log every contact with any single customer, from emails, scheduled meetings, phone to even offline activities. Specifically, each team and its members will have full access to the history of any single customer and know precisely where the business left off with a single customer, even if through another team. Ultimately, this allows you to provide a seamless and customized customer experience (CX). Since CRM also allows you to spot and merge multiple records created by different team members for a single contact, it essentially combines all of the bits of information from different locations to create a single, more complete record. In short, CRM can significantly improve your business' efficiency and customer experience (CX). Consider for instance how a sales representative can consult notes of all prior interactions before calling or responding to a customer. Perhaps that sales representative can avert a potentially bad sales day with a customer who has complained to another department over a product or issue that (s)he wanted to offer. Perhaps the customer is frustrated and on the point of attrition. With knowledge about a customer's history, the sales representative can make an appropriate and well informed decision on how to proceed with the particular customer.
• CRM tools can integrate different applications and even social media that you already use, the most common of which include Gmail, MailChimp, Facebook, etc. Consequently, it allows you to enhance your business' CRM-driven efficiency with added functionality (of each individual system). Regarding the social media integration, this also allows you to know every time your business is mentioned on social media. This therefore allows your business to respond very quickly to market sentiments.
• CRM allows you to monitor how correspondence ages and, in turn, recognize the health of your relationship with a customer in a timely manner. For instance, if a customer stops sharing information and responding as readily as before and slower than normal, you may need to work on maintaining the relationship. In fact, CRM task functions can be set to send reminders that ensure you are reminded of important tasks. For instance, you can create reminders for 'tasks' that send you email reminders when contracts are up for renewal and so on. It can essentially prevent aging of contact points.
• CRM can integrate pre-existing databases. For instance, you can import contact lists using a CSV file. See how to do this using HubSpot.

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  NB. HubSpot already has a list of preset field names (like first name, country, etc). In order to ensure HubSpot accepts your csv file with fields that are special to your field, edit the list of fields, called 'properties' in HubSpot before attempting to import your csv file.

• CRM is ideal for ensuring the continuity of a company after sales representatives are absent through vacation, retirement, termination, end of project and so on. This is possible because the data is managed in an already familiar (standardized) and accessible manner in a single place.
• Since CRM allows you to standardize and centralize all of your customer data, it is much easier to observe, make accurate management reports of, track and consequently respond strategically to market trends (like groups that respond better to certain marketing efforts, untapped geographic-related markets of hot lead, cash flow from weighted averages of the percentages on the sales pipeline, aging quotes, sales person activity to ensure salesforce is spending time in worthwhile places, etc). In turn, it also provides a better opportunity to grow your business than otherwise. For instance, CRM even allows you to monitor geographic market trends that you examine for opportunities.
• CRM offers tools that organize and track a business' sales process. For instance, you can spot the bottleneck points, ie where leads get stuck in the sales pipeline. In short, it can help businesses to identify and resolve operational issues.
• CRM allows you to automate your business intelligently. For instance, if someone visits your website and completes a contact form after business hours, your integrated CRM can send you an automatic email notification of this fact. Although this is already a common feature in contact form applications, if your market segmentation involves geographic location, the CRM goes further by establishing the lead's location as a means of determining who in your team must deal with the email and even incorporating an autoresponse email that assures the lead that someone will respond shortly. In other cases, based on the lead's contact form entries, you may even set up your CRM to quickly qualify your 'hot leads' and direct the notification as urgent to the correct person.

CONTENT RELATED TO CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

• CRM is the sine qua non that helps you to create a superior customer experience (CX)
• Encourage leads to easily book meetings using a HubSpot CRM schedulig tool. Preliminary meetings are an effective way of qualifying leads.
• Integrate incoming and outgoing emails to a HubSpot CRM, even without access to the HubSpot CRM account.
• Trouble tickets
• CRM is a key aspect of successful virtual team working
• What is your brand personality? Customers notice, trust, like and commit to a brand personality they see as compatible and with which they can have a relationship. Every touchpoint of your CRM must integrate your brand's personality in a consistent way.
• A CRM system needs one good coordinator.

Build a Successful Virtual Team

A virtual team (aka a geographically dispersed team, distributed team, digital team or remote team) refers to a group of individual people and or entities that work together from different physical locations and rely on communication technology to collaborate.

Benefits of Having Virtual Teams

• lower overhead
• lower IT costs (Everyone provides their own equipment but must meet requirements regarding virus and other protection; There is no need to constantly refresh technology)
• meet clients on their terms (re in their homes, at convenient times, etc)
• More work-life balance because workers work at home. There is no commute, stiff and costly work clothes, etc
• More environmentally friendly (less gas used yearly, less gas on the road, etc)

How to Build a Successful / High-Functioning Virtual Team

• Write accurate job descriptions, hold strategically planned job interviews and select people who have the right characteristics for virtual team work. 
• Strive to provide a good internal customer experience. Previously, we discussed customer experience when referring to external customers. However, consider employees as your 'internal customers' for whom you create a positive internal customer experience. 
• Respect time zone 
• Consider learning styles of virtual team members. 
• Integrate all functional departments to allow virtual team work to occur smoothly, in the cloud CRM programs (like HubSpot) are very useful in this regard.
• Conduct team and one-on-one 'huddle' meetings at intervals. 
• For instance, 'daily huddles', ie quick meetings no more than 5-15 minutes can have a fixed set of objectives like 
• deliverables yesterday
• plans for today and 
• current needs / barriers
• Onboard new and existing employees to ensure all virtual (and other workers) have clear goals. Some must-have elements of the onboarding process include the following.
• Company's unique value proposition and the way in which the specific role contributes to it.
• Clarity and transparency via Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and performance expectations.
• Train virtual team members in the art of 'over communication' as it is critical for the success of virtual teams, especially regarding more complex issues and members. 
• For instance, explaining that your company has an onboarding process rather than assume new employees know what to you is 'the obvious' is necessary, especially since many online workers are notoriously averse to much personal contact. If not advised beforehand, these employees might resent the additional interaction required for the onboarding process or other type of work.
• For instance, adequate scheduling tools that send multiple reminders. Some even send to mobile phones as in the case of Calendry. This helps to cover all bases since other reminders may all arrive on someone's computer-based email.
• Giving examples that highlight their need, stress soft skills like consideration for different time zones, the need for clear and timely communication, etc.

• Have adequate infrastructure with the following capabilities.
• Round-the-clock real time operational information as per the following examples.
• Current project stages, deadlines and outstanding tasks, progress reports of deals, owners of tasks and so on. In the cloud CRM tools that allow deal tracking sales pipelines like HubSpot are ideal for achieving this. Managers could rest assured that they still have as much, if not more chance to monitor and control work (than in traditional teams).
• Each member's current availability status and (if unavailable) times when expected to be available. There should be an agreement regarding the time zone to be used.
• Automatic time zone converter that accounts for day light saving changes
• Training materials
• Communication for an experience that is as virtually in person as possible and desired. Options include the following. The ability to do video conferencing is very commendable as a means of improving the virtual team experience. 
• Google Hangout, Zoom, Skype, Whatsapp, ICQ and Slack
• Scheduling (across time zones)
• HubSpot CRM's meeting scheduler
• Calendly meeting scheduler
• Doodle meeting scheduler which is especially useful for numerous attendees (even using the free trial version)
• Google Calendar (ONLY the school version allows this)
• Document sharing and storage
• Google Docs
• Dropbox
• SharePoint. 
• HR systems
• Online training (Youtube videos, webpages), Online HR systems (UpWork), Direct payment (Paypal, UpWork)
• Security. Examples include the following.
• LastPass is a system that gives your (virtual team) workers access to your accounts without risk of them hijacking your account in any way (through vacation, illness, conclusion of a project, dismissal and so on). It works by allowing you to give them access to any account, Paypal, etc but via LastPass. You can then revoke that access after their role has finished, without them ever having the real password to the website (Paypal, etc).

• Valued reward system based on results (vs just movement that is sometimes unproductive).
• Request feedback on the experience of virtual team members. Use this exercise as a means to learn how you can ensure each virtual team member is as happy and productive as possible.

CONTENT RELATED TO MANAGING A SUCCESSFUL VIRTUAL TEAM

• The best starting point for formulating a plan to motivate virtual team members to be successful is strategic recruitment and selection. Even planning the job interview for virtual team members is critical.
• How to Assign Ownership of Contacts and Deals to HubSpot CRM users / virtual team members
• Social media manager

How to Change Page Setup to Portrait in Google Slides

Google Slides provide presentation slides oriented to landscape. The steps below explain how to change the page setup / orientation to portrait.

• Click on Help (on the top menu after 'File', 'Edit', 'View', etc)
• Type "page setup" (in the search window)
• Click on the 'page setup' result
• Click 'Custom' (to change from the default of something like 'Widescreen 16:9')
• Enter your dimensions like the following.
• A4 dimensions: 210 × 297 millimeters or 8.27 × 11.69 inches

• Letter dimensions: 8.5 by 11 inches (21.59 by 27.94 cm) - a common format in the US

• Click 'OK'

CONTENT RELATED TO ORIENT GOOGLE SLIDES TO PORTRAIT 

• Virtual team work often involves document sharing. Google slides can be shared with different user permissions. They can even be re-purposed for attractive business document templates.