What is a CRM?

A CRM system – Customer Relationship Management – is a database that allows you to store information on your clients, prospects and other people related to your business.  The larger, fancier CRMs are more flexible and customisable, whereas the simpler, lower-priced ones are stock standard and hence have limitations.  Price follows functionality in this case.

What can it do for you?

I recall a client a couple of years ago who had a very profitable business, but was extremely inefficient in their processes and systems – so they hired me to sort things out.  What surprised me was that they had built a massively large database and huge client list using just Outlook, Word, Post-it notes and lists.  It’s no wonder they were in disarray!

Since they were adept at attracting business, imagine how much better off they were once they could view all their clients and sales details, and then follow-up with them all using automated marketing processes within the CRM.

Ultimately you want a system that is going to make life easy for you.  So it should:

• save you time
• improve your productivity
• streamline your processes
• help you to make money

You might think that using those paper files, post-it notes, Outlook lists and Excel spreadsheets is safe – but it could be costing you dearly in time, not to mention efficiency.

Having all your client and contact information in the one central location is not just  ‘mandatory’ for big business; it’s essential for small business too.  As a solo business owner your time is precious – and you need to be able to access important information quickly.

Do your homework, set up a system, and reap the rewards.  Your time and business success is worth it.

As a Small Business Owner, it’s easy to find yourself working long hours, doing everything you can, winding up with a few hours at the end of the day to eat and fall in a heap… only to get up the next day and do it again!  It doesn’t have to be that way.

If you view every work hour that passes as being an hour that could have brought you money, are you using that time in the best possible way?  And are you using leverage and strategies to bring you the most amount of income?

Here are some things you can do to ensure you structure your day for maximum effectiveness:

• Have set times each day for breaks and meals
• Ensure you take regular breaks to clear your head and stretch your body!

• Use an organised system for storing files and managing daily files and papers

• Start your day by reviewing a list of things you need to accomplish for the day, and prioritise them.

• Identify all the items in your list that you know DE-MOTIVATE you, ones that you DISLIKE doing!

• See what items you can outsource to others, so you can keep your motivation and energy levels high.

Secret Steps to Diary Management

I’ve got two secret steps to many successful people’s diary and time management:

1. Identify all the tasks or actions in your daily list that will actually make you money – and put those at the top of the list. These are the no. 1 priority items each and every day!
2. Write your daily task list at the END of the workday for the following day, and leave it on your desk. It will enable you to walk in and start working on item no. 1 without delay.

When you start looking at your daily list in terms of what will make you money and ‘everything else’ – you’ll find your focus will be clearer and you’ll have far more energy for the rest of the day.

Remember to outsource or delegate those things that slow you down or de-motivate you. You’ll feel a load off your shoulders.  Using systems such as automated marketing will help hugely, as will using outsourced providers to do those other menial things that you can’t stand.

By following these simple and effective strategies, you’ll be utilising your time more wisely – and you’ll plug the gaps on any money leaks from wasteful activities. Not only that, when you focus on income-earning activities more, you’ll find yourself with a more profitable bottom line.

For any given product, there is a primary target market and possibly secondary markets. If you are trying to capture two different markets with the same campaign, you are splitting the focus and this normally doesn’t work too well. It’s exactly the same with selling propositions – hence the name ‘Unique’ Selling Proposition.

The answer is fairly simple: just craft a campaign and choose the media for each audience. This is made easy with the target market segmentation provided inside Infusionsoft, which uses automated marketing functionality.

First, You Must Get to Know Them

Get to know your top 20% of customers intimately:  find out their reading or viewing habits, their shopping habits, and their interests and tastes. Write all this down in a file called “ideal customer profile”.  Then when you have a new campaign to be written, you can send this to your copywriter to craft a message just for them.

Why do I suggest the top 20%? Because that’s who spends the most with you (80%, if the Pareto Principle is correct). They are usually the most loyal, and will often cost you less in administration.

Many companies have an offering for each market segment and this makes a lot of sense. But be careful if you cater to both business and consumer markets, because each needs different styles of marketing. For instance, you cannot get away with a long-winded online sales letter for a B2B software product, because your main buyers will dismiss it as fluff. But offering a free white paper outlining the pros and cons of certain systems would be infinitely better.

Ensure you have a marketing follow up system in place to build on this great first introduction to your product, and an automated marketing system works even better.

Then, You Must Court Them

Marketing is a lot like dating. Just as the beer swiller at the bar with a one liner gets rejected, so does the email marketer with a full-on sales message or over-familiar tone, intent on the sale.

If you’re setting up an email campaign, spend the first email welcoming them and reassuring new patrons that you respect their privacy. The second email should contain some great fresh ideas or knowledge that will help their decision making (business) or overriding problems (consumer). The third email will build on this; perhaps introduce a case study of how your solution helped someone, or keep up the interesting articles… with links to your website if they want to find out more.

In this strategy we’re not selling in the emails because if they’re interested, the linked website pages should be primed for persuading both cold and warm prospects to your solution.

Sometimes this will not be the way forward because your business has limited time offers (such as a travel agency or accommodation provider). In this case, you can ‘sandwich’ these offers in between some words that ignite the imagination. Even well crafted captions will do the trick; it’s certainly preferable to an image-laden email that does not even get seen by most email viewers.

I hope this article has you brimming with new ideas to implement. If you need any help with copywriting, web design, or email marketing, please send us an email and we’ll pass you to a trusted professional that’s right for the job.

SME owners without adequate systems often struggle to keep up with different enquiries from different sources, trying to remember who gets what and when. Prospects are at different stages of the sales cycle, and it usually falls on the SME owner to keep track of each prospect and send them the right information, to keep building trust one step at a time. Utilising a great sales & marketing process (or automated marketing), can mean the difference between having a successful business, or a busy job.

If this sounds familiar, it might be time to seek some assistance. As Greg Chapman says on Business Builders:

“By systematising your business, you make your business more efficient, reduce your costs, and ultimately, make your business run without you.”

If you are too busy, you dread opening your email, or your work style is haphazard at best… an integrated system like Infusionsoft that combines Automated Email Marketing, a powerful CRM that keeps all sales activities on track, and a helpful person to set it all up… could sound like business nirvana to you. After all, if you can make part of your business run without you, you get that most precious commodity of all back: TIME.

Some micro business owners feel caught in the middle – they do not have the time or resources to use the full functionality of the large CRMs built for medium to large enterprises – but they could do with a contact management system to keep it all together in one place, as well as build targeted marketing campaigns.

With a well-executed CRM system that has in built automated marketing, you can better service customers, increase customer loyalty and repeat business, streamline tasks, and of course ensure long-term profitability. The more information you gather in your system, the better you will become at seeing where the opportunities lie.

Unfortunately, while all business owners know they are vital, these strategies are rarely implemented consistently and easily, so let’s look at some of the sticking points.

Problem Overcome – Under-Marketing

Often we overlook marketing our other services/products to people that we have already sold to. This upsell or cross-sell can be an easy way to add to your profits for little extra costs. But how?  One way is to market to a segmented list with a special offer for that particular type of client.

Many business people have been doing it the manual way so long, that they are surprised when I show them a system that does it all so easily … often automatically. This frees up their time as well as aids their brand recall.

Problem Overcome – Crossing Over Tasks, Chaotic Working Style

In working with businesses, I have seen some partner businesses misallocating tasks, sometimes forgetting tasks, crossing over tasks, and having poor systems and tools. Once such couple I recently coached at length had all these problems.

When it comes to this couple, their working style was very different, one had more on their plate, and the unbalanced task allocation was having a big impact on their relationship all-round. A fresh look at it opened up some great answers, like using a journal for noting ideas instead of interrupting, respecting the spouse’s time, having a schedule, discussing business at a weekly planning meeting and prioritizing tasks.

In your team, who are doing similar tasks?  Which tasks could be streamlined?  If it’s a manual task or process then we see how it can be automated using technology or a simple system sequence.  Oft-times using a software tool can streamline a task into a few simple steps…  saving many hours of painstaking work.

You may even be paying for a bells & whistles CRM program, but haven’t seen the benefits yet as so-and-so was supposed to be doing it (i.e. a dusty database). Take charge and look at new ways to perform those regular repetitive tasks like quotes, proposals, invoicing, follow-up emails, newsletters, etc via automated marketing and some straight-up smart tasking. I’d love to hear all your questions about how to streamline your tasks.

We all can attest to how busy life has become… but how do we make sure that ‘busyness’ is productive to our business? A busy business owner is not necessarily a profitable and productive one.

A fresh perspective
If you start to contemplate a fresh lifestyle change, for example, taking the family around Australia for six months, it will suddenly become clearer which things and activities you (and the family) can live without. It’s easy to think of leisure habits to reduce, since we all watch too much TV/play too many games, but what about business activities?

As a consulting Mum with a gazillion things to do, good systems save me from many hours of work. There are ‘no brainer’ tasks like:

• Letting a good email marketing system process email opt-ins, bounces and unsubscribes; allowing you to set optimum times to send, and sending it to the right list category
• Reminder systems for business appointments, and
• Automated reminders to send account overdue notices to clients (this one is more to backup the ole brain)

Ages ago I realised that I cannot do it all myself, namely: BAS/accounts, sales, backend admin, replying to enquiries, IT issues, writing blogs, PR, branding/design, create marketing campaigns, etc. I’ve seen too many micro businesses suffer under the weight of all those tasks to believe its possible.

Outsourcing to professionals may hurt in the hip pocket, but if we take on too much, life will find a way to penalise us anyhow:

• Late bill payment fees
• Missing out on sales due to slow response
• Spouse mad that you never seem present and not distracted
• A slow decline of movement and muscle tone, leading to aches and pains.

Deliberate or Delegate?
Just recently I had a vital lesson in delegation, when a website coding problem wreaked havoc on a client website. As midnight drew near, I was stressing that the website would never look the same again due to my lack of ‘tech’ knowledge.

My partner had told me about a local WordPress expert who helped him out ‘beyond the call’ earlier that week. Finally I came to my senses the next day and emailed Mr WordPress. He quickly responded, and sent a picture asking, “is this what it should look like”? It was. Did I mind paying for one hour? No I did not.

Just about an hour later it was all fixed, including the footer. And it cost just $44 to solve a problem that I bothered over for three hours.

Henry Ford had a method. He said something like, “Don’t BE the expert, it takes too long. It’s far easier and faster to surround yourself with experts.” Amen to that Henry.