This post explains why service firms need a CRM for their Inbound Marketing efforts. A CRM is the base platform for automating the process of generating leads and nurturing leads and tracking client information. A good CRM not only tracks prospect and client information but scores the leads and helps the process of moving the leads to close.
This post explains some of the reason you needs a CRM for your service business.
One additional reason that your service business needs a CRM is simple. You spend a lot of money generating leads and some of those leads are ready to buy today, others may not be ready until later. A CRM allows you to track clients and prospect data but also allows you to automate the process of marketing to the leads that have not converted. Every service business, including your financial practice needs a CRM.
The Role of CRM in Inbound Marketing for Professional Services Firms
Within companies that don’t have a CRM system, prospect and customer information can be found on business cards, notepads, Post-its, emails, documents and spreadsheets. And worst of all, important data is often only stored in peoples’ brains.
CRM consolidates all this disparate information and makes it globally accessible within an organization (of course, data records can be secured so that people only have access to what they should see). Here’s a graphic from a recent presentation that we did.
Without a CRM system, pipeline data can be a weekly information extraction and compilation exercise. Salespeople need to be repeatedly reminded to email a spreadsheet of potential deals and then an administrator manually consolidates the information for management.
With a CRM system, a company has a centralized, Web-based system where salespeople can maintain their pipeline of sales opportunities. Management can pull reports on-demand or reports can be automatically emailed. Will some salespeople still have to be reminded to update their deals? Of course.
If a company does not have a structured, shared system for fielding customer service issues and collaborating on issue resolution, client problems can languish. In some cases, an issue can be completely lost sight of.
A CRM system can provide customers with multiple options for issue submission. Requests from all channels are funneled into a single shared repository of Tickets or Cases. From there, issues can be resolved collaboratively. Automatic Ticket assignment based on issue type and automatic escalations based on defined parameters are both possible within CRM.
4. Marketing operates on its own island
Marketing does its job of generating leads, but new leads are not distributed in a timely fashion. The marketing department receives no metrics as to which marketing efforts have been the most effective, which means that marketers “fly blind” on an ongoing basis.
With a CRM system, marketing functions are integrated into the sales department’s operations. New leads can be fed into a CRM system and automatically assigned to the right salesperson. Since the progress of leads can be followed through the entire sales process, the marketing department can understand which campaigns are the most effective ones and better focus its future efforts.
Within many organizations, internal communication and collaboration are accomplished by copying a lot of people on a lot of emails. Staff becomes overwhelmed with email and people often overlook critical information since they don’t have time to process the huge flow of information.
Certain CRM systems now incorporate collaboration features that can be a substitute for an over-reliance on email. A CRM system can be a repository of quotation templates, customer email templates and presentation templates. There can be internal conversation threads that are similar to threads that can be found on social media sites, which is becoming a more natural way for a group of people to communicate electronically.
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