Have you ever wondered whether your CRM is setup "correctly"?
Does your sales team cringe when you ask them to enter data into your CRM?
Do sometimes wish there was a "standard" way to setup a CRM?
In this article, we'll be sharing our CRM secrets that help businesses flourish, in particular - 7 fields that will help transform your CRM.
Here's some common answers we hear when we ask business owners why they have a CRM:
Our second question runs along the lines of "how is your CRM going?" - here's some typical responses:
Fortunately, there's businesses who turn a corner with their CRM. Here's what they say about their systems:
All that being said - here's a shortlist of reasons for setting up a CRM in your business:
This list is by no means definitive, but you should have been able to pick out a few items that are relevant for your business.
The following is a list of our top 10 CRM fields that all our clients include in their setup. We've described the fields in the following way:
CRM Type: Name of field
CRM Type - describes the type of thing in the CRM that the field is setup for. As an example, Contact: Type of Contact means that the field is added to a Contact.
Name of Field - describes the name that we give to the field.
This field identifies the relationship between the contact and the business. As an example, you'll probably want to store your employee's details in your CRM. These can easily be segmented by giving them a value of Employee.
Equally important, is that you'll probably want to identify your referral partners in the system. Once again, these can be easily identified by giving them a "Referral Partner" value.
Hint: Setup this field so that a contact can have a multiple of these fields, e.g. they might be a client, supplier AND a referral partner.
Typical values for this field include:
Every CRM system needs the ability to be segmented. As an example, if you have a big project that you've just won and you need extra resources - you would be able to pull out a list of your contractors to request that they come on board for the project.
Alternatively, you might also have an ongoing Business Development campaign where you rotate through your referral partners and pay them a visit once a quarter. With the Type of Contact field you can easily pull up a list of all your referral partners.
This is a handy field that we've recently added to our CRM. It's a checkbox field that we tick when we hear that a person has recently left an organisation. Connected to this field is an automated process that sends a reminder to reach out to this person in 2 months time.
When we've reached out the person, we ask a few questions about how their new job is going and what their new role is - it's a fact finding exercise.
This field is a trigger to help keep your CRM clean - i.e. after a follow up conversation with the contact you can update details such as what company they work for and what their new role is.
You will also be able to discover whether there are any opportunities to do business with the new company that they're working for.
This is a handy field where we get to store details about any products or services that a contact is interested in. Typically we'll store this information when we're communicating with the contact. We also have lead generation forms that automatically assign contacts with these values when they fill out a form.
Once you have this information stored in your CRM you can:
This field stores any products or services that a client has purchased. It's similar to the Product / Services Interested In field - but we set the value after we've kicked off a project with a client. As example, if the client has purchased a logo from us, then we tick the Branding Services value in this field.
Hint: Setup this field so that a contact can have a multiple of these fields, e.g. they might be a Branding Services client AND a Web Services client AND a CRM Services client.
Note: Some CRM systems allow you to link additional information such as a specific product / service that a client purchased. These can be used for an extra layer of detail.
Similar to the Product / Services Interested In field, this field is important for you to segment your CRM data. This means that different clients can be communicated with in a way that makes sense to them.
As an example, we sell Branding, Website, Inbound Marketing and CRM services. A client who purchased our CRM services doesn't necessarily want to be receiving emails about our latest blog post on logo design.
Segmentation is also great for re marketing. As a general rule, we recommend that businesses refresh their website every 3-4 years. This means that we can setup an automated follow up task to have a conversation with a business 2 years after their website went live to start planning for the next round of their website.
This field allows you to assign a sales persona / avatar to a contact.
After your business has been running for a couple of years, you should have a relatively clear picture of who your best clients are. Marketers will generally assign a Persona to those clients so they can find more of them, feed them to your sales team who convert them and send them to your delivery team.
As an example, you might have a persona named Margaret Marketer. She came in via your ABC Google Adwords campaign and filled out a form to download a free eBook. She then opened every single on of your nurture emails and spent a lot of time reading your blog posts. She took 9 months to convert to a client, but once she did she became one of your best referrers. After answering a phone questionnaire you discovered that she preferred to spend a couple of months educating herself on the blog content and eBooks before deciding to book in a meeting with your sales team. She reveals that calls from the sales team to book in a meeting early in her sales journey would have turned her off your business and pushed her to reach out to one of your competitors.
Having a field in your database that identifies a contact by a persona means they can be communicated with in a specific way by your sales and marketing teams. As an example, if a contact with a persona of Margaret Marketer was continually called by your sales team, it would be likely that you would lose that sales opportunity.
Instead, having a field that identifies that sales prospect with a persona, means that the sales team can schedule a single call to check whether they have any questions, then leave them alone for a few weeks.
The outcome is that your sales team is now empowered with information that is likely to result in increased conversions.
This field stores the details of where a sales opportunity came from. As an example, when communicating with the sales prospect, you might find out that they were speaking to one of your clients who told them to checkout your website. This means that the Lead Source field can be assigned a value of Existing Client.
Typical values for this field include:
Note: A good CRM system will store details such as the specific advertising campaign of where a contact came from. This information can be extracted from "utm" codes in your campaign.
Management typically want to have this single question answered - "where do our best clients come from and how can we get more of them?"
A CRM field that stores the details of where a deal came from can be the saving grace that answers that question. Imagine turning up to your next management meeting and sharing with your team that you know where to get another 50 replicas of your best client!
This is a text field (or field linked to a Contact) where you get to assign a value for the person who referred this opportunity to your business. As an example, imagine that Betty Smith had an amazing experience with your business. As a result, whenever one of her clients asks about a service that you offer, she shares an amazing testimonial and automatically sends that client to your website.
Over time, your sales team is diligently assigning the Referred By field, noting every opportunity that's been referred to by Betty.
Once a quarter, your sales manager runs a report to answer a simple question - who are our best referrers? They find out that Betty has referred 15% of your sales for the quarter. Not only that, but the sales team loves the referrals that she sends through, as do the delivery and accounts team.
The CEO of the business rewards Betty with a gift of taking her husband away for a weekend - all expenses paid.
More importantly, the CRM is setup with a new Betty Referrer persona and the sales team actively seeks out more Betty's to partner with.
This is a critical field that helps you grow your business faster - especially if you're a "word of mouth" type of business. It helps management team discover who your best referrers are, nurture them and find more of them.