If you’re like most entrepreneurs I know, you’d like to be more efficient. You know that if you’re able to free up more of your time you’ll be able to grow your business, find ways to reduce cost and increase your sales. Heck you might even get to see your family now and again!
Today I’d like to talk to you about email. Now before you roll your eyes at me, I’m not talking about your run-of-the-mill Outlook or Gmail, I’m talking about intelligent email, otherwise known as a CRM. And before you think you need to drop a ton of money on fancy software, most of the apps out there have free, or close to free versions, so you can dip your toe in the water and see if the ROI is there for your business. Hold that thought, because I’ll come back to it later with an eye-opening concept.
According to Forrester Research, 87% of businesses who adopted a CRM tool improved their sales, 74% increased customer satisfaction, and 73% improved business process efficiency. It’s this last piece I’d like to focus on today and share some specific ideas on things you can try for your business.
A CRM tool will typically support automation in three areas, marketing, sales and customer service. The goal is to organize your business and make complex tasks easier to accomplish. Anything that is repeated in your business is a candidate for automation. And I do mean anything.
When it comes to bringing in new customers, marketing is at the top of your funnel. It’s purpose is to generate awareness, a positive reputation and leads. In case you’re not familiar with the concept of a sales funnel, think of it as a way to progressively qualify your interested prospects until they become customers. At the top of the funnel you’ll find all of the tire kickers trying to learn more about you. They become more serious as they progress their information gathering toward a purchase. So the more you can automate the top and middle of your sales funnel, the more time you can spend closing prospects who are more likely to buy from you.
When it comes to marketing, there are a ton of tasks you can automate using a CRM tool. First, you need to make it worth someone’s while to share their email address with you, because we all know how much spam we typically receive. A typical prospect will only share their email if they are really interested in your content, if you give them a freebie like a guide, access to something cool or a nifty quiz answer in return. Just asking nicely probably isn’t going to cut it. Once you have their email, they’ll be naturally suspicious for a while. Now is not the time to hit them with a hard sell, but rather to load them up with value. You can automate a series of emails that share really helpful knowledge and then slowly gather more information about them based on what they open and click on. The more you learn, the more you can develop this relationship and better target the value of the information you’re delivering. Remember you’re not selling at this point in your relationship. It’s too early.
Entrepreneurs are sometimes concerned about giving away too much free information and wonder if a prospect will still sign up to become a customer if they do. Over the years I have found the opposite is true. The more valuable information I give away, the more likely someone is to become a paying customer. The information isn’t the hard part, it’s the implementation. The more you can show a prospect that you know your stuff, the more comfortable they’ll feel trusting you with their money to implement. So at the top of your funnel, it’s all about giving.
Here are some ideas for emails you can automate at the top of your funnel:
- Follow up with a networking introduction if they don’t respond the first time you try.
- Regularly educate prospects about some aspect of your business. We call this an educational drip campaign.
- Segment your prospects and customers into groups of specific interests so you can personalize your content for them. This is an even better educational drip campaign because it will be more relevant.
- Deliver a free ebook in exchange for someone entering their email on your website.
- Collect contact information at an in person event such as a speaking event or trade show.
Once your prospect sees enough value in your content to discuss their business with you, or they have requested a follow up, then you have officially entered the sales process. But you know you can’t take that to the bank just yet, you now need to progressively qualify them toward the sale. You might start with an initial conversation, understand their needs, present your recommendations, further discuss their needs, create a formal proposal, negotiate, and then ultimately close the deal.
Here is a list of some of the things a CRM can help you with during your sales process:
- Send out an automated calendar invitation to schedule an initial call.
- Keep chasing the prospect if they ghosted you on that initial call.
- Automatically follow up if a prospect remains in one of your sales stages for too long. For example, regularly follow up with a prospect after you send a proposal and they haven’t responded. Sometimes people just get busy. I’ve had prospects come back and become clients after many months of just keeping in touch, because it showed them that I really do care about their business.
- Score your leads according to their activity so you can better prioritize your sales time.
Finally, after all of that chasing, your prospect decides to become a client. After you pop the champagne cork, don’t stop your automation efforts there. Now you can use a CRM tool to deliver a consistently great customer service experience. Here are a few ideas:
- Partially automate your client onboarding process, delivering a welcome message,
documents, requesting information and checking in for feedback.
- Ask customers for a review after you complete your work for them.
- Regularly educate customers about some aspect of your business. I can’t tell you how many frustrated entrepreneurs I speak with whose customer purchased something they do from a competitor because the customer didn’t realize the business could help them. Make sure your customers know all of the things they can buy from you.
- Customer or patient reactivation if too much time has passed since their last visit. You can automate periodic check-ins to make sure your customers remain actively engaged.
Remember that like any technology, a CRM is only as helpful to your business as you make it. If all you use it for is to send newsletters, then you may as well have a Ferrari sitting in the garage that you never drive. The good news is that a CRM will cost you a heck of a lot less than a Ferrari, so you don’t need to automate a heck of a lot for it to have a positive ROI. You do, however, need to make sure that you’re starting with a large enough list of contacts who have agreed in writing to receive your emails, either through organic connections or a paid lead generation campaign. No spamming allowed!
You may be asking yourself if adding this type of software is really necessary for your business. So let me challenge you with a concept. The value of your time increases as your business does. And as an entrepreneur, your value isn’t just your own time, but how investing your time can multiply by making the rest of your team more effective.
There was an eye-opening article in Inc. Magazine a few years ago about valuing your time. They said, and I quote, “Assuming a 40-hour workweek, and accounting for various deductions, you must value your (hourly) time in the thousands of dollars to become a millionaire in your lifetime.” So, for argument's sake, let’s say your time should be valued at $2,000 per hour. Now do you look differently at the list of things you can automate? I know I sure do.