If your aim is to be a successful agency, and grow your business, then you’ll be looking to have a reasonable number of clients on your books. You’ll also be working on increasing that number through sales and marketing activity of your own. Managing the interaction between your team, clients and prospects can be a challenge if you don’t have the right tools. That’s where CRM comes in.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is an integral part of the way in which any business communicates with the outside world. It’s all too easy to just take a call, have a conversation, end it and move on to the next thing.
Agencies are hives of activity, with a never-ending task list. Clients are managed by multiple people, all contributing to the successful campaigns you create. It’s easy to see how what was said and agreed can get lost whilst in the throes of ‘being productive’.
There are many solutions on the market that can help with keeping track of conversations: online to do apps, project management systems, spreadsheets and so on. But, whilst many do the single thing they are designed to do well, there often isn’t the full picture view that larger teams really need.
Add to this that many teams work remotely, or are certainly not always in the same place, and you can see why agencies need some method of collating and sharing information for all to see.
CRMs follow the client from the beginning of the journey with your agency to the very end (which is hopefully a long time away). Let’s look at three key times in the relationship with your client when a CRM will help you communicate more effectively and deliver a better service to them.
Sales
The sales team (which may be a single person or many) needs to be recording who they are talking to. Which leads have come into the business and how qualified are they? Where did they come from? Which services are they interested in?
At a very basic level, the person in the sales role should be creating contact records for every prospect and indicating the source of the opportunity. As that opportunity is qualified in or out, the conversations and further research needs to be detailed.
The value of the opportunity is crucial to understanding the value of the marketing activity that took place prior – which strategies generated the highest value of potential new business? As they close, which opportunity sources should the marketing team scale up?
A salesperson’s pipeline is the embryonic future potential of the agency and seeing in one place how developed each opportunity is provides helpful business intelligence and allows the company to plan for future resources required to fulfil the work.
Operations
Once a deal is won, delivery of the services should merely be a continuation of the relationship already developed. Having a CRM within the agency means a smooth transition from sales to the creative teams involved.
Sure, the creative people within the agency are primarily concerned with working on the project, but good communications are essential to the success of the project itself.
When clients agree certain designs or content, details of the conversation, who agreed what and any feedback given can all be recorded in CRM against the contact.
Where project specific information is required, an end to end solution such as Vogsy , helps the business have a 360 degree view of the client.
Aftercare
Assuming all has gone according to plan, your client will continue to engage with you and you’ll be working on future plans. Of course, each potential additional project is a new opportunity which should be recorded as before. You’ll be able to see the true client lifetime value. And, because you can already see what effort was required to close the deal before, and you know who’s who in the business, you should be in a favourable position for next-sell, upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
No scrambling for notes from someone’s book.
If you offer a support package for your client, CRM will be able to track any incident via a support ticket offering a traceable route for them and for their account manager who instantly has an overview of any issues they are facing and avoids the embarrassing conversation when they arrive for an appointment.
All of this may not be a new thing for your agency – fantastic! You’re well on your way to understanding who your clients are, your history with them, and can start to build a picture of their true value to your business.
Not quite there yet? It’s time to learn more about CRM and how this technology can help your agency grow.
Visit our page for Copper CRM.