5 ways a CRM can boost your biz and build your audience

There are lots of ways a CRM can work for you and help you build and engage with your audience and the routes you choose will depend on the knowledge you already have and the CRM strategy you adopt, but these are my 5 top tips:

• Avoid making costly CRM mistakes
• Understand your CRM goals
• Choose the right system
• Simplify processes and sort the customer journey
• Connection & Engagement – use the system to reach your goals/audience

Avoid Costly Mistakes

Why do costly CRM mistakes happen?

The biggest reasons are:

• not having a clear strategy and understanding where the software/systems fits into it
• when there hasn’t been enough research done.
• thinking you can do the whole job yourself without any help. If you don’t have the knowledge there is no shame in bringing in the experts to help you.

Understand Your CRM Goals

Think about your audience. Customer Relationship Management and the system that delivers it is likely to be the very first point of contact your audience or visitor has with you. So it’s vital to get it right and make your audiences happy.

Here it’s important to not only understand your, or your teams’ goals but decide and agree what the goals are for the whole business.  That means involving everyone and giving everyone a voice.

Choose the right system

Choosing the right CRM and Ticketing software is going to make sure you hit your business goals, pull in the money from all the potential revenue streams you’ve identified and this really is a biggie help you build a 360° view of each audience member/visitor and their needs.

Making it an organisational decision, led from the top, rather than a marketing one will lead to a successful business strategy.

Choosing the best CRM and ticketing software is a step by step process:

• Information Gathering
• System Specification
• Priced Tenders
• Supplier Evaluation
• Implement & Embed

Simplify Processes

At the end of the day I’m sure making your life easier and your audiences’ life easier is very appealing.

We’ve all been in that place of getting lost in convoluted processes, wading through data or just ways of doing things that don’t make any sense and don’t help you.  Now you’re going to have to do some work but spending some time thinking about and mapping out how you do things, why you do them that way and what changes could be made will be time well spent.  Also if you work with other then don’t just do that for yourself, look at how what they do overlaps and how you can make changes for the better for all of you.  Your CRM/Ticketing system will play a big part in helping you solve some of this.

Sort the Customer Journey

Remember the days when you used a roadmap to navigate your way from home to a new place you’d decided to go?  Well that’s the way to plot your audience journey.  Develop a roadmap and plot the milestones on that journey.

• What will the roadmap include?
• What will be the main entry point for your audience?
• What will be their next logical step and the one after that?
• Do you have enough information to move them on?
• And what’s the end point and where do you want them to be to get to the deepest engagement with you?

And if you’ve done that then you can use your CRM system to hold the data so you can track your goals and milestones which will help you to make data driven decisions.

Connection & Engagement

Think about how you can use your CRM system to help you achieve your goals and build your audience, otherwise it’s just a piece of software that collects and organises data.

You can do this in many ways and what’s important is to make sure that what you do is tailored to each of your audiences.  Be personal.

Think about how can you break your audience down into segments or groups so that you can create a picture?  Will it be based on their behaviour – so what they’ve done with you in the past – or geography or whether they are male female or a family?  Can you find out what drives and motivates them so that you can connect and influence them?

Helen Dunnett, Director, Helen Dunnett Consulting