How can you streamline your relationship building tasks with technology?

It’s not good enough to just to have a CRM. It has to be designed to track the many changes that occur within a relationship. People change jobs, get promoted, get married, have kids, move onto other companies, come back to the old ones, the list goes on and on. Not only is it critical to have a CRM system, but is very important to set it up from day one to be able to easily pull, measure, and track the information that is most important to your relationships.

Not investing in a true CRM is disastrous. I’m old enough to remember record cards for each customer. The problem, multiple AM’s from across the business working on the same customers (different tech stacks) with no visibility of the data. If you have one don’t be cheap. They say data is the new oil. Once you have it you need the analytical platform to harness it, BI, Qlik, Tableau are all great with a great developer.

CRM is a great way to visualise your customers journey as they pass through the process of buying cycle. It help organisations to track key moments in business , understand the customers buyer personas to build an organisation map and eventually give greta insights on customers behaviours during buying cycle. All of this can help you improve the experience of customers all the way making revenue generation smoother.

Having a CRM system alone is not good enough. The task is also identify potential target accounts/prospects first. It is also key to recored all activity against the prospects. It requires tremendous discipline within the team to ensure that all activity are recorded.

Leveraging social media and networking platforms like LinkedIn can help you easily connect with many more people than you could reach individually. Video conferencing tools like Zoom make it easy to schedule calls with contacts around the world without costly travel. Customer relationship management (CRM) software centralizes your connections, conversations, and touchpoints with people in an organized system. Email marketing services enable you to customize communications to nurture relationships with personalization at scale. And don't underestimate the power of a customized text - a brief, timely message to check in with someone or recognize an achievement can go a long way in strengthening bonds.

More and more customers are getting acquired these days through social media outreach. Its easy to be present where they are rather then bringing them back to your own app. Identify their needs and concerns and proactively reaching them on their favourite social media app can help building ever lasting relations.

Today's executives are measured by the continous success they bring to the table. The market is very dynamic and even your relationships measure by the value you bring to them. It is important to create a personal brand to by sharing valuable content and engage them in conversations.

Face to Face meeting are happening after relationships reaches a certain maturity level. It is important to acknowledge that Video conferencing calls are the way forward to deepen the relationship. Prepare well for these conferences/meeting.

With advent of GenAI , chatbots will see a paradigm shift on how to handle conversations they engage on, so it become more human and personalised. Bots can help you cut warm bodies addressing customer concerns along with customers saving a ton load of time waiting for human assistance. With reinforcement learning these chatbots can continuously work on making their responses and hence the user experience world-class

Email marketing software makes it easy to customize and automate communications, nurturing relationships at scale. Segment your contacts so messages can be tailored based on interests and needs, personalizing content. Set up workflows to trigger relevant follow-ups, like anniversaries or recently released products of interest. Track opens and engagement to see what content resonates, then replicate your top performing emails. With the ability to A/B test subject lines and content, email marketing enables you to continually optimize relationship building. And with analytics providing insights on your audience, you can better understand contacts and respond promptly to strengthen bonds over time.

Add to your CRM a date/time to send a gift. It doesn’t have to be a big gift — maybe some cookies (Grove Cookie) or an unexpected gift card. There’s plenty of gifting platforms that you can connect to line Sendoso.