How a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) Can Help You Build Your Customer Base

 Posted by JuJuan Buford @JSBUFORD

You have a proven product or service, your fine tuning your elevator pitch, and a result of your prospecting strategies you’ve reached a point whereas the stress of balancing making dials, staying relevant via social media, and meeting the right prospects (I’ll elaborate) is starting to feel overwhelming. At the end of the day, there are so many hours available to spend between making 20, 50, or 100 dials, giving presentations and servicing your customers, and managing all the other stuff that is required to keep revenues coming in. 

What you really want is to meet more idea prospects, make them happy clients, acquire more leads, upgrade your capacity (hire better people) to offer more or upgraded services, increasing your value proposition, allowing you to increase your prices, ultimately allowing you to enjoy increased cash flow. We all want more systemic cash flow. 

How can a good customer relationship manager (CRM) help you achieve all of the aforementioned?

A CRM CAN HELP YOU BETTER MINE YOUR BUSINESS

 One of the greatest benefits of a CRM is it helps you identify who and where your focus should go. At some point, we have to begin to identify who our idea customer is, and thus our idea prospect. What do I mean by this? 

A Prospects = Prospects that are already very much motivated to buy what you're offering; have enough disposable income to easily afford the 5 Star treatment; and appreciate your professional approach.

B Prospects = Prospects that require some education regarding how conducting business with you can improve their lives; have disposable income; and arrive on time for the appointment.

C Prospects = Prospects that need or require your assistance, but choose to wait until the engine light, brake pads, and the I'm overheating and in imminent danger of breaking down light alerts them before they make a decision. Working with them might cost you more than you're going to earn (it's a non-profit endeavor, almost every time), and arriving on time would be a good start.

In an idea world, you want to spend the majority of your efforts and resources contacting and engaging your idea prospects or what many refer to as your buyer persona. If you’re still waking up in the morning and calling from a legal pad, prospecting worksheets, or an email list, after you get beyond 100 contacts it is imperative that you switch to a more systematic approach. Making this transition will also better help you track where people are in the sales process: how many times has this person been exposed to what I’m offering; how many times have I asked for their business; when did they ask me to follow up; and when did we set the appointment to on-board them as a customer. 

A CRM HELPS YOU TRANSITION FROM A TRANSACTION TO A RELATIONSHIP BASED BUSINESS

 Let’s use an example of two salon owners. Salon Owner #1 sends text messages and periodic emails highlighting special deals, appointment reminders, and general advertisements to their list of customers. Here’s the thing. If most business owners just took the time to do this alone, it would result in a dramatic increase in sales activity. Ultimately, you want to be top of mind as much as possible, so when someone is ready to make a buying decision, they think about you first. 

Salon Owner #2 does all the aforementioned, and actually takes the time to leave a personalized voicemail or message wishing their clients happy birthday. And yes, Facebook does track birthdays, but everyone is not actively engaged on FB. They also, track the wedding anniversaries of their clients, and or the anniversaries of their client’s businesses. How about the spouse? How impactful would it be if you sent a small gift certificate to your client’s favorite restaurant, book store, or hobby store every now and again. 

In other words, the customer isn’t just receiving a phone call only when you need to drum up business, or as a reminder to spend their hard earned currency with you again. They begin to welcome your call, because they know it may be about something other than buying your wares. I still remember the first and last time a business owner sent my daughter a birthday card after I patronized him. It was followed shortly thereafter by a gift card to my favorite bookstore at the time, and thereafter a birthday card for me. Despite the annoying commute, and his prices being higher than some of his competition, almost twenty years later I still patronize his establishment. 

IT HELPS TO REMOVE CALL BIAS FROM THE EQUATION

 You’ve religiously committed to making 50 to 100 dials a day. You’ve spent nights responding to every Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn inbox, share, and comment. You respond to email inquiries and requests religiously. Any yet, you’re setting less appointments, giving less presentations, your closing or conversion ratio is dipping, and your growing mentally fatigued of rescheduling appointments and hearing “please call me later.” 

This is a sure sign that you’re falling victim to an internal bias,....you’re calling the same people. More than likely, you’ve stopped filling your prospecting funnel with new contacts, and you’re falling victim to hearing the sweet sound of familiar voices. Employing a CRM keeps you honest, because it allows you to track the number of times you've reached out to someone, and provides clarity regarding who is an A, B, or C prospect. 

Yes, have a Top 10 hot prospect list. But also remember depending on the service or product you’re marketing, there is a pool of 300 million people in the U.S. market alone, and everyone knows someone. As a general rule, you should ask for the sale 7 times, and attempt to make contact 7 times. After the first attempt to reach them verbally, I may call back the following day. Then I may follow up via voicemail or text 2 business days later; then 3 business days later with an email, then weekly for a couple weeks with a combination thereof; then monthly for a quarter; then the prospect ends up in some type of automated funnel whereas they begin to receive related content. 

To this day, the majority of my clients have come from the 6th or 7th attempt to contact them. Absent a contact manager to keep me honest, I’d either stop at the 4th, or depending on the nature of the relationship continue calling indefinitely. Think about it like this. Calling and expending mental energy attempting to reach the same people is like staying in unfulfilling relationships because they’re familiar. That person is taking up valuable space (time) that you’d be better served spending (investing) with someone else. We have all fallen victim to this behavior at one time or another. Cut it out. 

INFORMATION IS KING

 Let’s return to the example of the two salon owners, except let’s keep their behaviors consistent, but make them barbers instead. Both barbers are engaging their customers, but barbershop owner #2 is doing so with more frequency and in a much more personalized way. There is a qualifying process that barber #2 is engaged in on a much deeper level, and the more information you have about your customers, the more you will be able to identify who your buyer persona or idea customer is. Neither owner is going to turn away paying customers, however some are simply more profitable than others. 

There is a customer that arrives 30 minutes late consistently, wants to engage in endless banter with non patrons waltzing into the shop selling their wares, and then haggles over the price or wants a discount on everything. Regardless of industry you're in we all know how to identify this person when they walk in through the door, or after the initial appointment. 

Then there is the customer that arrives 10 minutes early like clockwork, on the same day of the week, in between time commitments. They're easy to converse with but not overly boisterous or distracting; they leave very generous tips, and depart promptly to make their next time commitment. And has been responsible for at least 5 referrals who exhibit the same behaviors. We all know who this person is as well when we spot them. 

Let’s fill in the blanks. Let’s say that latter customer happens to be a business owner in the non-medical transportation industry, who frequents the same restaurants in the area with their fellow entrepreneurial friends, and is also part of a couple well known civic and professional organizations in the area. Well, if you’re barbershop owner #2, you know these things about your clients and some, because you're using a CRM to better understand your customers. So you take out ads in a local or regional paper that circulates in the areas that this customer frequents. You may jump online and identify the social networking groups that cater to civic and professional organizations this customer is a part of, and occasionally respond to posts in this group. You may ask this customer to visit your social media site and leave a compliment; meaning they're network will become aware of your business.  

WHY? 

Birds of a feather flock together, and you want more of those birds walking in through your doors. And the extent that you can create happy customers, and incentivize them to become brand advocates online and offline can pay huge dividends. Think about it. If the aforementioned approaches outlined in this article, results in an extra 3-5 more patrons per week or even per month, how would that impact your bottom line? Just for the sake of simplicity, the average salon owner may see an increase of $500 per week (5 x $100 average compensation)....but it doesn’t stop there, because as you attract more A prospects your compensation grows per patron as well. Now you are in a more informed position with more resources to cater more of your marketing toward attracting the clients you desire. 

Using a CRM to collect, analyze, and use the information you acquire from your prospects and clients makes all of this happen. The aforementioned concepts and strategies can be implemented, whether you’re a fledgling business owner fresh off your first customer, and is being employed on a much more comprehensive level by corporations across the globe. 

If you want your business to not only last, but grow in profitability and scale you will need to adopt tools and systems that allow you to be strategic about how you invest in your enterprise. Every bit of information you can acquire from your marketing, sales, client services, and online marketing efforts need to be collected and translated into more profitable uses of your time and talent. This in part, is how to graduate from being a self-employed venture (whereas your enterprise operates solely because of you) to building a business (an organism that begins to operate even when you’re sleep). 

Remember…..

There are an endless procession of customer relationship managers available to choose from. Some are nothing more than glamorized address books. Some will allow you to record everything from your clients email address to the color of their toe nail polish. Others are sales and marketing funnels dressed up as CRMs. There are some CRMs that require you to be a technical specialist, and some that are simple enough for a 5th grader to use it. And everything in between. I've employed several over the years and settled on a select few, given my affinity for information and aversion to spending minutes or hours trouble shooting IT issues. 

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JuJuan Buford is a Detroit native, CEO, SmallBiz franchise owner, entrepreneur, business development professional, public speaker, and writer dedicated to helping families, entrepreneurs, and business owners establish thriving enterprises, achieve financial independence, and build lives of satisfaction.

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