Smart Client Management

What Is Smart Client Management And How Can It Help My Business, Save Me Time And Make Me More Sales?

With more and more small businesses realising that customer relationship management systems aren’t right for their operation, this article takes an in-depth look at the alternative, smart client management software…

I first started my business back in 2001, leaving the corporate world where systems and processes reigned. 

The internet had barely been invented back then, but the corporate world was already well versed in powerful computer systems that streamlined processes.

So walking away from that and finding myself on my own was a bit of a shock.

Within 24 hours I realised that I’d gone from some of the most advanced systems around at the time to a dusty laptop and an old version of Microsoft Office.

The business I’d set up served companies by helping them implement sales processes.

In practice, this meant that I gave them advice on how to make more sales, training them to do that or – in some cases – doing the sales for them.

What I did was pretty in-depth, and not cheap, so I didn’t need many clients at any one time; 3 or 4 would do.

And in order to get those 3 or 4 and not have gaps while I sought out new business, I needed a consistent flow of a few decent new leads each month, enabling me to build a wait list and keep myself topped up.

Anyway, I launched the business and it didn’t take me long to work through my book of contacts, and after that I realised I had to do something else to generate leads.

Cue plenty of mornings spent eating breakfasts and attending seminars, trying to hobnob with people who could use my services.

I met lots of people, many of whom had an interest, barely any of whom had an immediate requirement, and would need following up with.

The problem was that I had no proper system to manage prospects and clients and therefore follow up properly and accurately – I tried using Microsoft Outlook, but it didn’t really work.

I rarely followed up, and none of those people became clients, so it was quite a stressful time for me!

These were the days before the online revolution, before Google, Facebook and WordPress.

Had I launched my business in 2019, rather than 2001, it would have been a very different story.

I’d have been able to advertise on the Internet and “drive traffic” to a beautifully built landing page using one of the many page builders out there.

I’d be able to send automated follow up emails to all the leads I came into contact with; nurturing them and bringing them closer to the point of purchase.

I’d easily be able to organise all of the data I collected in a “CRM”, and – because I like technology – I’d probably also have some sales pipeline management software as well.

Oh, and I’d certainly be able to link them altogether using the various software solutions out there.

The question is: would I be in a better position now, using numerous systems and multiple pieces of software, than I was back in 2001 with a dodgy laptop and an old version of Microsoft Office?

I don’t think so.

You see, there’s an abundance of different solutions available. Software, apps, plugins, systems, the list goes on.

But with multiple systems comes multiple layers of complexity, and in the end your “solution” can end up creating a load of additional problems, which – when solutions are meant to solve things – is the opposite of the desired effect.

The technology revolution has given us options aplenty; but implementing all of those options - and hiring a coder to make them all talk to each other - is time consuming, expensive and confusing.

And frankly, for most small businesses – and certainly my business in 2001 – that time, effort and expense isn’t worth it.

Businesses with teams of marketers and sales people may well get value from implementing all of these solutions, but for the small scale that I needed in 2001, and still need in 2019, they’re confusing and OTT.

Looking back, what I really needed was:

·        A very simple, easy-to-use system that allowed me to enter my contacts’ details and prompted me to follow up with them.

·        Something that helped with the immediate followup with contacts, and then automated the longer-term relationship building process.

·        A way of allowing people to easily book into my calendar when I’m available, without having to trade dozens of emails.

·        An easy system for sending personal emails and tracking all of the responses in one place.

·        A way of sending quotes and checking when they’ve been accepted

·        A system that allowed me to send invoices and collect payments

And that’s just about it. A system that helped me manage my clients in a smart and simple way.

I needed that in 2001, and there are thousands of businesses who still need that in 2019, but unfortunately, most of the software and applications produced have either only dealt with one small element of what I needed, or have been too big, unwieldy and unintuitive.

Right now, there are thousands – perhaps even millions – of small services companies with an owner-manager trying to interact on a personal level with a small number of leads and clients.

Is a CRM the solution?

Over the past few years the term “CRM” has crept into business vocabulary, and if you don’t know what it stands for, let me tell you:

Customer Relationship Management.

In other words, a contact database with some software tools that help you manage the relationship with your customers.

As with most things, the CRM industry started with the big companies – the companies that had huge datasets of customers with vast transactional history – and it existed primarily for two departments: sales and marketing.

The marketers wanted access to as much data as they could get their hands on, allowing them to make decisions about the kinds of campaigns they should be running and the kind of markets they should be going after. 

They also wanted to be able to communicate with prospects and customers en masse, so something that grouped them together in a coherent format was very useful.

The sales team wanted something a little bit different: their goal was to communicate with a very small group of – usually B2B – contacts at a time, so they wanted a clear idea of the stage that each contact was at so that when they contacted a prospect or customer, they were able to have a coherent and relevant dialogue with them.

These two primary groups were what paved the way for the CRMs we now see in today’s marketplace.

CRM use started with the bigger, corporate organisations, and slowly filtered down to smaller and smaller organisations, as these things tend to do.

But that’s exactly where the problem was: because CRMs were designed to provide what the sales and marketing teams of big corporates wanted, none of them were particularly well designed for the needs of a small business.

Sales-focused CRMs

The sales-focused CRMs are very “one size fits all”.

They assume that everyone using the software is a professional sales person, and consequently the entire structure of the CRM is based in the world of sales; working through a pipeline and grinding out sales.

For the dynamic business owner, they can be pedantic, slow and actually not very useful.

Marketing-focused CRMs

Unfortunately, marketing CRMs are not much more valuable to the small business owner.

Generally speaking, they offer some level of autoresponder mechanism, allowing automated responses to enquiries, and many of them focus on the concept of a “marketing funnel”, with contacts bounced hither and thither depending on the actions they take.

As someone who likes marketing, I much prefer the marketing-focused CRM, but I am still under no illusion: these CRMs are built to support the requirements of experienced marketers, and in so doing, they pass over the heads of most small business owners.

Using them is often complex and requires extensive training, and because the focus is very much on digital marketing, they tend to be less useful if a lot of the prospecting and sales activity you get involved in is offline.

For the small business owners that have the time and inclination to get their heads round such software, they can be highly valuable, but for a huge majority of business owners, they are unwieldy, unnecessarily complex and do not easily and quickly perform the kind of tasks that most need; certainly they do not perform the tasks I was crying out for when I started my business back in 2001.

If CRMs aren’t right for small businesses, what’s the alternative?

The long and short of it is that “customer relationship management” software is generally too complex and difficult to use for most small business owners.

And the reality is that most small business owners don’t actually need customer relationship management.

Instead, most of their ‘customer relationships’ are managed in person or on the telephone – they don’t need an incredibly complicated system in order to strengthen or enhance them.

But what they do need is to manage their clients more effectively, both at the acquisition side of things, and the ongoing administrative side.

They don’t need a hugely complex flowchart – they just need a simple way to engage with prospects, provide them with quotes, send invoices and get paid.

Rather than customer relationship management, they need “smart client management”.

Whatever your business, the chances are you can appreciate that you could manage your clients in a smarter way, if only you had the technology that allowed you to do it.

With smart client management software you can.

Good smart client management software allows you to easily manage each element of a prospect’s journey with you, providing tailored and automated communication at each stage, and moving the prospect through the sales cycle

How smart client management works in practice and how it helps small business owners.

If you’re not hugely familiar with either CRM or smart client management, you might be wondering exactly what smart client management does that makes it so vital for small businesses.

The best way to illustrate this is with a couple of examples:

Example 1 – The networking lead

You attend a business networking event. You get chatting to a fellow business owner who expresses an interest in your product/service and gives you their card and permission to follow up with them.

However, if you’re anything like most business owners, you’re up to your eyeballs in dealing with enquiries, staff, tax and payroll, and you’ve got somewhere to be straight after the meeting.

So, the business card stays in your wallet or bag for a few days until you get around to following up with that prospect, which you then have to do manually, and even then you’re relying on your head or an Excel spreadsheet to remind yourself that you’ve got a lead that you need to work.

With smart client management software, the whole process would be far simpler, thanks to the ‘micro automation’ nature of the tool.

Immediately after being given the card you tap to open the mobile friendly app, tap “Add Contact” and pop in their name email address and telephone number. The application prompts you to select a follow-up email template and “Save & Send”.

Their details are safely in your database and the first email has gone out. 

You can add any notes about the conversations you had or with one click add them to a pre-written email follow-up campaign.

No more forgetting to record their details or send a follow-up. Within 2 minutes it is all taken care of.

Plus, when they come on board, their billing and invoicing will be all be managed within the same system, so you’re not using multiple systems depending on where a business is in your customer journey.

Example 2 – The flyer lead

Let’s say you’re a gardener, and you want some more clients, so you commission a flyer drop.

Your flyer drops through the letterbox of an extremely interested party who checks out your flyer and visits your website to find out more.

She’d like a quote, so she fills in a form to get a quote, but because the form is just housed within your website, and not connected to anything else, you’ve got to go and manually retrieve each enquiry that comes through that form.

Sometimes you forget completely, but even if you don’t, it might take you a few days to get hold of that lead, by which time they may have gone completely cold or bought from someone else.

With smart client management, your software takes over the majority of that process.

When a client visits your website and submits their details to get a quote, your software will take over, sending them an automated email assuring them that someone will be in touch very soon, and sending you a task to ensure you follow up with the lead.

Example 3 – The invoice in the haystack

A customer gets in touch with you – they need an invoice from February because their accountant has asked for it.

Depending on how sophisticated your operation is, that invoice might even be on paper, stacked away somewhere in your office, or maybe it’ll be in your accounting software somewhere. Once you’ve remembered your password and have worked out how to search for and find the invoice.

Either way, finding and sending that invoice isn’t growing your business, and the chances are it’s taking time.

With smart client management software, sending the invoice would be as simple as two clicks – find the contact on your phone or desktop, scroll down to find the relevant invoice and fire it straight over.

What are the benefits of smart client management?

Put simply, smart client management can increase the amount of business you get AND save you time. Your prospects and customer will really appreciate your efficiency leading to more referrals. The whole experience for you and your customers will be improved.

Customers appreciate the personal touch you are displaying though your speedy follow-up. They thank you for communicating frequently and personally. 

Plus, because the processes are automated, a one or two-man business saves a huge amount of time spent following up accurately. The knock on effect is that you can do more of the thinking that matters to build your business and serve your customers.

What are the options for smart client management?

Google “CRM” and you’ll have options coming out of your ears.

Salesforce, Zoho, Intercom, Infusionsoft, Dynamics 365, the list goes on and on and on.

But as discussed, most of them simply aren’t appropriate for small businesses; they’re not built with the small business owner without a digital marketing diploma.

The trouble is, when you’re looking for a smart client management solution, there aren’t many options out there.

There are some great entry level products like Mailchimp, Aweber and Constant Contact, and these sorts of products provide robust autoresponders and email broadcasts, most of them very much revolved around email marketing.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but the problem is that most small businesses don’t have a big enough list of prospects to sustain a consistent flow of leads from email marketing alone.

Instead, they create business when they meet people face-to-face, or at the very least talk to them on the phone, which means that for most small business owners, getting out and meeting people is a vital part of growing their business.

But the getting out and meeting people is only one part – the only way customers are created from that initial contact is with fast, efficient follow up after face-to-face or telephone meetings, and that’s where solutions like autoresponders fall down.

True smart client management software allows you to take notes, create tasks, send emails, create quotes and invoice while chatting with individual prospects, as well send send mass email to groups of contacts, all within the same application and within a matter of seconds.

Active Campaign, Click Funnels and smart client management.

There are more sophisticated versions of these sorts of products, like Active Campaign and Click Funnels, and these are absolutely great products for sophisticated digital marketers.

But they still fail to deliver what most small business owners need – a series of automated processes that correspond to your existing customer journey within one easy to navigate and intuitive interface.

What is the best smart client management software out there?

In January 2019, one of the better small business CRM providers set out to provide smart client management software that filled the serious gap in the market.

What they came up with is Keap – a revolutionary smart client management system for small businesses that actually works, without the convoluted elements or the drawbacks of most of the CRMs out there.

When you add a contact to Keap, you are prompted to send a follow up email, which is already templated, so you can just amend any details you want and get it out, in seconds.

If you want a prospect to book an appointment with you, you just send out a Keap? booking link that synchronises with your diary.

When sending quotes out, you can simply generate your quote in Keap? and email your quote out.  You can see in real-time when a customer has accepted your quote.

And once they have, that quote can be turned into an invoice and sent to the customer, together with a link so they can pay straight away. You receive a pleasing notification that your invoice has been settled.

This isn’t all Keap does, but these various points illustrate that Keap isn’t built for bloated sales teams or advanced marketers.

Instead, it’s for the everyday business owner who just wants to be able to manage their leads more effectively, spend less time chasing business and enjoy the peace of mind that comes when they know that their whole customer journey is consistent and effective.

Should I get smart client management software or small business CRM?

It depends.

If your business is pretty simple, and you know that you want to be able to get in front of more prospects, find an easier way to communicate with them and ensure that they get consistent communication from you, then Keap is for you.

If you sell products and services online, and you need ecommerce, then Keap won’t do that for you, and I would recommend the small business CRM solution by the same company, Infusionsoft.

If you’re a one-man business, you’re extremely aware that you’ve only got one pair of hands, you’re aware that you’re wasting opportunities because you’re not managing clients effectively enough and you want to stop running around like a blue-bottomed fly, then Keap is the software for you.

What’s the next step?

If you’ve read this far, then the chances are you see the wisdom in investing in some smart client management software for your business, and the good news is that it couldn’t be easier to give Keap – the leader in smart client management – a go.

All you need to do is click here to take a completely free, no obligation 14-day test drive. 

No credit cards are collected, so you won’t get sneakily charged after your trial period.

During the 14-day trial, you’ll get a good idea of how the software works and whether it can help your business, and if you decide to invest in the software, you’ll be eligible for free training courses at the EXELA training centre in Cheltenham. EXELA  ensures that Keap is set up and working for your business as quickly as possible.

If you’d like a demo before you decide whether you want a free trial, then that can also be arranged, just click here to book a slot in my diary and I’ll give you a demo of Keap and what it can do.

Thanks so much for reading this article – at EXELA we specialise in helping businesses use technology to grow, and smart client management is a key part of that; I hope that this inspires you to take some action and start managing your clients in a smarter, more streamlined and more effective way.