Business owners across the country spend millions in pursuit of customers. Business owners confront me often with “I want more customers” or “I need more customers.”
Often, I respond to these charges explaining that a customer is not something you can grab. They are people with thoughts and ideas, likes and dislikes and preferences. People choose to listen or watch your presentation. They choose to form and maintain a relationship based on what stimulates their intellect. Your task is to find the person that is stimulated by your ideas, thoughts and platform. Then build a relationship with them.
I often use the analogy of physical health to illustrate this point. Physical health requires work, discipline and commitment. It can’t be purchased from a store bottle. Although, many would believe it could. One acquires health through proper eating habits and a regular exercise program.
This analogy works on many levels. For instance, just as choosing too many of the wrong foods such as sugars and starches will have negative effects on your energy level, choosing the wrong customer group will lead a miscommunicated message and loss of income and reputation.
The other variable in the analogy is exercise. Exercise burns fat, develops muscle and keeps most of the body’s organs working at optimum levels. Your relationship with your customer is your exercise program, in that working on your relationship with your customer will develop the trust and understanding required to form a profitable relationship. A CRM system is a tool to help you develop a relationship with your customers, just like Reebok running shoes facilitate your exercise.
Businesses make a crucial mistake when they do not invest the time nor resources towards a healthy CRM system. When asked if they have a CRM or marketing program many business owners reply, “I don't have time for that right now.” This brings us back to the analogy above: “I don’t have time to go to the gym” or “I don’t have time to go to the supermarket and buy healthy foods.” These remarks have the same result on the body as neglecting a CRM or marketing program has on the customer base. The state of both declines rapidly.
Another common response to the use of CRM is “CRM systems waste money so, I don’t use it.” Similarly to the treadmill exercise bike sitting in the basement with clothes hanging on them, once a CRM system is purchased and put into place it requires the discipline and commitment to use it. A CRM system is a tool to help you manage customer relationships, just as Reebok shoes, exercise equipment or a gym membership are tools to help you improve your health and well-being.
The formula for the level of relationship is the sum of interactions between you and that other person.
Hopefully the level of your relationship with your spouse or your significant other includes many interactions happening every day resulting in an elevated level of trust and understanding. In business, relationships require many positive and customer enhancing interactions that result in elevated trust and understanding, albeit not to the level of your spouse or significant other. In this instance, we are trying to build a different type of relationship that allows for a long-term valuable experience for the customer and a positive effect on your reputation and bottom line. This will depend on the dollar amount of the product or service. If you're just selling a cup of coffee, there should not be intense interactions at every sale. A larger more sophisticated transaction, such as a merger or acquisition, can last months or a year in the making and often form very important bonds between customer and service provider.
Relationships in business are complex and fluid. They expand, contract and evolve and in many cases the players change, as the course of the relationship takes shape. When communicating to thousands of customers, a CRM system becomes a crucial tool that will prevent crossed lines of communication and lost revenue, due to confused customers. Each interaction has an outcome either positive or negative depending on the person’s perception, so every interaction that you have with the customer or a prospect is a test. Keeping your appointment or conference call is a day to day task that can build strong relationships over time or end them quickly, when missed. A CRM system is designed to be a tool to help you keep track of the relationships and interactions, so you can watch the relationship evolve and make correction, where needed.
Just as your customer base grows with your business a CRM system grows you’re your customer base. The right CRM system will depend on your needs, just like the Reebok running shoes. Similarly, running shoes and the CRM system should be easy to use and help you achieve your goals. I wouldn’t purchase running shoes with lead soles and would also not purchase a CRM system that doesn’t fit the needs of my customer base. Once you have the right CRM system, however, you still need to be disciplined to use it and committed to acquire the knowledge and training to use and understand it. You may be required to watch training videos to learn more about CRM tools or hire a consultant or trainer to help.
CRM software has changed drastically in the last 18 months giving salespeople a set of tools to help find and transition a prospect down your sales funnel to a customer. The must-have features are:
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