CRM's - What they are, and do you need one?

CRM's, What are they and do you need one

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome back to the Business Development Podcast. On today's episode, we're gonna talk CRMs. What are they? And do you need one? Stay tuned.

Intro: The great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years. Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal, and we couldn't agree more. This is the Business Development Podcast, based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. In broadcasting to the world, you'll get expert business development advice, tips, and experiences, and you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs, and business development reps.

You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business, brought to you by Capital Business Development Capitalbd.ca. Lets do it. Welcome to the Business Development Podcast, and now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy: Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Business Development Podcast. Wow, episode seven. Here we are.

I am so thankful to continue to be here for you. Really looking forward to today's episode. We are going to spend some time today talking about CRM's. Customer relationship management software. Do you need one? Stay tuned. Let's figure this one out. Let's start just by going over the Microsoft definition for it.

Believe it or not, there's actually not like an Oxford Dictionary definition, so I'm gonna go with Microsoft's. I think Microsoft's is actually pretty good. So Microsoft's definition of a customer relationship management CRM, it is a set of integrated data-driven software solutions that help manage track and store information related to a company's current and potential customers.

By keeping this information in a centralized system, business teams have access to the insights they need, the moment they need them. Without the support of an integrated CRM solution, your company may miss growth opportunities and lose potential revenues because it's not optimizing operating process or making the most of customer relationships and sales leads.

This is actually an incredibly good definition, and I agree with it fully. What are some well-known CRM programs? So Salesforce tends to be the number 1, followed by Zoho, HubSpot Fresh Sales. And my favorite is Pipedrive, not affiliated with Pipedrive. Just utilize them for a lot of years and find them to be a really, really cost effective option that ticks, all the boxes that you need.

So I thought that I would spend a little bit of time today and talk to you about the good old days. I have been in business development a long time since before we used these CRMs on a regular basis. And what did we used to do? So we had excel spreadsheets out the wazoo. We had Rolodexes, we had business cards all over our desks.

We didn't know what we were doing half the time, frankly, we were running around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to reference old papers, trying to reference client data on like old software, like most companies had software to track customers. But it was really, really not good, frankly. It was just not good.

And it was not simple. It was not all in one place. And then these CRM softwares came in and really shook the game up and frankly, They are invaluable to your sales team. Let me repeat that. CRM softwares are invaluable and shouldn't even be a discussion as to whether you need one or not in your company.

Just trust me, you need one. Your business development reps need one, and basically anyone handling sales or account management in your company needs to be utilizing a crm. So how do I utilize a CRM today? So a CRM manages details and customers including positions, emails, phone numbers.

Guys, you utilize these things to track all of your customer data. It is so great to have it all in one place. So when you open your CRM, just to give you a quick idea, what ends up happening is, is you typically have a bunch of deals. And how they work is it's just a company that you wanna work with and it happens to be your main contact in that company or a list of contacts in that company, along with their emails, phone numbers positions.

You know, like whatever data that you have, you can really centralize it in this one place that just makes it. So much easier when you need to reference an employee or get in touch with somebody. It gives you your leads in various stages. So you might be making introduction calls with a company and you can place them in a separate space just for introduction calls.

You might be having that weekly follow up that I discussed so regularly. And on the weekly follow up side, you just have this list now of just people that you contact over and over and over again on a weekly basis until you get the meetings that you want, you have the ability to then move them down. Maybe you're not getting anywhere with somebody and you need to kick 'em out.

Well now you can remove them or put them into a different category so that you're only making calls to people who, you know, you have the right people you know, you can make contact with, and eventually lead to that meeting that you're so, so desiring. You can then next steps, you can move them into the meeting stages.

So once you book your meetings, you can move them down the line right into meetings and, and basically have this list of, of all these upcoming meetings that you know you have in one place with all the data related to that customer, all the calls, all the emails you've sent, all that information just centralized so that when you are showing up for that meeting, you can quickly review that customer's data and you can know exactly what they're at, even if they've dealt with multiple salespeople or multiple business development reps in your company.

You have all that information centralized to just make it so much easier for you. You have all of the document notes and follow up dates, so once again, you have, you have just access to all of that data that you've went through so that you can essentially move them to the next stages. You have your follow up reminders.

So here's a big one. For those of you that like to just know what you got coming up every day. If you utilize a, a CRM like Pipedrive, You can hop in there and you can essentially have all of the follow up data that you've been looking for. It'll tell you exactly when to follow up, what the last conversation was, who to call.

Guys, it is so flippin useful and you absolutely 100% you need a CRM for your company. It's gonna make a huge difference. If you are still operating on business cards and Excel spreadsheets, guys, you have to upgrade. You gotta upgrade a CRM is going to make a huge difference for your sales teams. It's gonna make you so much more effective.

It'll be almost intangible. Reports and forecasting. So here's something else you can do with your crm. CRMs allow you to put in quite a bit of data, and so you can essentially do reports on how many people your, your company has contacted that month. You can easily print a report on how many, how many people are in the contacted, how many messages were sent.

How, you know, how many contacts did you add that month or that week? How many LinkedIn introductions did you send? It's all trackable and you can print it out in really, really easy computerized reports. I like to export those reports and then put 'em, frankly, into a different reporting system that I utilize at Capital, but you can utilize that however you want.

And they're different with every single CRM you can get, you know, some with a little more detail, some with a little less, just depending on what you want. Reports are definitely possible with any CRM software. The next one is you can share data with the team. So this just, just allows for collaboration.

It allows you to. Move forward so much easier with a deal or with a customer, especially if you got multiple people working that one customer or you have, you have maybe a guy step away, maybe for whatever reason you lose, you lose a BD guy or you lose a sales guy and you're like, crap, you know, we were just about a deal with this customer.

What do we do next? Well, guess what? All that data should be centralized in that crm. So when you put a new account rep on it, or you put a new BD rep on it, They can just walk right in and essentially just take right over that deal and have all the data available to them just like the previous BD rep or salesperson had.

So let's talk a little bit about how to set up a CRM flow correctly. This is very, very important. Most most CRM softwares allow you to kind of put a track or a path that you take your customers through. And I'm just gonna let you in a little bit on how we do it at capital Business Development today.

A layout that I like to utilize with my crm is that the first step or the first crm entry where I, where I put a new, a new contact or a new target into is called digital contact. And this can be whether you reached out to them on LinkedIn, whether you reached out to them on Facebook or Instagram or whatever you guys are using for your socials or whatever you're using for that, that introduction contact.

It just allows you to reach out, make a, make an introduction digitally, and then you can take that contact, add their, add their company data, add their data, their hopefully whatever information you have, hopefully you have a phone number or an email or something like that. And then suddenly you just put them into that first stage.

The next stage I like to do is called Contacted. Contacted for capital business development means that we are contacting them either via phone or email. This is, this is what I like to call a direct contact. You either have their phone number, You can call them, you can leave a message, you can speak to them, or you can, you have their email.

You can drop them a line, you can send them an introduction on behalf of your company. You can attach brochures, things like that. Contacted stage is the next stage that we like to utilize. After that, I actually have a stage that I like to call back burner or low priority. These are people that are in your contacted stage.

You know, you can only contact so many people every week. Frankly, your time is limited and you're going to, over time, you're gonna have customers in the contacted stage that maybe, maybe you're just not getting anywhere with them. Maybe if you have the right person, you've dropped them 10 emails, you've called them, left them 10, 10 messages, and you just aren't getting anywhere, and you figure, well, maybe it's not a super important customer.

Maybe you can. You can come back to it later. I like to then take these customers that I'm not really getting traction with. I'll move them into back burner and then add a new contact from that LinkedIn digital contact into contacted with a higher probability so that we are constantly delivering for our customers.

The next stage that you would like to have after this is the most important stage. You want to have your meeting stage. Yay. This is all the people that we have worked so hard to get to. These are all the people that have agreed to have a meeting with you. You then move them out of contacted you, throw them into meeting stages, and yes, you were on the path in meeting stages once again, you always wanna review these before the meeting so that you know what was talked about.

What the customer's interested in, what information was sent to them. And you can do this all because it's all organized underneath that one that one company profile that's now sitting in your meeting stages. After meeting stages, I like to have a stage called next steps. So most of the time when you go to a meeting, you don't necessarily close a deal, right?

You make the relationship. Maybe you have a really great meeting, the customer loves you, but there are still things to do. You have to either fill out a vendor application, you have to maybe sign, sign, sign up to ComplyWorks or ISNET or some other vendor management software. There's some work to do. Okay. I like to then move these customers into next steps, put what that work is, and then, and then put who's, who's assigned to either complete that or follow up on that.

After next steps, I have one final stage that I like to utilize, and that is current customer. Current customer means you have made it, you have made it that you had their meeting, you had next steps, you completed their vendor application, and now you are working for them. Congratulations, you have made it to the step that you, that every company is aiming for.

All the hard work you've done has led you to to a win. Okay? Your job is not done. Who needs to .Follow up with current customer account managers? Okay, so whoever your account manager is at the company, they need to be reviewing current customers all the time and they need to be booking constant meeting follow ups.

I will spend some time on account management. I I don't typically consider BD in account management, but since this is, this is kind of geared towards a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of them are kind of doing it on their own. So at some point I was an account manager as well. So I will I will do a full show on account management and how to do it effectively in the future.

But gonna spend a little less time on that today. Today I just really wanted to talk about a CRM and why they're so critical to your business. Truly, a CRM is invaluable to your sales and business development teams. They share data between teammates and supercharge your business development. They are truly amazing.

You 100% need one. If you are operating without a CRM right now the cost is, is negligible. They're truly not that expensive. We're probably talking for a team of four. We're probably talking about a hundred bucks a month for access to a really good CRM like Pipedrive. And it is worth every penny.

It allows collaboration, it allows all your data, all your customer data, all of the contact data, all of the, the sales efforts to be concentrated in one. And you need to utilize it. At Capital, we don't even work without a crm. There's just no point. It, we're spinning our tires, we're wasting time. And time is valuable, incredibly valuable at capital.

And I would much rather be moving your people down the lines than filling out data. So CRMs, absolutely critical. I wanna talk about something else about a CRM, garbage in, garbage out. You need to input good data to your CRM for it to be effective. Okay? I don't wanna see you guys typing in. George s or George, just first names into the name profiles.

Make sure that you got first and last names. Make sure that you are inputting phone numbers the, the same way every time. So whether or not you like to use a dash or not in your phone number, whether or not you just like to jumble up the, the numbers, it's up to you. Whatever you want. Just make sure that you are consistent in the way that you input your data into your crm, because if your CRM gets full of garbage, It's not going to be as effective.

It gets a lot harder to kind of track down, now you gotta figure out what the guy's last guy or girl's last name is. You gotta figure out, maybe you, maybe you jumbled up a number and now the number's messed up and you don't have the right phone numbers. Or maybe there's two numbers and you only put down one of them and now you need both.

Or maybe the email is misspelled or you need to put in as much information as you can into the CRMs and you need to input it correctly. Because the, the better you are at this, the more organized your CRM will be. The more organized your employees will be, which is equally critically important because if you have multiple people inputting this data into crm, there has to be, there has to be a template, there has to be an expectation, a standard as to how you utilize it and how much information you put into it.

So please, please do put in good information cuz you get garbage in, garbage out. But if you put in good information, you get wins out. Trust me. The next one is use it or lose. You need to use your crm. I know that when you're kind of getting into a new software program, it can sometimes be a little bit challenging, you know?

I'm not even gonna lie. Okay. I I think I got into the Pipedrive CRM in something like 2013, maybe the end of 2013, beginning of 2014 was my first kind of utilization I think of Pipedrive, and I'll tell you what, I didn't use it. I didn't use it. I I, I was one of those people who's like, I don't need this.

I don't need this. I was just gonna use my Excel spreadsheet. I'm gonna use my Rolodex cuz my Rolodex is awesome. Yeah. You know what I mean? I was, I was thinking old man thinking, I guess you know, you do it one way and you like to do it that way. That doesn't mean it's the best way. And I, over time I really did learn that a CRM was critical to my operation.

It was critical to me to me being effective. And it took a long time. It probably took me a year to truly adopt one and be like, okay, okay, I see the value here. I'm telling you, I'm telling you, give it some cha, give it a chance, give it, give it a chance, and you will also find your CRMs to be incredibly effective.

I think you will, you will start to see an, an uptake in your sales fairly quickly just because. It's almost impossible to not get a win if you're utilizing a CRM correctly. They truly are. They're just, there's something else. There's lots of them to choose from. Find one that you like. I like Pipedrive, would recommend it a hundred times and a hundred times outta a hundred, but you use whatever works for you.

But trust me, if you're not utilizing a CRM right now in your sales process or in your business development process, you do need to implement one. So consistency of information. I kind of talked about this in garbage and garbage out. Just make sure that you are consistent in the information that you were inputting into your crm.

Okay? So if, for instance, you do a follow up call and there's some, there's some data, some critical data from that call, make sure that you're inputting it. Make sure that you don't just put, oh, talk to John. Put, put what you talk to John about. Talk to John. Oh, John wants us to send brochures and information follow up next week.

Make sure that your notes are consistent and detailed enough that if somebody was to go in after you who doesn't know you or doesn't know John, they can put together the story of what is going on with customer, John because, the whole point of it is so that you have the data in one place, and if you were, if you were putting weak data or not enough data, it makes it really hard for, for anyone else or even yourself, if you gotta come back to this customer after three months, like let's say, let's say that with this customer, what ends up happening is, is that they say, Hey, you know what?

I don't have an opportunity for you today, but follow up in three months and we can book that meeting then. Well, that's great. That's great. You definitely want that. But Now what? Right? You don't have the information inputted correctly, so you won't even know. So it's very, very critical that you are putting in the right information, all the information, all relevant information from any calls, emails.

Nice thing about emails is they do actually integrate. So you can pair your, your email with Pipedrive for instance. And what'll happen is any emails with that customer, as long as the email of the customer is set up in Pipedrive, it'll, it'll link over to Pipedrive, which is really cool. So you actually have all the call data and then you actually have access to all the emails as well.

Make sure that you're linking your accounts so that you do have all that information in one place. Okay, guys, well, that's it for today's episode. Wasn't really a crazy busy one. Just wanted to chat about a crm. Let you know that they are critical to your operation. They're gonna bring a lot of value. Trust me if you haven't, if you haven't operated one, they're not that hard.

They're not that hard. Don't be afraid. They don't take very long to set up. There's lots of good videos that typically come along with starting a crm, and just go from there. So, in closing, a CRM combines many aspects of customer tracking contacts, deal stages, next steps, and customer stage in one convenient place for your entire team to utilize exponentially increasing the effectiveness of your sales program.

Thank you so much guys for joining me. This has been episode seven CRM. It's an absolute pleasure to be on with you today. I just wanna say if you got some value outta this episode today, please do you like, please tell a friend please leave me a rating. Shoot me a message. You can always get a hold of me at podcast@capitalbd.ca, or please feel free to, to get me right on my LinkedIn at Kelly Kennedy.

It's an absolute pleasure to host this show for you and until next time. This has been the Business Development podcast.

Outro: This has been the Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy. Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry, and founded his own business development firm in 2020.

His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation and business development. The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development Specialists. For more, we invite you to the www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.