Why marketing agencies need a CRM?
Marketing never stops: the secret is to send the right messages to the right people, at the right moment.
Marketing agencies of all sizes, from the largest company to the single freelance consultant, sadly know how this dynamism turns into a frenetic way of working, where the slogan is “real time”. Between a brainstorming and a social networks updates, it is easy to forget to call a client or to lose sight of the monthly turnover. Not to mention the uncountable e-mail updates between team members and the endless meetings with the client!
How CRM impact the sales pipeline
Hence a customer management software, the so-called CRM, for marketing agencies is not an optional: it is the only solution to improve their business results without stressing out. A CRM is vital in all the sales pipeline steps: let’s see how it impacts in the different activities to better understand the advantages.
1. Prospect
Every business needs marketing, so any business contact can become a potential customer. From the user who fill out the form on your website, to the person you met by chance at a networking event: each contact has a great value. A CRM allows you to save the contact data and collects the needs expressed by potential customers, so that you can have them on hand in the future. When you add the contact, the CRM suggests you to contextually schedule a follow up, adding to your calendar a reminder both to recall the prospect after a week and to work on the business proposal. Plus, you can give a money value to the customer, by estimating the value of the deal in the initial setup phase and then on a on-going level. Adding these data, the CRM makes you understand what is the total value of all the potential customers you have on hand, helping you understand how far are you from your goals.
2. Tenders/proposal
This is the most delicate phase, when you play your best card: whether it is a call for tenders or only a business proposal, you are meant to propose a challenging strategy and a convincing action plan while fitting the budget. Therefore it’s common to spend several days to prepare a tender document and/or a deal quote, working on preliminary analysis of the market, detailed proposals for the new website graphics, editorial calendars for social networks, etc … all without having signed a contract yet! Integrating with cloud file storage services, a CRM simplifies the job, allowing you to always have at hand the documents and clients notes you need and to share them with the team.
3. Negotiation
The quote has been sent and now you are waiting for the customer to decide what to do. If you do not remember to call you, why would he? Your CRM, luckily, is the one that remembers and bothers to send you a reminder. And to help you be prepared, it briefs you with the main information you need to say the right things to the client, even if you lost contact for weeks.
4. Won Deal
In case of victory, the whole team should celebrate the success: a CRM notifies the news to the whole team in real time. We at Sellf are convinced of the importance of this happy moment for the motivation of the whole team, so we decided to integrate our app with Slack to make the victory celebration even more exciting. But after the toasts, the people assigned to the new project should start working right away. A CRM allows you to share all customers information and tender documents with the right team without the need to exchange e-mails and phone calls, and avoiding long alignment meetings. All the documents and notes are available to those who need it, complete with all the emails exchanged with the client and phone calls notes.
5. Lost Deal
Even in marketing, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Losing a customer is never pleasant, but the important is not to waste the work done in the proposal phase. Appropriately storing the information, the CRM makes sure that all the documents and notes remain always accessible: the economic estimates could be a mine of information for similar projects in the future, while the presentations could be used again to recover the layout, the structure, and why not even some strategic inspirations.
6. Operations
During the next operative phases, a CRM helps in many continuing operations: it collects documents, emails and notes, making them available to the entire team in real time, and it reminds you of any deadline, such as customers meetings, documents you must send, etc.
7. Accounting and Analytics
Besides the sales lifecycle, CRMs help agencies in many other activities. In terms of accounting, they allow to quantify the turnover for each month and for the following year, forecasting the business results. According to team management, CRMs provide useful data to evaluate the work done by the team, collecting data on how many negotiations are won and lost, and who worked on the different proposals.
In short, a CRM allows you to focus on what you do best, helping your customers sell more, while supporting you in your sales activities.
How to choose the right CRM: Self for marketing agencies
Example of Marketing Agencies sales pipeline on Sellf
Not all CRM, however, are well suited to such a dynamic business: you need a tool that goes at your own pace. We at Sellf know well the challenges of those involved in marketing, from larger companies, to small web agencies and creative freelancers.
For this reason we have developed an application that can meet all the requirements you need:
- Flexibility: you are always on the move, so you need a multi-platform solution. Self is designed for all the platforms, from the full integration with your smartphone and tablet (collecting contacts, phone calls and emails) to a handy web application you can access from your laptop.
- Customizable: the customer acquisition cycle can vary widely, with very different phases and goals between them: think of how different are a new website project and a social media management activity! Sellf’s sales pipeline is fully customizable, choosing different objectives and phases for each type of project.
- Tailor-made: a CRM must be suitable for your team size, not created for large companies. We designed Sellf to meet the need of small and medium-sized team to freelance professional: a human-centered tool.
- Quick and easy: you have no time to lose. Sellf is the only CRM that you can start using in minutes!
- Integrated: your CRM must integrate with the tools you use every day. Sellf integrates with the contact book of your smartphone, with cloud data storage services (Dropbox, Google Drive), with calendar services (Google Calendar, iCal, Microsoft Exchange), with Evernote to smoothly manage notes and now even with Slack, the team communication tool used by most marketing agencies.
- Collaborative: it must be easy for the team to share information and communicate with CRM. Sellf guarantees maximum transparency among team members and allows you to manage multi-level teams, so that only those who are working for a specific client can see the documents and notes relating to it.
More than a thousand creative, web and marketing agencies have chosen Sellf instead of the other CRMs. Every day we learn from them new ways in which they use Sellf to be more productive and sell more.
What are you waiting for? It’s never too late to start working better.
