There has been plenty of talk lately between industry press and social media about customer relationship management systems (CRMs) and what they can do for your business.
You may have investigated one or two CRM platforms, maybe even going as far as doing a demo or taking a call with a sales representative. Unfortunately, some of these professionals can be aggressive, vague, or even unhelpful, while expecting you to provide your credit-card information and trust that their solution is the best for your business without answering any of your specific questions.
A conversation I recently had showed what can go wrong. I followed up with a hot tub dealer who had discussed a CRM with me months before. He expressed his annoyance at the situation he found himself in: He had already hired a CRM implementation team, from the brand they chose, but it quickly became clear that they hadn’t fully understood his business model. It seemed they hadn’t taken the time to gather the important details so they could customize a system, but had simply slapped a standardized solution into the hot-tub dealer’s system and called it good.
There was no training other than the generic videos on their website, and no support unless he paid for it. There had been no assistance in writing email content, so it was up to his team to write the emails and add them to the campaigns. He didn’t know what to do. He felt like it was a waste of his time and money, and he regretted ever investing in a CRM at all.
While it wasn’t my mess, I offered to help fix it. He thanked me but was disheartened enough by the entire experience that he needed to think it over before investing any more time and money into it. I’m guessing that isn’t going to happen.
This is the exact scenario I want everyone else to avoid falling into. Incorporating a CRM into your system doesn’t have to be this way — nor should it. There is a method you can follow to map out a CRM that will add to your company’s overall value and your customer lifetime value for years to come.
But Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your CRM system be. It is a complicated system that takes time, careful planning and respectful implementation, along with clear communication throughout the process.
The bane of my existence is cleaning up CRM systems that were hastily built, barely planned and half-heartedly executed. One small snag can result in many leads not getting into the right campaign, or the salesperson not getting notified on time that they have a new lead. Does it completely negate the value of having a CRM? Absolutely not! But it can be very disheartening for a salesperson when they don’t receive timely notification of a new lead. Prevent the preventable problems.
Important Questions To Ask
The challenge is that most managers and owners stall out in the process before pulling the trigger on a CRM build.
Even if business owners do take the leap of faith and pay for the CRM brand to build out the system, they don’t know how to write effective nurture emails that educate leads, build relationships consistently over time, and help convert leads into customers. Or they can write and implement the emails, but they don’t know how to train their sales team to adopt and use the new system to track leads and move clients through the sales funnel effectively. They also don’t know how to hold their sales people accountable.
It’s no fault of their own. This technology is not their area of expertise. In fact, it’s probably not in their job description to know how to use a technical system and train others.
Much of this frustration can be avoided by asking the right questions when choosing your CRM-implementation team. These should center around not only your company’s specific needs for customer communications, but also the support you receive to help your team implement it.
Below, I’ve listed a few of the most common scoping questions that go unanswered, which can lead to complaints months and thousands of dollars of investment later — and turn a potential CRM success story into a failure.
Who does the actual CRM setup for my company?
Who writes emails for the campaigns that we will be emailing out?
Who trains my sales team to use it?
How does this system provide the reporting I need to prove its value?
What is the ongoing support structure available for my team’s future requests?
How much will all of this actually cost to implement? Keep in mind that, in addition to the monthly fee for the CRM, costs also come from its implementation, email content creation, training and support.
Setting up a CRM and getting customized email content, training, reporting and support set up for your team will cost you around $4,000 for each product line you choose to support with your sales and marketing team. Most of our customers spend $8,000 to $12,000 to fully support three to four product lead campaigns plus customer campaigns. It is a worthwhile investment: You will fully recoup your investment within the first year — if your team uses it.
Remember that, on top of the implementation cost, the average monthly cost that you pay to a CRM platform that will work to support a pool and spa company ranges between $250 and $1,500 per month. It can be higher, depending on custom integrations with your phone system, texting system, POS system, etc., that you choose. There are many factors to consider that make it worthwhile despite the high price tag.
What do you want to accomplish with your CRM?
The key to choosing the right CRM for your company is making a focused list of what you hope to accomplish with it.
This requires you having an understanding foremost: What will a CRM automate for me in my business operations? What are the specific results I want to see from it?
Do you want more insights into how many leads you are getting from each lead source?
Do you want to know how much leads cost from Meta vs. leads from Google vs. leads from organic traffic?
Do you want to be able to run your ads and social media from within that CRM instead of using five different platforms?
Do you want more robust reporting on which salesperson makes the most calls, who gets the highest conversion rate and how many contacts it takes for a lead to convert to a customer?
Do you want to automate email follow-up and text messaging to push educational material to leads and customers with a clear call to action?
Do you want to passively sell more of the products you sell over time by automating some of the required follow-up?
You should want all of these things. If you want to stay competitive and sustain growth amidst new competitors entering the fight and direct-to-consumer options growing, you need all of those insights.
Here’s what we consider the ultimate goal for how a CRM system should work in a company: When a lead comes in, it is immediately assigned, and the salesperson is notified within two minutes. Three minutes later, that lead receives an email from their salesperson, containing information about the product they were researching. Tasks and follow-up notes are created, as is an opportunity in the right “new lead” pipeline stage. The salesperson just has to read the email, pick up the phone and move that lead forward, continuing to act as a helpful guide along the way.
You are trying to provide an automated, immediate, positive customer-service experience for your leads. It sounds easy, but it can take a couple months to get the process set up, tweaked, and adjusted, then your team trained to use the system flawlessly.
Don’t be fooled into thinking a CRM can be built for you within a week and be perfect. We have been building CRM campaigns and automations for a long time, and every single customer uses things slightly differently. There is no cookie-cutter option that will perfectly match your operations. There are many questions that go into creating a successful CRM automation for your team that must first be addressed before your technician should even begin building the structure of your pipeline.
How To Approach Implementing Your CRM
With the right steps, you can not only get the system that works best for your company, but also establish a realistic implementation timeline. Here is how we suggest approaching implementation for a CRM:
Step One: This is the investigation phase. When working with pool and spa companies, we take them through a detailed list of questions, similar to that above though more robust. We address the same questions for every product line our customer hopes to implement.
Step Two: Map the customer journey. This is a document outlining the details to be shared in each email, the time delays between email sends. This will act as a guide to the content team that is writing the emails for your nurture campaigns. What helpful information does the lead get on day one? On day three? On day seven? What about six months later? How have we as salespeople acted to guide them in exploring the product, visiting the showroom, taking a quiz, narrowing down their choices in that time so they feel comfortable getting a quote?
Step Three: Share the documentation and customer journey map with the content team, along with the assets for the brand of product that is being written about. Usually these assets — images and videos — will come from the manufacturer or your company, of your team, showroom, or installs you have done, images of the hot tub models, lifestyle images, colors, etc., they you want to feature in the emails. How many emails are you going to be sending the lead over the course of 18 months? How frequently?
Step Four: The technician builds the workflows to match the customer journey map so that, once they receive the completed and approved emails, they can add them to the proper steps and timing in the client journey. They will also have outlined the pipeline, deal stages, task assignments, lead assignments and notification emails that will automate the process on the back end. Then they will help you schedule training to show your team how to use the system that has been built.
Things can also go wrong along the way. It’s technology — it’s full of surprises. Despite your best efforts, steps can be missed. It’s all the more possible for cracks to appear in the system when the customer journey map is not created and the outline of the campaigns are not discussed in advance.
It’s a school of hard knocks sometimes, running an entrepreneurial business. But the difference between finding a result that is ultimately worth your investment or feeling like your resources have been wasted is not necessarily intuitive. It requires spending the time up front to map it out thoroughly with a team that understands your business model, customers, products and services.
Be the tortoise, not the hare.