Streamline your business with cloud contact management systems for small businesses

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in this video we're gonna break down seven tips on how you can determine the best CRM software for your small business let's jump right in first off what is a CRM well CRM stands for customer relationship management essentially it's your business database it's your business database you use to manage your leads your customers and even your team it's really your business management software so it's critical you have a good software to manage your business so that you're most effective with managing your business and driving success so now that you know what a CRM is let's just jump right into tip number one tip number one is to make sure your CRM has forms that you can manage within the CRM and create and put on your website so these would be like lead forms or contact forms or application forms that you can create within the CRM and place on your website the importance of that is when somebody fills out the form on your website it automatically goes into your CRM properly formatted with all the correct information all populated into your CRM this allows you to do things like automate female journeys automate who those contacts are assigned to on your team automate workflows and beyond so this was really powerful the nice thing about this is whenever you create a new form in your CRM where you edit your form in the CRM maybe you add a couple fields to it that's automatically gonna become visible on your website you won't even need to go to your website to make any kind of edits or updates the form is just automatically updated so it saves you a step there but the most important thing about forms is it allows it to be the connection point between capturing information and the digital world and getting that information into your CRM so all of your automated processes can kick off from there super powerful let me show you what this looks like inside marketing 360 so inside a marketing 360 you can just simply click the drop-down you can see of course that your CRM actually is right here and then forms is actually right here so you can go into forms in this example account there's a couple forms that have been created you can click into those forms and you can see the fields that have been created for that particular form of course you can click to add new fields if you want to and these are all fields that map directly to the CRM so super easy once you create this form you can go ahead and go over here and grab this embed code and throw it on your website when you throw it under your website the form is visible and now whenever anybody populates the form they're gonna of course fill out this information and that's going to automatically go directly into the CRM right here so that's all automated from here you can assign these contacts to certain salespeople or customer service reps you can even create automated tasks you can put them into email journeys and beyond so it's super powerful tip 2 is to make sure that your CRM allows you to create all the fields that you need for each contact in order to collect the information that you need whether it's information about your leads or your customers or your partner's whoever it is you're going to want to be able to create fields for all that type of information that's properly organized in your CRM so that you have everything that you need at your fingertips to do everything that you need to do to deliver success let's take a look at this inside a marketing 360 so to show you what I mean inside a marketing 360 for the CRM in particular you can manage all of your fields in one place so if you go over here to settings and you come down right here you can click contact fields and these are going to be all the contact fields that you can create for your CRM so this is totally customizable this is just an example of what we're looking at here for how some fields are being created and used for this account but of course you can create your own headings and your own fields beneath each of these headings however you would like when you create fields you can simply click here and you can go ahead and give the field a name and then you can select the type of field the type of field is really powerful because you can have types of fields that are just text fields like paragraph fields email addresses phone numbers links drop-down boxes and beyond so super powerful you can create all the different types of fields that you need in one place you can store that right within your contact profile and the CRM you can even reorder the fields however you want those things organized in your CRM is exactly how they're going to show on the front-end so once you manage all your fields here it's real easy to then go into your contacts so if I pop over here to my CRM and I navigate down to a contact I'm just going to click on myself here you're going to see all of those fields are over here on the left so the ones that are populated you're going to course see that information right here and so from one place I can easily if this if this contact were to give me a call right now maybe there was some additional notes of important information that they gave me I could leave those notes and save it real quick on their contact profile this just has everything that I need in one place the other beautiful thing is when you have all the information you need from the main contact grid like you're seeing here you can quickly organize the type of context that you have so for example if I just wanted to see my contacts or my teammates I could click right there boom and it just filters it instantly I could also of course control what I'm seeing on this bird's-eye view for the different types of fields of information so I could come over here click and see visible edit visible fields this is going to show me all the fields I have visible on my main overview page and then of course when I click into the contact I have access to all of the fields of information but this is really nice here when I when I can really customize the columns I see on my overview page it makes it really easy to manage all my leads and customers from one view and then I can of course click into them from here to dive down deeper if I want to so very powerful tip 3 is to look for a CRM that allows you to manage everything you need to manage about a contact within the CRM such as history notes and communications tasks maybe deals and projects list that that contact is a part of for email automation or other lists that you've created for your organization to stay organized you're just going to want all of that information in one view let me show you what I'm talking about within marketing 360 so when you're in marketing 360 you can just click any contact in the CRM like I did here and then of course you can see all the information about the contact over here on the left side these are all the fields that you have created for that contact and then right here in the middle you can really see everything you need to see about managing that contact over time and building that relationship so history is going to show all the notes the communications that have been logged all the activity that's occurred on this contact you can upload tasks and create tasks for this contact maybe I want to do a call back for this contact in a couple weeks I could go ahead and click this plus sign right over here and I could go add a task and create that you can of course manage any deals that you're working for the contact projects you could even upload files like contracts and agreements I could just simply click right here and I could go ahead and upload a contract and store it maybe I have a link to a Google file I could add that link here as well so any resources for that contact could be managed here and then of course lists so you can see any lists of that contacts and so for example this contact is a subscriber they're part of the weekly content series and you can see all the previous emails that they received so the beauty of this is is literally from one view you can see everything you need to see about a particularly door a customer in order to drive success and stay on top of it because remember CRM stands for customer relationship management so this is essentially where you can manage that relationship in that contact over time tip four is you're going to want to make sure your CRM can create dynamic lists and reports based on certain criteria the reason this is important is because you're going to want to do things such as email all of your customers after they make an online purchase or a complete service with you asking for a review in an automated way or maybe send all of your leads a series of emails to nurture them during the sales process really valuable right you're gonna even want to do things as specific as maybe you have an event coming up in Denver and you want to see all of your contacts that are in the Denver area so that you can invite them to the event so there's so many different ways to leverage lists and reports you're going to want to serum that allows you to do that and connects the email marketing so that you can create these lists and then provide email marketing not just create a list that you can call through etc so let me show you what this looks like inside a marketing 360 so you can see how lists works there and wrap your mind around this so in this example encount inside of marketing 360 CRM if I click on lists here you can see there's one list that's been created here for subscribers so if you click into that list here you can see the criteria of that list over here on the left hand side and you can completely customize this to work however you like so for example if I create a new list over here if I click there I can go ahead and give this list a name and a description and then really here is the criteria that allows you to really fine-tune what this list is so you can have the list for all contacts or just contacts between a certain date period or a certain type of contact certain type of contact status who it's assigned to you can pull a list for certain tags you can also create custom filters which are basically any field within your CRM you can create as a criteria to create the list so basically this allows you to create a list for just about anything you can think of within the CRM and the beauty is once you've actually created a list like you're seeing here you can obviously click into it to view it but you can also go into your nurture campaigns over here into email marketing and if I go into this account for email marketing you can see all of these campaigns here have been sent to that particular list in an automated way so it's really powerful to have an integrated CRM that connects to email so that you can build lists manage lists and do automated email marketing on top of that tip number five is to make sure that you can add all the teammates and users that you need into the CRM and it doesn't really increase your cost what you're going to want to do is be able to scale your organization with your CRM so as you hire people add more salespeople more customer service reps etc you're going to want to add them as users into the CRM so that you have your whole team within the platform the beauty of that is is now you have one place where your business can be managed online right and anybody whether they're on their mobile phone or their desktop computer or wherever they are in the world they can find all your contacts in the CRM they can add notes that can manage those customers also you want to make sure that when you're adding these team members you have the functionality in order to give them view rights to certain contacts maybe they can only see the information for contacts that are assigned to them and not anybody else and other cases you might want to give them access to find any contact and do anything so the permissions and the roles are important and make sure that works for your organization tip 6 is to make sure that your CRM is mobile friendly you're really going to want this for you and your team because you're gonna want to be able to continue to use the CRM easily on the go right whether you're on your phone on your couch and the evenings or you're out on the road and you're just working off of your iPhone or your Android or whatever you know smartphone device that you have or an iPad maybe a little bit bigger device but you don't have your full-blown desktop computer there's still a lot of CRM that are really clunky and hard to use unless you're on a desktop computer and you don't want that tip seven last tip is to make sure that your CRM is in a fully integrated singular platform solution so that it's not just your CRM that you're managing in this application and then you have a totally different application for your email marketing and a totally different application for your social media marketing and beyond you're gonna want from one login and one platform to do everything that you need to do the power that is everything's fully integrated so the CRM talks to these other programs and these other programs talk to the CRM you can unlock so much you know automation and so much power by having a singular platform solution that's fully integrated that it's really gonna take your business to the next level let me show you what this looks like inside a marketing 360 so of course inside of marketing 360 you can see right from the dashboard it has everything that you you would need really to manage and grow your business from CRM to social media management to reputation management to your business listings to nurture which would be your email marketing and SMS marketing to your ad management and content marketing and business reporting and intelligence creative tools it's powerful right from the drop-down you can jump wherever you need to go and the beauty like I said before is everything's integrated so the forms that you create you know talk to the CRM the CRM talks to nurture and the lists you know trigger email automation everything just is fully integrated which allows you to manage your business so smoothly and so effectively it's gonna really allow you to scale it also saves you a ton of money because having all these solutions and at all a cart format not only is it not integrated but it gets pretty expensive because you're paying for each thing one by one whereas with a singular platform solution you're just basically leveraging the bundle effect where you have everything you need in one platform for one low cost so that's it thanks for watching hopefully these seven tips help get you down the road to finding the best CRM for your business and determining what that is thanks for watching like the video if you liked it share it with your friends and leave us more comments in the comments if you have other tips on how to find a good CRM for your business we'd love to hear about it thanks for watching happy marketing