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term i worked for a small firm um work for all different kinds of uh size firms and then i've actually spent about the last 12 years in sales training and sales leadership for both walters clewer and bloomberg bna so that's really where i fell in love with sales and that's really where all this started so we'll be talking about why you should be using a crm and some tips on if you're just getting started with this some ideas for you to to use it and see an immediate impact on your firm so i know nathan has a little bit of upfront stuff he has to talk about so i'll let him jump back in and then we'll dive into it okay awesome if you can go and go to the next slide oh yeah i'm in control guys this is scary and ty she also did a previous webinar with us it was key building blocks for an account advisory practice and we can actually send you the recording of that one if you would like as well and she has another one coming up with us later down the road um i don't think we have a topic for that yet but be on the lookout for that one too it's a little housekeeping um typically if you've joined one of our webinars before um it's more of a podcast style but today it will be just ty kind of talking and we'll step in here and there we have valentilos with us as well we are part of the zoho uh cpa partner team um and really if you go to that zoho.com cpa it's for accountants and bookkeepers and uh cpas where you can become you know join our partner team over here at zoho and uh we would like you to kind of just go check it out see if it's the right fit for you and your firm um and i wanted to kind of talk about showtime and what it has to offer so if you look at the left-hand side you'll see all those uh sections and we have the question section the chat chat box as well and the chat is really used just for you to kind of tell us hey you can't hear us uh ties blurry the vision's blurry or the slides aren't moving or something and the questions box is where you ask specific questions to tai can be about zoho or about the partner program or about what thai's talking about and throughout the presentation i'll be launching poll questions and those are for anyone who's trying to receive a cpe credit which is one this this webinar does qualify for one cpe credit in order to receive that cpu credit you will need to um stay till the end of the presentation at the very end do not close out because there will be an evaluation you'll need to answer that and anybody else who's attending is free to answer that evaluation it helps us kind of um do have better webinars down the f down the in the future just because we kind of listen to the feedback and we kind of shape our webinars to that feedback you'll need to answer three out of those four polling questions and then from that um that's all you need to do to get the cpu credit and i think we're ready to go ty perfect so as as we jump into this if you guys have questions throw them in the questions box i'll try to keep an eye on it but what i normally try to do is grab those when we jump into the polling questions and try to answer them then so i'm excited to get into this topic with you all and i've got my chat open another screen so one of the things as we get started is i'd like to actually ask you guys to give me an answer in the chat um it's not a polling question just uh seeing where we're at are you looking to implement a crm have you started do you have one do you not even know what a crm is and you're here to learn that it just helps set the stage for for where we're going and helps me answer some questions so if you don't mind throw that in the chat real quick and i'll just see where everybody is you zoho awesome um looking at zoho right now perfect so we've got some people with zoho some people um some people just starting awesome so i am a big believer in accounting firms using a crm i come like i said for my sales background i've worked with some pretty big sales organizations and it was really eye-opening uh going back into the the coaching of accountants uh area which we do at the clc that we do everything about all around sales but the crm is one thing that i've become really passionate about because business development is one of those things that when accountants get started it it they struggle with it and it's very overwhelming and they you know a lot of people give up way too early and part of that is they don't understand what they're supposed to be doing they don't have any metrics they don't know if things are working and that's one of the ways a crm can help accounting firms and we'll talk about others as we go through as we go through the session today so you know before we really even jump into the way a crm helps accounting firms i really do like to just set the stage start with very basics and define what a crm is and does and by definition your crm stands for your customer relationship manager or customer relationship management system so if you google the definition of a crm you are going to get thousands if not millions of different definitions but basically it's a technology that helps you manage your firm's interactions with your past present and potential customers so that it can help you support your growth goals and retention you know we're going to talk a little bit about zoho as we go through the session today but crms come in all different forms many different vendors they can be simple incredibly complex and to me i think that's one of the reasons why accounting firms are just now starting to embrace this technology and in using it for the benefit in their firm because they don't really know where to get started and i actually in our training that we do in our business development coaching we have a 12-month program that we do we actually use zoho in our training because i think it's super simple super straightforward and just really one of the easiest to use and it allows you to jump in and get started with that so let's talk a little bit about the history of crms just to kind of give you a baseline um crms haven't been around too terribly long they they really the idea of it just started in the 70s and this is when companies started using customer satisfaction surveys and they were looking to evaluate what their customers thought of their business but at that point the only real way to measure it was through spreadsheets and through list and it was really only in 1986 that the first crm technology called act was released and and it was built really based on the principle of like the digital rolodex um but that started the trend to develop crm systems and then over the last 40 years these systems have been enhanced and they're tailored now for specific industries like zohos is for the cpa market but the main driver has always been a way to track the customer and the prospect data so that you can make better sales and marketing and retention and business decisions for your now accounting firm so some of the specific components that make up a crm are your data warehousing technology that's going to give you some different kpis and that's what's going to be able to help you analyze some of the data opportunity management is what i was talking about a little bit earlier it helps you track your pipelines and sales forecasts so you can plan your revenue more accurately it allows the ability to track marketing campaigns and analyze customer and prospect interactions on those and the contact management allows you to keep every contact there every interaction you have with your client in one place which is huge so it's funny i started looking to see you know what industries use crms the most because i was trying to wrap my brain around why accountants are really just starting to to embrace this and um i personally believe every business should be using a crm to track this information and i i saw a study um that detailed at the top industries that use a crm and one of the ways that i think everyone can relate to is the top industry which will come as no surprise is uh retail industry so you know think about any purchase you make in a retail location let's say you go to target and you use your target card all of your customer information is being tracked think about how much that easier is when i have to go return something they don't you know i don't need the receipt they've got all the information stored it makes life easier on me as a customer and that's one of the things you want to look for in a crm but then you also have to think on the flip side think about how much information they now have about your buying trends you know you see these ads pop up on facebook on you see you know your emails come in that you know have promotions on something you were just looking at or you know all that different type of stuff all this information is valuable to them so that they can tailor their marketing to what they think is going to be best for you based on your history and that's something that accountants can do as well the second largest industry is business services and to me that was interesting because that's what accounting really should fall into so accounting should fall into the second largest industry using a crm and so it's it's interesting that accountants are just starting to embrace this so when you when you look at how these crm systems can help you make better business decisions based on your insight it makes complete sense that we need to embrace this as accountants and we need to start using it to make better business decisions for us all right i gotta remember to move keep up with it all right so crms when you start looking at these um they can be categorized really into four different types you've got strategic you've got operational you've got analytical and you've got collaborative the one that you all want to look for is a strategic crm and that's really what zoho is that's because your strategic crms are the ones that are developed and focused around building a customer-centric business culture you know you're not really using a crm to collaborate with different vendors and and um you're not selling goods this isn't something necessarily that you're going to go back and forth with shareholders of companies right so what you want to focus on is strategic and i mean as accountants the core of our business is clients so finding a crm that's going to help you better service your clients really should be the number one consideration as you start you know talking about crms so knowing what you know now the real question is is why in the world would accounting firms not use a crm system you hear day in and day out how firms want to become more client-centric and we want to focus on relationships we've got to add value we've got to build loyalty we've got to make sure our clients are tied into us so they don't go looking for someone to do the work cheaper when you rely on your own memory it's going to be too hard to provide the level of service your clients need i i can't even tell you what i have for breakfast so remembering that i need to contact someone in three months is not something that i'm going to be able to do and so that that reliance on memory and time is so daunting and that's the reason so many fail so when you use the crm system you can stay on top of your initiatives and you can utilize the technology that's available there to support you in these endeavors so what i want to talk about first are three specific ways that accountants can use crms in their firm okay so the first one is data management and this is really the main reason accountants should use a crm system one of the biggest keys to delivering successful client service is knowing information about your client so if you don't have a place to house all of your information now that that's going to be a big problem but most people they do have a lot of information stored most the time it's in their time and billing software um or it's in some other type of software that you're using in-house but that information being in something like time and billing doesn't really do much good for someone who's trying to build a relationship your crm is going to let you store that client contact information and personal data and your interactions everything you need so maybe you want to track your clients birthdays so you can send them all birthday cards i mean everybody's doing that now but maybe you want to go a step further and you want to develop a little more personal relationship and you want to remember some important information maybe your client opens up and tells you about their wedding anniversary or maybe that they're expecting their first child in six months or maybe your client is someone who has a big celebration for the anniversary of their business each year if it's left up to your memory it's highly unlikely that you're going to remember to wish someone a happy anniversary or send them a baby gift because we all have way too much to remember but if your client is one that really you know it really makes a big deal out of that anniversary you remembering each year the anniversary of their business is going to be something that sticks out to them and it's going to be going the extra mile and using a crm system that makes stuff like that easy so once you know that information you just put it in the crm and you set tasks to remind you of anything that you need to remember secondary to all this information it's going to be a great place to track all of your conversations that's whether it's an email or notes from a phone call or a meeting i people think that i am crazy but i track everything and i write everything down and it's you know if i talk to someone i talk to someone recently that was telling me how they were get hoping to get back into flying that that was a passion and they were going to take some more um some more lessons on that and i just thought that was so cool we talked about it for such a long time and i made a point to put it in my notes and it was funny because when i went to reach back out it was months later um so i had conversation a while ago um when i went to reach back out i i saw that in my notes i thought oh my gosh i've got to ask him if he got back into flying i would truly probably would not have remembered that left to my own because i just don't we all have so much on our minds but leaving those little nuggets leaving a trail for yourself is going to help you really personalize the experience you have with your clients so the bottom line is when you use your crm for data management you need to house all of the important information about your clients and prospects so that you can improve your communication quality and you can have it more frequent and more efficient and i'm talking with my hands a lot today so i apologize all right before we move on i'm going to go ahead and launch the first pulling question oh well it doesn't really make sense until we get to the slide 10. oh sorry sorry i'm afraid it's kind of all based on this i'm sorry is that okay he already launched it but uh yeah next time go ahead and tell me when you would like me to launch the next polling question okay okay the uh i will um did you do we need to relaunch it i already launched people are answering because they don't talk them through a tie yeah yes which of the three ways to use a crm would be the most beneficial to your firm that's the question well you just heard data management and we'll talk about opportunity management and client service in just a second but we touched on it a little bit opportunity management has a lot to do with forecasting revenue and client service is really about the experience that your clients and prospects have using that data we'll talk about in a second nathan i have the triggers in the um okay okay all right that's fine yeah just a comment folks we had a question about zoho crm begin and using constant contact uh begin as crm lite zol crm is going to be a full functioning crm with all kinds of custom fields and integration of books and things like that so it's it just depends on what what do you want to use like a just a contact management it'd be like crm light like begin zoho crm the key thing there is the deep integration with tools like zoho campaign so rather than using constant contact if you have a zoho license with zol crm and campaigns you can use those they're directly integrated and will work really well for you in my prior organization getting into crm is a big deal for us we were actually using constant contact and that was one of the reasons we went over to pretty much a full zoho house was because of the integration with campaigns campaigns are great tool for mail campaigns and and works integrated right into zoho crm ty you should be good to go now okay are we good to go yes ma'am all right um no you're fine okay let me see making sure questions are good finally joel got audio thank you joel i'm glad it worked out all right so we talked about data management you saw opportunity management in the poll so we want to talk a little bit about that and this is one of one of the ways that i think makes such a big difference on accounting firms because in addition to to the data management your firms are able to track all of the prospecting and new revenue opportunities in the firm and this really covers a few different areas so one of the things that the pipeline management does is it it allows the firms to understand forecasting and pipeline management and what that means is when everyone in the business development process is utilizing a crm to track their opportunities with potential clients what it does is it takes all of those opportunities and based on where it is in the process it assigns a percentage so you may have a million dollars of opportunities that the firm's working as in total but it's not realistic you're going to sign all million dollars worth of clients so what this allows you to do is is it it automates the process of assigning those percentages and figuring out what's realistic that you're going to have coming in and making sure that you have better data to go off of and we'll talk about what you can do with that in a little bit um but outside of those leadership level reportings um it also helps you stay on top of each opportunity so you can track your tasks in those crms and automate some of those processes and let's say that you've been in talks with the prospect and and they told you you know they're actually open to a conversation but they've got a big project coming up and they want you to circle back in two months to start the conversation you know you can use your crm to either set the task to remind you to reach back out to that person or you can actually automate that process in in some way to to do that outreach as well additionally when you manage your opportunities in your crm you should be tracking those conversations so that when the time comes to move forward in the process you have all of those notes from those previous conversations in one place which is going to make it easier for you to prepare for the meeting and then the third big initiative in terms of utilizing the the crm in the firm is for client service and this is where it all kind of comes together and if you're tracking all your data and you're tracking your opportunities then you're gonna be able to pull some pretty pretty significant client insights and kpis from your platform so when when all your client data is in that central repository you can find trends in your clients that will help you provide greater service maybe you know you're having to do outreach on the same topic a lot maybe there's there's gaps in your communication that you can automate or add into the process it's also going to be able to make you more proactive in your outreach and it's going to help you tailor that communication you send to your clients so the crm is going to give you insight into market segments that you can give you insight into market segments that are more lucrative than others and it's also going to help you know where to focus your efforts so we just did our first polling question uh and so now we can actually jump into we talked about the three initiatives that accounting firms can can use the crm for let me talk about some specific ways that you can use your crm in when you get this in place so these that we're going to talk about are not by any means all-encompassing but i really just want to give you a couple ideas of ways that you can use the crm that you're looking at or have in place um to to start the process you know crms a lot of times are big animals and one of the most important things that i will challenge you to do for those of you that are looking at these or implementing them is think about what areas that you really need to see immediate improvements on your processes and then make a long-term plan for how to use the platform because it's a lot at once and a lot of times a staggered approach can can help you generate the buy-in you need from the individuals in your firm to make it a long-term success so the first way to use the crm that we're going to talk about is the way to enhance your personalized relationship with your clients and prospects so we talked a lot about this but think about all of the clients that you've had over the course of your career how many people have you touched it's been thousands think about your current clients how much personal information do you know on each one of those with client service and relationships and loyalty being probably the hottest topic right now in accounting um you you're not going to be able to provide that without some serious help and some back-end support and that's the main point of a crm to help you build your customer relationships it's a place to not only store the information but automate some of that relationship building process so let's start we'll break this down by how you can do it for prospects and how you can do it for clients so first let's think about the prospects hopefully uh you have quite a few prospects in your pipeline that you guys are are consistently working to build trust in relationships so that you can eventually convert them into clients the problem is which i know all of you know some of these prospects could take months or even years to convert so how are you going to remember every interaction with them let's say that you meet someone from a business that you want to bring in as a client maybe you're at a networking event and everybody's talking freely and you you know you're really having a great time and they give you a ton of insight as to what they do now maybe some of the things they're struggling with or some of their frustrations we've all seen that come out and in easy conversations and maybe some of the things that are going well but maybe that person isn't in a position to make the move for the company or maybe that person knows that the company isn't ready to make a move but it really is a good prospect so let's say maybe you don't make contact with them again for another year normally what people have to do at that point is start the process all over again you've forgotten what you talked about you've forgotten those conversations maybe you're in bits and pieces but when you have all of that information all your notes all your conversations all your communications stored in a crm when you pick that conversation back up you're already informed and it's interesting because what you'll see is when you're able to reference that conversation from a year ago or even two years ago your prospect thinks you've been thinking about them and it really makes them feel important instead of having to say okay so i know we talked last year um let's just start from the beginning and and you know see where we need to go if you can reference those conversations it makes a big deal uh in in being able to move forward and not having to start over builds trust and it's going to help you move that prospect forward now i know not all prospective clients work that way but so much valuable information gets lost in our email i'm one of those crazy people that um you know on your phone you either have uh you either have no unread messages or ten thousand and i'm a ten 000 person it's 10 307 we looked at last night so much information gets lost because there's so many different ways of communication and we forget conversations so another thing that that tracking this can help is if you meet someone at a networking event and you know you're really excited it's a great prospect and you're excited to to try to win their business but maybe you get back to work and you look in your crm you could find that someone else in the firm has already been working with a different connection at the same business now this is it prevents two people from you know going at odds over the same business allows you to work together and it prevents some of that miscommunication you just have to think about it this way if the entire firm embraces your crm system then you have access to all of the communication from others in the office and in this type of centralized data makes any business development initiatives so much more efficient and personalized so let's think about it from the client perspective and and really the same can be said for client service to your current clients um it's it's so helpful when your entire firm is using the crm because that communication is housed centrally and maybe you know you have staff that might be sending emails maybe you have managers that have some communications um think about how much easier it would be to be able to prepare for a meeting if you could easily reference those notes from your last conversation you can reference the notes from any conversation anyone else in the firm has had this helps you have a better conversation with those clients and provide better client service it helps you prepare and it also helps you tailor the conversation and provide that personalized touch so i pulled just a little screenshot from zoho and in this you know brings in your lead information it gives you some information about their industry where the lead source came for um and then as you scroll down through here as you're working through uh zoho there's places to track all these communications there's ways to track the emails as as as val mentioned and it really is going to help you build those personal relationships all right the second way is it's going to make your communication much more efficient you know every business struggles with staying front of mind of clients and prospects i i feel like we talked a little bit about emails but i feel like right now we are in a world where you're always reading emails you're always getting phone calls you're seeing text you're on social media the communication channels are all around us and they never ever ever seem to turn off so as much as you know you're you're taking that in your clients are taking that in as well so it's incredibly important that you stay in front of the communication with your clients and prospects and again it is virtually impossible to remember every email that needs to be sent out every phone call needs to be made without some back-end support and that's really where your crn is going to bring a ton of value when you add in automated communications you can make sure that you're never going to miss an opportunity with a prospect you're never going to miss an opportunity to build trust with clients and in turn make their end user experience so much easier so how do we do this with prospects well if you're trying to cast a wide net and work with a lot of prospects to bring in new business it can be exhausting and it truly can be ineffective if you don't automate at least part of the process part of converting that lead into a client is through a nurture process where you have to provide value and trust i know you guys have all all been there you can't just find someone on linkedin and oh great they'd be a great client for our firm i'm just going to call them up and see if they'd be interested in letting us do their work they don't know you they don't like you they don't trust you it's no offense but that's part of the process to move a prospective client into an actual client and so if every day you had to think about what to send prospects and who to email and when you would never get any work done this is the number one reason why so many people give up in business development because it's an overwhelming process so it's it's not to say that i want you to take the personal interaction out of nurturing prospects you have to have those actual conversations with them but you can easily stay front of the mind by sending prospects valuable information on an automated schedule using that crm integration that val talked about earlier this helps to efficiently qualify your prospects it also helps to warm them up and it makes sure that your friend of mine when they're ready to convert all right another really great way to improve your communication using a crm is to streamline the onboarding process of new clients so when a new client comes on board with you think about what type of process you have now you have to get them signed up you have to get their personal information you have to get prior your information you have to make sure you're introducing them to the team and the list goes on and on the beauty of a crm is that you can help automate this process by building workflows that could include anything from emails to tasks and essentially create a step-by-step process that walks both you and your client through the process efficiently and in its entirety i mean this is one of the best ways that firms can utilize a crm to getting people on board and making sure nothing is missed in the onboarding process now if you don't have a streamlined process now this is going to make a huge impact but if you do have a streamlined process that's fine the crm is just going to help you automate that process and it's going to eliminate any gaps in communication plus when you do it through the crm and you have all this communication stored there you're going to have that information at your fingertips in the crm in the future so just a quick uh picture uh this is a little bit on the welcome email so what you can do is you set up these workflows and and they're just it's a huge huge time saver and it takes the the mental process out of this and the manual checklist and it really can incorporate everything that you need to do as you go through the onboarding process all right uh the third way that you can use a crm to actually improve your processes in your firm is through brand building and brand building is an incredibly powerful way for you to incorporate your crm into your firm traditionally accounting firms aren't really known for marketing initiatives other than networking and sponsorship that has changed so much over the past five to ten years but it's something that can always be improved upon and with there being so much more remote engagement there are tremendous opportunities to use a crm to help accounting firms build their brand image so oh do we have a question no okay uh okay sorry i just heard a little background noise all right so with your prospects one way that a crm can help you with your prospects is with the ability to tag your prospective clients ing to their interest so you shouldn't stop at managing the data and just putting in the information putting in the bare minimum the more information that you can put in the crm about your client your clients and your prospects that's what's going to help you tailor the communication you know if you have someone tagged as a prospective client that um that is interested in cfo services if you have another prospective client that's interested that's working in the construction industry there's different you've got to think about services you've got to think of industries different ways that you can tag your clients and group them so that the communications that you send to your clients are more customized your prospects and when you customize those communications you're able to build a brand image with that prospect that really aligns your vision with their needs and when you have these insights tagged in your crm you can also use that communication to differentiate your brand and define your brand and really build that know like and trust for your prospects ty are you coming up on a pole again um probably need another poll and while you're looking at that let me just comment about this uh essentially a custom field or you know key information you're using you're storing and that that's how it really sets you apart with your brand with your customers in arnold form we started this by building our own debase database of customers and we had things like what was the last gift we gave them what what college are they big in supporting the area additional notes it made a huge difference when we would go back and talk to customers it was like people were like you remember that stuff wow you guys really care about me and we're like yeah we do but we're kind of cheating in a way cheating on the back end because we're keeping that information but it really helped us stand out as a small firm and the firm just exploded i'm very pleased to say i've been gone from that firm for probably 20 years and they're still just doing terribly well and a lot of that was due to the the technology used at the time and the way we engaged customers differently than many other firms in the valley i love that i absolutely love that and we're not quite to a poll but you're welcome to start it um it does talk about some of the things we're getting ready to talk about but it'd probably be another little bit so if you want to throw it up you're welcome no go ahead ty get up to your top and don't throw the pole there sorry sorry i was just sorry all right okay so so as we're talking about brand building really along the lines of what val just just said you really should not stop tagging the interests of your prospects but understanding the interest of your clients helps you tailor that communication it helps them think that you care about them know that you care about them i mean i know val said you know you're kind of cheating by keeping that but you care enough to want to remember to want to make those notes so you can remember and so i think you know as much as it is cheating we all have to do it i mean you know my my husband still writes down our anniversary i still have to remind them and that's more important than our clients so you know you have to write things down to remember not a big deal all right so just a quick uh screenshot of where you would do this right here you know in zoho you age or tag they need taxes then you payroll you can put in any custom field there's a lot of different ways that you can track this information in zoho uh from there talking a little bit about client insights i mentioned earlier once you have all this information in one place it's not enough to just have it there you want to analyze that data and as your firm continues to grow these insights help you make better business decisions and grind guide you to better productivity and growth so one of the things that that i really love as we get into business development side of it and what the crm can do for you as you nurture a lead the crm can do two things one it can give you insight into how engage your prospect and in the same respect your clients are with you which in turn helps you understand where they are in in the decision process in the relationship because your crm should be able to tell you when your prospect engages with an email that you sent it can help you see interactions on your website as well as on social media through different integrations and imagine having that insight when you're trying to sign on a new client let's say that they're extremely engaged with your business and you can see these insights but they aren't moving as fast as you hoped you can at least feel better to know that they're still engaged and you can continue the conversation additionally one of the the really fabulous ways is as you continue to work these leads you can start getting insights onto what lead channels are providing you the greatest number of leads as well as the highest number of conversions that helps you figure out where to spend your time i mean that is such a huge thing we don't have time to go out there and keep doing more business development we still have work to do so the more you can add an efficiency the better and this is one of the ways that can help you figure out where to spend your time additionally client insights are just as important it's going to help you see profitability as well as areas of opportunity for your clients so the more you are able to segment your clients and see different trends the better you're able to service your clients and it might give you insights into how to streamline your services or it might give you insights into new marketing ideas uh this is one example of of how we've tracked that on our end in terms of you know leads by source you can see which ones get the most and where you should spend the most of your time so the more data you have in here the better information you get out of it and the last section is really pipeline and growth management and like i said this is one of the most challenging ways for accountants to embrace the crm and it's not because of what the pipeline is because accountants for the most part understand the math behind it but it isn't something that's traditionally tracked this way in most firms so the pipeline measures as you remember the potential revenue based on your opportunities that you're currently working with your prospective clients so how does this work with prospects well this is a big deal because tracking your pipeline is is crucial to understanding your potential growth from new clients and the key to using this effectively is to getting everybody on board with the crm and they're tracking their activity if just partners i've seen this at so many firms just partners use the crm and yes you can get a good view into opportunities that they're currently working but what about everybody else what about some up and comers that you have in your firm if you test them to start developing new business you have to see what they're working to how are you going to coach your future leaders or help them become good at this if you don't have any insight into their processes and the crm is going to give you insight into their strengths and weaknesses and help you coach and secondary to that is thinking about how well you're staffed if you have a significant amount of new business potential this helps you plan for staffing and workload when you know what's coming i see so many firms that don't track this information and they find themselves in reactive mode because they realize they're under shaft for the amount of work that's coming in and that that's one of the big benefits is being able to plan for that the crm also helps you identify uh upsell and cross-selling opportunities for current clients because when you track the work and your interactions you can better understand what additional needs the clients have where they could benefit from additional services or look for trends and this is really this is really an example of what that pipeline might look like you may have a ton of information in there but it throws the amounts in based on the percentages at each stage to give you a realistic view of what you would get and that brings us to question two i know we've been excited to get there oh yeah here i'll go and launch it ty and just a reminder if you want to receive a cpe you have to to answer three out of four polling questions and ty um just a reminder for you you have about 16 more minutes um just a heads up i i got you i don't have much more after this okay we need to get two questions in if we can ty so hustle hey let me tell you you guys are going to be shocked i've only got a little i know here we go here we go that's right all right we're ready all right so as we come to the end of this i just want to ramp it up with some of the key considerations for you guys to think about when implementing and choosing a crm uh because it is so overwhelming when you look at each of the additional ones all right so the first thing you know we talked about enhancing personal relationships efficient communication brand building client insights pipeline management you need to take a step back and figure out what your biggest pain point is there's so many ways a crm can impact your business but you want to think about what needs to be addressed now and what you would like down the road make sure that the crm you choose has all the capabilities that can scale with you so you can stick with it long term additionally it's important to look at both the internal and external experience when you evaluate the crm if your crm is going to have client access points where they give you information or different communication methods think about how your client experiences this look at that because any client experience you want to be simple straightforward and bring value to them that's the whole point of it and additionally you want to look at how well the crm fits in with your current processes because the easier a crm is to use for your employees and the more value it provides them the more likely it is that they're going to embrace the platform and stick with this long term all right the third thing to think about is your onboarding and support options unless you have it professionals on staff which you still are going to need good support as well but it's going to be important that the crm you choose helps provide support to not only get you set up but that you get set up in the best way to provide value to your firm those customizations you know all that different type of stuff you want to make sure it's set up right and that they have the ability you have the ability to get that support um all right fourth you want to think about what it integrates with does it integrate with any of your current software providers any of those integrations like now mentioned earlier with zoho integrations with other platforms that you use it helps to streamline all of the processes and it makes it easier on the end user and those that are implementing so at the very least you know you want to make sure it integrates with email but other platforms like dropbox g suite linkedin or any other platform that you use that can integrate can help optimize the use of your new crm and lastly we want to think about the customizations you might need in your crm to make it work for you typically a straightforward out-of-the-box crm system it might do the job initially but usually that one size fits all is not the best for your business long term you you might want to add certain fields in the platform like val mentioned to track information about your clients you might want to customize the way your dashboard looks which i know zoho does a great job of or you might want to customize the steps in your sales process on the platform in any of these scenarios it's important to understand the flexibility of the crm you choose so that it can scale with you long term and i told you guys that would be quick there is our third polling question all right i'll go and launch that all right you can um people as people answer you can go ahead and continue well that was it so i was actually gonna uh wrap it up at this point uh my contact information is on the screen you know the goal of today's session was to give you ideas of why accounting firms need a crm and how you can use it to improve the processes in your firm so hopefully you took away some ideas and some ways to get started and things to think about as you're considering a crm and if you have any questions or anything after the fact my email and phone number on the screen and i would be happy to answer anything yeah ty and i didn't launch our uh the last polling question which is just really asking if um you'd like to be reached out by salesy and uh i i did have a question for you do you have you had any experience can you kind of walk us through one of your experiences whenever you saw a client of yours that had no crm system and you tried it you started to introduce them to some sort of system to keep track of clients and what that looks like yeah i think you know i think like i said earlier a staggered approach is really makes the most sense but even before you get there i do think that sitting down if you have someone that can walk you through a best practices you know conversation or what do you what do you want now what do you want down the road and figure out what's most important and how you want to use it because getting that visualization of what you want the end result to be of using a crm that's usually where i start with with clients that i work with um but then it's it's as you figure out those processes you you push out one thing and you start with the data management right like you get everybody bought in but people aren't going to continue to use it if they feel like it's just a task and they're just putting stuff in without getting anything out so starting those automations and bringing up those kpis and getting insights and tailoring conversations and giving them the ability to work with their clients better is where you really get the the buy-in on the end result does that help nathan yeah also i kind of wanted to point out as well that um you know marketing and sales it's not really you know it's about being a people person and having you know a way of with your words and everything but a lot of it has to do with analytics and keeping track of what your clients need so for example whenever we try to reach out for these webinars we look at analytics in order to um advertise our webinars to the right group the right target market and if we kind of go away from that target market it makes it a little bit more difficult to get attendees and also the attendees if they join they might not be the right fit for you know what we're talking about within that webinar um val i don't know if you want to if you want to jump in on this but there's a question on and you might have just answered it in there but on on whether or not you use crm for workflow management which i think are two really separate things but i don't know if you want to touch on that yeah it really is two separate things i tossed out at least one idea there uh xcm solutions and what they do for detailed workflow for firms we do have a workflow tool called orchestry but that would need to be kind of designed out from uh you know for each firm it could you could get there it's a very visual workflow tool and that that could work what you can do in zoe crm though is kind of keep a general sense what i mean by a general sense uh is this is this a tax client is this an audit client is you know where are they where do they stand you could keep track of that easily in crm it's kind of everything completed so you could put a custom field like let's say that they're a tax client and not a client you know are they taken care of for this year but then that's something like you come around the next year you'd be resetting fields whereas a real workflow solution there's gonna know due dates you're gonna have to stuff track you're gonna track workflow like who's working on what um who's responsible for it when it's due so more sophisticated firm workflow you're probably looking at something like xcm or other tools like that okay and there's some people popping up in chat saying that they use um some some zoho projects to track some workflow for clients as well so um yeah i hadn't thought of that that's a good comment too just hadn't thought that on the top of my head and that that could work for certain situations as well yeah the beauty of zoho is it's so all-encompassing there's something for everything and i know that there's always been this discussion of like keep it all in one house or get the best of breed but but it's nice when a vendor actually has best of breed and almost everything so it makes a big difference well what we see a lot is a lot of firms struggle with the with the integration i mean if you go out and you tie together you know even just tying together an xcm and uh like tax prep like walter's claw and stuff even though they're so closely related and talk to each other a lot that integration takes quite a bit of effort and stuff whereas you know what we've got generally the pipes are there it's a matter of turning stuff on and off and connect configuring uh fields and moving stuff forward i would say actually for a firm probably the biggest stumbling block i would see for a firm doesn't have anything to do with the technology it's actually the internal mindset if the firm is not committed top to bottom management all the way down to use a solution you've got trouble often in firms the biggest problem people are at the top they want everyone else to use it but they're not willing to learn to use it themselves or sometimes we see a key management manager person if you will office manager person who's just resistant to change in using their own system of keeping track of stuff and they can often be a real big stumbling block so it really kind of comes down to the internal mindset the commitment of the firm you know folks the technology is there you can do this it can be extremely successful it really comes down to the dedication communication and also layout design like ty's talked about you know don't overwhelm the system don't don't want to track i mean like 30 things per client pick out what really does matter to you to make all this work what do you really need to know then go to your next like i want to know these things but in the base start of all this stay with really what you need to know and then add to it that's right i see a comment there crawl walk run absolutely don't don't go crazy out of the box because you just overwhelm everybody and i think you'll be very very happy with what you get and i think uh we have another question that came through oh no it's just kind of a statement yeah but yeah so ty thank you for uh joining us for this webinar and kind of presenting this idea of crm for an accounting firm um we have her for a few more minutes if anybody has any other questions uh if not we can go ahead and uh in this session yep we're we're good on nas but credits and cpa it's just a matter of families got a few other closing comments or questions and folks just to kind of let you know like i said our first crm we built for auto firm was actually in dbase and even back then that worked so terribly well that we kept it for years and years and years and then along cape tools like act like ty talked about and it's kind of turned the world upside down and now there's there's some really sophisticated tools out there so it's a matter of picking really what works best in your world um val there's a question in here on they're on zoho books is it easy to transfer data over to the zoho crm system you talking about customers from zold books in the crm um it's linda yeah she said i think so yeah yes yep pretty much uh our stuff's integrated so it's a matter of deciding you want to do that and kind of opening the floodgate and turning the switch and they will be available in crm there's a question here about any practical course on crm yes we've got a number of webcasts on crm and we'll probably be broadcasting some more of those soon they'll have a lot more like zoe crm demos and stuff today we want to stay with conceptual and ideas for a firm so well if anybody has any questions that they don't want to put in the chat you're welcome to reach out to me directly and i'm sure val too and you know we're happy to to answer anything we can reach out to val if it's zoho specific and i can answer whatever i possibly can as well and i just appreciate you all taking the time so i'll turn it back over to nathan and val to wrap it up well thank you ty and thanks for like i mentioned earlier doing this presentation really helps out a lot of accounting firms and i'm going to go ahead and put my email in the chat so if you would like to reach out to me about anything zoho related and like ty mentioned you can reach out to her as well and like i mentioned earlier in the beginning if you want to receive the cpe please uh stay till the end i'm going to end the session and you'll evaluation will pop up don't exit out of the screen just go ahead and fill out that evaluation and also if you don't need a cpe and you would just like to fill out the evaluation it helps us out a lot and in future webinars we really appreciate everybody's time i appreciate val and tal as well and uh tai thank you so much yeah thank you all everyone have a great day all right bye everyone bye