Empower Your IT Business with Crm Sales Funnel Management for It

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your business needs sales to thrive but for some businesses these sales can take a while to generate so having a system in place that reminds you of when to follow up can be absolutely the key between you making the sale or losing your opportunity all together so in this episode i'm going to share with you a simple tool called trello that you can use as your own customer relationship management system and best of all everything that we're going to go over today is included in their free version let's dive into the tutorial [Music] all right welcome back now we are going to go over this tutorial step by step today to teach you exactly how you can use this customer relationship management system to benefit your business but trello is not actually intended as a customer relationship management system it is so much more than that trello is a digital piece of software that you can find on the internet it's completely free though they do have a paid version as well that will allow you to do a lot more than what we are going to be covering today but the good news is that everything we're gonna go over today is included in their free version and if you are interested in using trello then it is a great system because it allows you to do many different things for example you can organize your workflow you can work with other people on shared projects and best of all it is a tool that will always be keep you accountable for reaching your goals by helping you set reminders and sending you follow-up emails when they're almost due so who should be using trello as a crm well it depends for example if you are a realtor or coach and you often have 10 20 30 active leads in your funnel then this is a great tool for you because it's free and it can be set up within minutes it's really ideal for anyone who has a more complex or longer sales funnel so for example if you are a storefront business selling candles and you make sales on the spot then this is not the kind of software that you want to use this is mainly intended for businesses who need to follow up with their customers regularly in order to nurture them and provide them with tons of value so that the ndn can make that sale and of course the best of all with a crm is that it allows you to track your progress and measure how many people goes into your cycle and how many comes out on the other side hopefully successfully so you might be asking what exactly is a customer relationship management system if you've never heard about that that's a great question in the industry we often call it a crm system so you'll hear me referring to that a lot in this video a customer relationship management system is really just a way for you to track all interactions that you have with a potential customer so let's pretend that you are a coach and you have someone who is approaching you because they're interested in your services but just because they're interested in your services it doesn't mean that they're gonna book you for a call or a session today they might just take a peek at what you're doing and hence get into your funnel and this could be via a freebie or some other way of interaction that made them provide their email address to you once you have that information they have entered the cycle and how you progress them throughout your sales process will be unique for you and your business but the idea here is that with a crm the customer relationship management system it allows you to progress them along the way and track it so that we can measure if your progress and your efforts are successful because at the end of the day that is the most important thing you want to measure everything that you're doing so that you know if you're being successful and if not then it's time to amend and figure out where we can adjust in order to progress if you're currently enjoying this video i would love it if you could like it comment and subscribe for more great content that way i can continue to provide you with valuable content that will help you grow your business all right so the very first thing you want to do is set yourself up with an account with travel and that's a very simple thing to do simply go to trello.com and sign up by providing your email address you do not need to provide any credit card or any other information just your email address so that you can get started and as soon as you have set yourself up you're gonna get into a page that looks like this and this is where all your boards live and this is where we are going to create your crm system from now as i mentioned there are many different ways that you can use trello four but for this particular tutorial we are only going to look at trello as a crm system so in order to create a new board you simply create a new board you click the button and you give it a title so i'm going to call this one customer relationship management and you can give it a nice color in this case i'm going to give it a nice blue color and then you create a board now from here we want to start creating your sales funnel and pending on your business that's going to look a little bit different for each type of business for today's example we're going to use a pretty generic sales cycle that will work for most types of businesses and once you have seen how this one works you can very easily go in and add additional steps that you have in your sales funnel so that you can keep track along the way how to set up your boards so the first thing that you're going to do in order to create your boards is you're going to go up and you're going to say add less so i'm going to add cold leads as my first one and then i'm going to say warm okay so now that i've set up my cycle i have cold leads warm leads discovery call offer made closed one close lost and follow up and you can continue to add as you need for your unique business once you have your board set up with all your different steps within your customer relationship management you need to start adding your leads and the way that we do that is by going in here and adding a card and we're going to start by giving this card a title and in this case we'll just call it john smith and once you have created that title you can go ahead and click on it and that will bring up another window that will give you a lot more information that you can enter so for example you can add unique details about that particular customer and this could include the address this could include a birthday it could include where they came from [Music] anything that's important for you to remember regarding this particular customer i also like to start by adding a start date the date that this customer came into your cycle so if that date was today you can go ahead and click that and that just indicates when the whole relationship started so that you can track how long it takes for you to get through the different steps within your unique cycle you can also add checklists within this so if you want to add a checklist you just go ahead and say add checklist and from here you can add steps to your customer that you need to do so if you need to send them a follow-up email this is something that you do every single time you can add that as a step in your cycle and maybe you need to do a check-in [Music] on day five all of these different things are just a way for you to keep track to ensure that you don't lose the ability to make a sale from this particular customer and you can check them off as you go along so that you can see how you're progressing now with the free version you don't have the ability to add a due date to the checklist but you can add a due date to the overall list so if there is a step that's due let's say that we have to send this follow-up email in three days i can go in here and i can say due date and i can add it in here instead so let's just pick monday because in this particular case that seems to make sense and now i know when i get the reminder on monday that i have to go back in and do the first thing on my checklist and once i have checked it off i can go in and i can move the due date again to be applicable with the second step on my checklist so that's one way you can get around the fact that this is a free version and if you want to upgrade later on to take full advantage then you can for each one of these at a due date but it does require the paid plan another feature with these cards is that you can add labels and labels can both be color coded and they can have text and this could be anything from where your lead came from or if you just want to identify a certain type of customers with a particular color code for easy recognition later on perhaps you have some wholesale customers or you have some direct customers so this could be indicated by that so i can say wholesale and i can save that as green and i could take this one and i could say direct [Music] customers and you can actually have multiple colors at the same time so for example if you have categories that are overlapping you can use multiple labels so once you have all of this created in the format that you like you can go ahead and make a template so that next time you have a lead you can easily use the same format to keep it consistent so i'm going to go ahead and say make template and then from here we can go in and we can say create card from template and then we can go in and we can change the name and in this case it now becomes jane doe and we are going to add her to our cold leads and we're going to keep the checklist and the labels sure create card and now it's bringing up jane's card and if we want to go in and change things at this point we absolutely can because maybe something else was applicable to her and we want to go in and edit her address to update it and of course indicate where this particular lead came from and then we want to start our whole process all over again we want to make sure that we have the correct start date maybe that was tomorrow in the future that this lead came in and when is the first time that we need to take action on our checklist we want to add that in as well and we want to be reminded it's completely up to you i like to have it at time of due date in this case but it could be the day before it could be the day aft not after it could be the day before or it could be a couple minutes before the choice is there for you you can also add other members to this card so for example if you are working with a team member or a va who's responsible for a lot of these things you can go in and you can say add members and you can add them so that they can collaborate but until then you can just leave that off one of the things that i also really like when it comes to the cards is that you can go in and you can add every single interaction that you've had with that particular customer and that's where the activity part of the card comes in so let's say that you send john an email on february 17th i might go in and say email sent to john on february 17th and if you have multiple people working on this card for example within vang they can also go in and add notes and you can see exactly who made the note so that you can keep track and you can collaborate in order to of course hopefully win this client to become one of your future clients and there are options that you can do from it within here too you can add different emojis you can search for team members if you want to mention something for them you can go in and you can add attachments and you can also add a card or a board from one of your templates and then you can go ahead and save it and if you don't want to see these details if you don't need them all the information you can just go ahead this it always goes in and tells you what has happened with the card so that you can see when it happened and that's where the power comes in when it comes to how long it's taken for you to go from cold lead to one you want to be able to see how long it takes because that's part of the tracking process now what happens after this this potential lead has come into our sales cycle something's going to indicate in your cycle what's gonna move them from step one to step two so once you have identified what that is and that interaction has occurred it's time to move them along so all you do is you grab the card and you move them from the cold lead into the warm lead and so forth and as you continue having more and more clients you will see that all these cards start to fill up and you might find that you have 10 people who have just completed a discovery call with you but you only have two new customers that's come in as a cold lead so when you have all of these different segments it's going to be extremely easy for you to see where your sales cycle is really strong and where it might be lacking because you always want to have a consistency between all of these areas so that once you're at the that you won all these cases or you've lost them you want to make sure that you still have an influx of new people coming into your sales cycle so that you can generate more sales the overall idea is of course to keep an eye on your potential needs and nurture them to become hopefully future clients of yours and that requires a system that allows you to keep track of not only the interactions that you're having but also the different things that you need to do to be successful in your sales cycle and that's going to look different for every single business so you want to identify what those are and get them in here so that it becomes as optimized as possible at the end of the day hopefully you have most of your leads right in here in the closed one case but you will also find that there will of course be some that goes into the lost and this becomes a part of your statistics make sure to keep track of it make sure to figure out where things went wrong so that you can best understand your sales cycle and optimize it for the future all right that's it for this week's episode my name is wendy standish and i hope you have enjoyed today's episode and that you now understand how powerful it is to have a customer relationship management system that you can use to keep track of all your potential leads so that they eventually can make sales for you if you're wondering about what other tools and strategies you should be implementing for your business then check out my website .winniestandish.com and then schedule a call and find out how i can help you grow your business and provide you with the small business freedom that you deserve have a positive and productive day