Streamline Your Document Signing Process with Lead Nurturing CRM for Accounting

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all right welcome let's see if i can figure out i'm transferring to you right now so tai is the founder of sales seed and sales is really dedicated to helping you know firms grow their business and ty has you know quite a bit of experience in sales and accounting and training and ty i'll kind of let you kind of fill in more uh absolutely and and thank you guys for having me today uh sorry for the little snapchat at the beginning it's been a crazy day um but it looks like my camera is working things are getting underway and i'm really excited to talk to you guys today uh about using a crm as val said we've talked about this multiple times in the past uh about the importance of using a crm in an accounting firm and just the the value of the information in there and part of what we do like nathan said is help accounting firms grow by implementing sales strategies and processes uh which really is not that scary when you understand that it just means giving you a framework to to grow successfully and to grow easily so um i'm going to let you guys monitor the chat nathan and the questions and if i need to jump in just you know let me know as we get into there but i want to go ahead and just kind of get us kicked off and get us started so you know before we even really jump into talking about what a crm can do i like to set a baseline of really what a crm is and by definition your crm is just your customer relationship manager or your customer relationship management system a lot of people you know hear about this and and know that they want to jump into it and know that they want to explore it but they just don't really even know what it is and it's a technology that is built to help you manage all of your firm's interactions with past present and potential clients to help you reach your retention and growth goals uh as val mentioned you know he worked with one a long time ago that and i hate to say a long time ago val sorry about that it wasn't it was back in the beginning of crms and it's come a long way as he said there's all kinds of different vendors out there they can be simplistic or complex um and that's i think one of the reasons why accounting firms have been hesitant to to adopt this in the past because it is a lot it's just a lot to take on so what we want to do today is go through a little bit about what you want to think about and how you can use it and then see a demo at the end i do like to talk a little bit about the history of crms because these really only started in the 1970s and it started based on companies using customer satisfaction surveys uh to really evaluate what their customers thought of the business and at that time there wasn't a really good way to track this other than through spreadsheets and lists so it was 1986 when the first crm system came out which was called act and it was basically just built on a rolodex of the the businesses clients or customers and it's come a long way from there now it's really um the technology is incredible and is a way to help you track that prospect and customer data to make better sales marketing and retention decisions so there's a couple specific components uh that i think are important uh in the crm that that help your business and those are there's there's data warehouse technology that gives you kpis uh out of all the information that's in the system to help you make better business decisions there's opportunity management that helps you track your pipelines and your sales forecast to plan revenue more accurately there's the ability to track marketing campaigns and analyze your customer interactions and the contact management is really what allows you to keep all your client interactions in one place all right and let's actually talk about the four different types of crms very quickly so when you look at crm systems that are on the market they they really can be categorized into four different types you've got strategic you've got operational you've got analytical and you've got collaborative and the one that you guys want to focus on which is what zoho falls under is um is the strategic because the strategic type of crm systems are the ones that are built to help you develop a more customer-centric business culture and i mean that's the number one goal of accountants right now uh that i talk to the majority of them out there is really to start building that service oriented firm and in building loyalty and really just just working with that customer client base all right so why shouldn't accountant use the crm knowing what you know about what we've talked about so far my question to you is why would accounting firms not use the crm and we hear day in and day out that firms are becoming more and more client centric and they want to focus on relationships and i don't know about you but if i had to rely on my own memory to build those relationships and have that type of communication it's too much and that's why so many people fail so your crm system is going to help you stay on top of all of these initiatives and utilize that technology that's available to support you in all of these endeavors so let's start with three specific ways that accounting firms can use a crm all right so let's get slides following us uh the first one is for data management so one of the biggest keys to successful client service is knowing information about your client so where we start with a lot of firms is thinking about do you have a place right now where you house all of your clients information that includes your business and necessary personal information for most people that's their time in billing software that's kind of their home base but it doesn't do a lot of good for someone who's trying to build relationships crms not only let you store that contact information but also the personal data so maybe you want to track your client's birthday send them a birthday card everybody's doing that now maybe you want to go a step further and track more important information your client you know may open up to you and tell you about his or her wedding anniversary or that they're expecting their first child or maybe that they celebrate the anniversary of their business every year if it's left up to your memory you're not going to remember to wish them a happy anniversary or send a baby gift because we're all so busy i mean i i have to write down my niece and nephew's birthdays you know there's a lot that you have to do to remember this and your clients probably fall further down on the list so you want to get to a point where your crm can help you automate these tasks i know they seem simple and they seem kind of basic but it's that extra touch and that extra mile that really drives that service in your firm the second part to this is it's a great place to track your conversations whether that's an email or notes from a phone call or a meeting when you start recording this information in your crm and you keep track of all the interactions it doesn't matter if it's you or someone else in your office all of that information is there and available to those that need it so that you have that when it's time maybe they told you about an important business decision that they're considering if you include that in your notes in your crm you can pull that up uh for your client or your prospect before your next meeting so you can reference any of those previous conversations and remember what you need to ask them and trigger those conversations so data management's really a big piece to this and in addition to data management the second piece to this is opportunity management and this is really the process of tracking all of your new new client prospects or new revenue opportunities for the firm and and it covers a couple different areas um you know one of the things that kind of blows my mind about working with accountants is that they're not great about doing their own forecasting or pipeline management if i ask them you know how many um how many new clients do you expect to sign over the next month quarter year what do you expect your workload to be what's your revenue projections a lot of it's based on historical data and not necessarily actual forecasting pipeline data that they they know and is tangible and it is realistic so you know we get into pipeline management in other areas it's it's too much for us to get through today but you know it's important to make sure you can automate that process and the crm can produce forecasting reports for budgeting and revenue planning very easily if you're tracking that information in there and the second piece to this outside of that leadership level reporting um you know it also helps you automate the processes so let's say that you've been in talks with a prospect and they tell you that they have a big project coming up and to circle back in two months if you use the crm you can set a task to remind you of that and so the nice thing is is once you have the technology in place it becomes kind of like your virtual assistant it becomes that person reminding you and staying on top of everything you need to do when it comes to those business processes and the third piece is um is using it for client service management so if you're tracking all of your information as well as your opportunities then that's what sets you up to start getting client insights and with that you're going to have all of your data in one place where you can find trends on your clients that will help you provide greater service um these insights will help you become more proactive in your outreach and it's going to help you tailor those communications that you send to current clients it can also help give you insight on market segments that are more lucrative or you know where you really need to focus your efforts so you know once you get your crm set up there's a lot of information that is going to come to you in that process and it's it's it's pretty magical once you get it all set up and working for you with that it brings us to our first poll so i'll let nathan go ahead and pull that up and i'll check out some of these questions so really just the first poll question is which of the three ways to use a crm would be most beneficial to your firm it looks like people are leaning more towards client service management ty yep that makes sense just a quick ad there ty one of the things that we learned early on with our little rudimentary access crm thing my partners in the firm wanted to add a field essentially tracking per client what gift we had given them before different gifts we'd given them and one of our other clients actually taught us the trick that if you give a customer or client a gift that's nice enough you really don't need to put your logo on it they always remember where it came from that concept worked really well for us and we tracked that in that database so all kinds of stuff you can track and yeah and by the way i don't mind old yeah i've been in the industry forever so you can just call me way old no no no no no no no but i appreciate and i love that i actually love that little tip um branding's good sometimes you know sometimes there's better options and you know what options right i um i actually talked to someone recently who uses the cr their crm internally as well and i thought this was so cool because we were talking about culture which is totally off topic and i promise i'll get back on but he actually kept track of the last time he complimented each of his staff members nice he didn't want a month to go by without giving them positive feedback because he feels like all they do is get negative so i thought that was really cool too so absolutely because you know we often think wonderful things about great work they've done but we forget to tell them how they did a great job yes and he said when he first started doing it he did not he was blown away by how much time went in between him giving compliments so he was like it was it was a big deal for them so it was good all right so jumping back in we'll talk a little bit about some of the ways accountants specifically can use a crm in your firm to see value in those three areas we just discussed now what i want you to know is these are by no means all-encompassing this is just to give you an idea of how to get off the ground in some ways that could make an immediate impact the other thing to mention is crms are also big animals so the most important thing that you can do if you're choosing a crm and rolling it out is to actually figure out what is most important and stagger the approach because the biggest indicator for success is buy-in and the best way to get buy-in is not to make big keeping changes at once so maybe prioritize some of these and see what makes the most sense for you as a firm so one of the first ways you can use a crm and one of the biggest ways that that you can make an impact is to enhance the personalized relationships with both your clients and your prospective clients so you know think about you know all the clients you've had over the course of your career how many people have you touched how many current clients do you have how much personal information do you know about each one of those it's a lot it's hard to remember everything about everybody and with client service and loyalty as we we mentioned becoming such a hot topic it's just not realistic to think that you can provide exceptional client service to clients without some help so the main point of the crm is to help build those relationships and it's a place to not only store the information but to help you automate those processes and build it so let's look at what that means specifically for first prospects so let's think about your prospects first so hopefully you have quite a few prospects in your pipeline that you're consistently working with to build your trust and relationships so that you can eventually convert them into clients the problem is anyone that's in been in business development or growing their own practice is you know that that prospects can take months or even years to convert so how do you go about remembering those interactions you know let's say you meet someone at a business that you know would like that you want to bring on as a client and maybe in that networking event they gave you tons of information about what they do now maybe some struggles some things that are going well but the business isn't ready to make a move and let's say you maybe don't make contact with that person for another year instead of starting that process over if you've got all of your notes and conversations and information stored in the crm you can pick up that conversation right where you left off and the nice thing is is they truly think that you care about them you do but it helps prove that you care about them that you remember and you remember those conversations and that's going to give you a leg up on your competition right that you don't have to start the process over and you have a little trust built now i know that not all prospective clients work that way but so much valuable information is going to get lost in your email or forgotten conversations um you know think about the fact that maybe you meet someone at a networking event and you come back to the firm and you find out someone else is working that connection from the same business crms help eliminate some of that head-to-head uh you know miscommunication because you know what everyone's working on at the same time all right the last piece to this is is that centralized uh communication management is if multiple people are working on the same client and you go to have a meeting with them you'll be able to see all of their emails all their contact information everything that's gone on in the process to that point to help you become more informed for all of your meetings as well all right let's talk a little bit about how this might work with your clients so the same thing can be said for client service to your current clients you know it's so helpful when the entire firm not just leadership embraces the crm because then you have all of that communication housed internally and i see this a lot where they just want to roll it out with leaders and get their buy-in and then get it out to everyone else but the beauty is in having all that information in one place um so think about you know again how much smoother those meetings are going to go how much more prepared you're going to be going into meetings and it allows you to really tailor the conversation and provide that personalized touch when you have access to all the communication with your current clients the second piece to this is it allows you to become more efficient with your communication as well you think about what it takes to nurture your leads or your prospects or even your clients so that they feel special it takes a lot to stay front of mind you know it seems like we're always getting emails we're getting phone calls texts we're on social media there's so many different communication channels around us and they never seem to turn off so it's incredibly important that you also stay in communication with your clients and prospects but it's virtually impossible to remember every single email that needs to be sent or phone call that needs to be made without some type of technology backing you up and that's where your crm can bring a ton of value you can automate some of these communications whether it's having the system automatically send certain emails to um to to warm them up you know some some lead nurture type stuff or whether it tells you it sends you a note and says hey this is when you're supposed to call someone this is when you're supposed to email someone um it can automate a lot of those processes for you to make it um to make it more efficient so how does this work with prospects so let's say that you're trying to cast a wide net and you work a lot of different prospects to bring in new business it's exhausting and truthfully ineffective if you don't automate some of that process part of converting those leads is like i said that nurture process where you have to provide value and build trust not everyone is ready to work with you the first time they visit your website or the first time that you make that connection and if every day you had to think about you know what to send to a prospect and who to email and when you never get any work done so you're setting that up and making sure your crm helps you do this is a big part of the process all right with current clients another way that this efficient and automated communication is helpful is with the onboarding process we've seen so many firms that have really become so much more efficient uh in onboarding new clients when they automate this process so you know when you're using a crm it can be something as long as it integrates with other platforms which it should uh you know you can you can send a welcome email you can trigger someone to reach out to ask them for certain information you can trigger different emails that need to go out over the course of the first month that are based on when you get things in and what needs to be done when you automate that onboarding process it really helps you just close any holes and gaps that you have and it can also make those new clients feel valued and get excited about the relationship because it's something that you know you don't have to think about just i've got to get this i've got to get that it it automates itself and it provides a ton of value to your clients all right another section where you can really add value to your firm with the crm is brand building and you know traditionally firms aren't known for their marketing initiatives even though i feel like that's changing a lot right now um it's always been networking and sponsorships but because of all of the remote engagement now there's a tremendous opportunity to use your crm to help build that brand image so one way you can do this is that you can tag your prospects um ing to their interest so let's say that you work with some medical practices and let's say that you work with um i'm in kentucky so i'm going to go ahead and throw out horse farms uh maybe you work with restaurants if you tag them with certain interests or if you tag them by you know their um their their corporation set up how they're set up you know when you have certain information that is relevant to a subset using those tags helps you tailor that uh communication that you have to your prospects so that they know they feel like you understand them and you they you're they're getting information that's relevant to them as opposed to just very generic accounting information and truly the same can be said for clients as well you really shouldn't stop the tagging uh with just your prospects when you understand the interest of your clients you can better tailor their communication as well so when you're sending them stuff that's important to them you're building that loyalty and brand awareness a crm should make it very easy for you to get valuable information out about tax law changes um that may impact a certain subset and and that's really going to help establish you as a thought leader as well all right two more sections before our next polling question you have client insights and we we touched on this a little bit in the beginning with the data management but it's so important to know that when you have all of this information in one place it's just as important to analyze the data so as you continue to grow these in these insights help you make better business decisions and guide you to greater growth and productivity on the business side so how do we understand you know what what does this mean in terms of prospects well it gives you a lot of insight into your prospecting activities as your nurturing leads your crms can help provide insight on how engaged your prospect is how many emails are they opening how many click-throughs are they having which helps you understand where they are in the process someone who's clicking through a lot of emails and visiting your website is more engaged than someone who hasn't opened an email you know in two months right and so the nice thing is is as they start to engage more you can start to see that they're warmer leads and you can start working with them more to try to convert them you know this jumps into lead scoring if any of you guys are are numbers geeks kind of like me i would definitely if you're looking into marketing you can look into lead scoring but it's a little more than we have time for here uh but i think you know as as you work with your leads and as you start getting insights you can figure out what what lead channels are giving you the greatest number of leads where your highest conversion rates are so you can start becoming much more efficient with your business development activities which is is what we all want right and then in terms of client insights when you look at your current clients this actually helps you it can help you understand profitability as well as opportunities within current clients so the more you can segment your clients down to see these trends the better you're able to provide service right and this additional type of insight can do a couple of things it can help you streamline the services you offer if you see these sub segments or all need specific things you know it may be a new a new product line that you want to add and it may give you ideas for new um marketing segments and in in different ways to position what you're doing all right the last piece to this is pipeline management and to me this is probably one of the hardest things for accountants to embrace when they look at their crm and it's not because they don't understand the math behind a pipeline because they do easily it's just most firms don't track their projected revenue through a pipeline or forecasting so you know pipeline is as you know now measures how much revenue a business or a firm can expect based on the opportunities that they're currently working with prospective clients and when you track those opportunities in a crm and you include the the likelihood of closing percentages and the closing dates you know it's really easy to calculate realistic revenue based on what's in your pipeline right now and it's it's incredibly it's incredibly important if you've got everyone in the firm doing this you can see what you know your next month three months six months 12 months are going to look like so when you're looking at understanding growth potential of new clients right the key is to get everyone on board like i just mentioned and tracking their activity if it's just the partners yeah you're probably going to get a good view into opportunities that are working but what about everybody else you know what about your up-and-comers if you task them to start doing business development you want to see what they're working on too it helps you coach them it helps you understand you know are they able to get meetings or are the prospects falling off or do you have someone who's just blown it out of the water with a close ratio this is going to help you identify strengths and weaknesses and where you need improvement and realistically forecast your revenue now the second piece to this which firms that do this this is the biggest advantage they see is that when you can accurately forecast your revenue you also know how many staff you need right so if you are about to close a bunch of new business or if you have the opportunity to close a bunch of new business you may have an increased workload and you may need to bring more people on and this allows you to become proactive with your staffing as opposed to reactive which can be a problem that might you know impact client retention you bring a bunch of people in and you don't have the capacity to work on it all right uh lastly when it comes to your clients the crm is going to help you better understand how to identify upselling or cross-selling opportunities for your current clients so when you track all these interactions in your crm you can better understand what the clients can benefit from based on trends and additional services that are discussed it's the same as with prospects it's important to know what revenue opportunities you have with your current clients because that's where the majority of firms see their first jump in growth all right and that brings us to our next polling questions i'll let nathan go ahead and pull that up yes so it's looking like which function of crm would be most beneficial to your firm it looks like people are saying pipeline management i love it yeah number one right now i love it you guys are my people that is i love to hear that because it's it's one of the biggest impacts you can have in your farm when you implement a crm but it's kind of scariest it's it's so easy to kind of think about doing and then if you don't do it you kind of lose track of certain uh aspects oh for sure i'll give this about 10 more seconds and we'll continue ty sure you know the proper tool really kind of takes care of that for you once you just start managing the connections the contacts and what you're doing and the pipeline kind of fills itself with the proper tool so really really great concepts i'm like val i'm such a i'm such a technology geek i love seeing all this and what it can do to to change a business and it's pretty magical i love a good crm i'm excited for you guys to see zohos in just a second we're going to wrap up with a few things am i ready to jump back in nathan yes ma'am perfect all right so we're just going to wrap up this part of it with a couple of considerations that you can think about as you're looking to implement the crm and what you want to make sure you consider as you go through the process because as i said it's big it does a lot there's a lot to think about right so the first thing that you want to do is think about what your top paying point is like we just mentioned um there you know pipeline management was one of the biggest ones you had you know but there's we just talked about five different ways enhancing personal relationships efficient communication brand building client insights and pipeline management there's so much more that a good crm like zoho can bring to the table but sit down and rank those pain points so you know what you need now and what you need long term so you know that that the platform has the ability to scale it out and what you need to do to scale through that process all right the other thing you want to look at is what are the internal and external experiences when evaluating a crm if you're going to have client access points which a lot of them do and you know in communication methods you think about how your client experiences this you want it to be simple and straightforward and bring value to your clients you also want to make sure that it's easy to use internally because that helps with buy-in right all right the third thing you want to think about is your onboarding and support options because unless your firm has it professionals on staff it's going to be important to choose a crm that will help you through the process if you get it set up and customize it the best way possible to really bring value to your farm the fourth one is think about what it integrates with um you know does it integrate with any current software providers you know the integrations help you streamline the process and make it easier on the end user and those that are implementing at the very least i feel like it's a must that a crm integrates with your email system but there's so many other platforms like dropbox g suite linkedin or any other platforms that provide immigration will just make it easier to automate those different types of services so make sure you know what integration options you have and then lastly you know you want it forward think towards any customation customizations that you might need in order to get your crm to work for you you know a lot of times a straightforward out of the box system will do the job initially but that one size fits all you'll see isn't really the best option long term and i know zoho has tons of customization options that you can do you just want to make sure you know if you want to add a certain feel to the platform to track information about your client you might want to customize your dashboard or you might need to customize the steps in your sales process you know any of these scenarios you want to understand the flexibility of the crm so you can scale with it long term and with that said i have another uh question in here so nathan i don't know if we need to throw that up now and after that we can turn it over to the demo yeah we'll just go ahead and do the third polling question a little early so we can do that demo so really we're just asking do you have an internal sales process that you will need because to be customized in your crm and it's okay if the third option is your answer because that's an option for that is what a lot of people say what's a sales process yeah definitely kind of like what val mentioned earlier uh just a lot of accountants don't necessarily or i guess during your presentation you're kind of touching on that is a lot of accounts don't necessarily focus on the sales side because they're so focused on the day-to-day activities also i'll give the whole question about 10 more seconds and then we'll continue with the demo one other just helpful hip tip too for those of you in public practice working clients in bookkeeping we learned one of the the greatest ways to market your firm one of the greatest ways to expand your business and pick up new clients absolutely is word of mouth and actually it kind of help requires you to do a little bit of work to kind of kick it off we had somebody mentioned one of our managing partners that you know at the end of every good chunk of work you do for a client is you kind of close up your conversation with them just have a little quick little conversation and say look if you like what we do would you please tell your friends because and by the way you share that with the clients that you like because the good people seem to hang with the good people uh the clients that you don't like we'd have to have another conversation another day about how do you fire a client and that's just a terribly difficult thing but use this trick and just say you know spend the extra few seconds here and just say if you really like what we do you know recommend your friends and other folks to come work with us we started doing that and we were stunned at the results even just in a year or so that's awesome hey and then you know you take that a step further now if you track those referrals in your room that's who gets the really nice unbranded present at the end of the year oh yeah absolutely and if you've got a good crm system to help you track that and help you out absolutely so ty i'm going to take uh control away from you and give it to tala sorry about that oh okay all right tyler are you there i sure am i'm transferring control now dawg all right well let me go ahead and share my screen with everyone and you should be able to see my crm dashboard now is that correct yes we can talk okay fantastic so um thank you so much tai for walking us through all those really important discussion topics on why it's important to consider a crm so actually taking a look at a crm system i'm just going to show you a few of the different ways you can actually utilize this i want to just throw a disclaimer right in the beginning which is a crm system is as individualized as every company is so there's no two crms that are going to look the same that are going to be the same but there are of course all of the kind of common features that you can utilize um so what you see here is something that for the most part you can really customize to fit your own organization so the first thing you'll notice is i have my dashboards available to me now in a crm system you're typically going to have multiple dashboards that bring you information from a variety of different sources so in this case i currently have my finance dashboard brought up that's because this crm account zoho crm is integrated with our zoho books accounting system and so that's showing me in information such as invoice status average balances and their difference based on their different statuses sales based on different users sales by customers and so on so this is some great information that i can actually customize i can add components here i can choose exactly what's relevant for me now you may want to take a look at lead information for a business so if you remember leads are basically any piece of information you have about someone that may potentially be a client for you and so leads could be brought in from a form that you have on your website right so you might have a contact form on your website that says contact me or for example a really great um example a real world example that i saw is before kovet we were going to a lot of trade shows and i actually had someone um come up to us saying hey i use zoho crm and i told them about this mobile app that zoho has it's a free mobile app called card scanner it's just a business card scanner but it's a really you know neat um tool where it just auto scans the business card then it pulls out the different information and i told them you can actually sync it into your crm so that the information from those from those cards automatically gets pumped into the leads module in your crm system and once you actually just take a picture of that card you can have your leads module automatically send out a welcome email so for example i just added myself as a lead a couple minutes ago and i had this workflow automatically execute this email that was sent out to me it's a you know very basic email just saying hi i was next meeting you and you can have some information about your organization there but it's just a way to get into someone's inbox right away right when you meet them and setting up a workflow in crm is very simple it's simply a matter of choosing your criteria so in my case i said whenever a new lead is created go ahead and shoot out this message from this template to this email address that's been added now the view that i'm looking at here is actually the leads view inside of a particular lead now you can see that there's a bunch of different fields here and this is something that you can customize completely to your organization so this is something that you know you may not need an industry field for example that may be something that you want to change up and put some different piece of information there something that's related to maybe their accounting or bookkeeping or you know potentially uh some information that's going to help you in determining what's a good fit for the types of services that you can offer them or maybe down the road now these are all um part of a template that you can edit so you can choose which fields are those are you can add new fields you can make these drop-downs you know for example if you have pre-selected choices these can be number fields text fields text boxes really anything that you need it to be you can actually choose that here once you've actually created a lead what typically happens is that leads are converted so when you convert a lead this actually says that hey i've already made contact with them this is someone that is engaging with us in the sales process and we are going to convert them so when you hit convert what happens in uh in zoho crm and in this case i already have this email address so it's letting me know hey this is a duplicate so add it to the existing contact so i'm going to go ahead and do that but what happens in zoho crm is that leads get converted into accounts now accounts are essentially the organizations that you're working with and by organizations i mean they can be individual customer businesses or actual customers themselves and this is really the central repository for all the information about your customers that you have so when val was talking about tracking information on you know gifts that you're going to send out to a customer an account is exactly where you would have that information tai was talking about i believe you mentioned having like birthday information this is where you know you would see a lot of information now inside of an account you have something called contacts so contacts are the individuals inside of that potential organization now this of course if you're working with individual customers and not businesses then you may not have multiple contacts in the account and that's okay but if you uh you know typically are doing some type of business to business contact or excuse me business of business sales then you're going to have contacts where people inside of that organization and so this is where you'll actually find those individuals so in this case we have this individual aptly named banana apple and they've got their own set information so what's relevant about this is that they may have their own email address right and you may have a personal relationship with them at that organization and you want to have some details about that organization listed here maybe some details about them specifically and those are details like like birthday that you could list here um and that's a a part of the business relationship that you have but it's specific to that person now of course this is also helpful because people switch roles within organizations and you typically want to continue your relationship with that company so that doesn't mean that all of the core information that you have in your account has to go to waste it can actually simply just be added as a new contact the other contact can be archived there yeah also mentioned sorry to interrupt um i'll mention that whenever you have different type of contacts as a organization you're able to see what contact can provide what information to use so for example if you're an accounting firm you can put you know the banana apple email as the person who provides a monthly uh payroll statement or they're the ones who provide the sale right you could have you could have accounts yeah maybe maybe sally in accounts payable is the specific person that you like reaching out to uh when you are looking to get paid um that's a that's a a great example as well so there are specific roles of people within that organization um that you can get in contact with so thank you for bringing that now the the other main function of this accounts module is that it has all of the inter the interactions that your your organization has with that client so what i mean by that is you may have multiple people interacting with this business so you could have other employees who send emails to this particular client now if i were to go back and actually show you another account i can go down to emails and i can actually see emails sent from a particular person in my organization or from all different persons in my organization you can do the same thing for leads and what's really useful about that is let's say the person who is the account manager for this particular business is on vacation or they're out sick and you need to find some information for that particular client maybe they give you a call maybe they have a question about some type of service that you're providing or they're waiting on a response to something so instead of having to go to you know aaron and say hey can you please tell me a little bit more about you know what you were talking about with this client here you can actually simply go down to this particular client view all of the emails listed here and actually see them organized here directly so it's really a central repository for all information not simply basic contact information so it's going to have let's say phone call records listed here notes from conversations meetings and appointments those are all listed here as well it really brings in all that information in one place now you'll notice there's a bunch of modules that kind of skipped over um you know you could actually use a tool that zoho has called zoho desk this is a support ticketing application where instead of simply getting emails from customers into a general inbox they'll go into a kind of round robin style system where it actually tracks how long it takes to respond to them it raises tickets to different support technicians if you have them you can even use this on a small organization simply to know that you are responding to a client within a set period of time and it just makes that a whole lot more organized but all of those tickets can be shown here as well we also have our zoho subscriptions finance application integrated here and so if this client is enrolled in any of those subscriptions through our zoho subscriptions product i can actually see which subscriptions those are the status of those when the next billing date is and information about them i can also drill down into the subscription to get further details on exactly what it is that they purchased and even pull up invoices directly from my accounting system here and i can view them as well if i need to so this is the main accounts module now the other part of a crm system that is something that you'll have to decide whether it's relevant to your workflow or not is using something called deals so most organizations that use a crm that have some sort of sales system uh sales workflow use deals to organize specific sales now this doesn't i would i would not say that this applies specifically towards um bookkeeping services or accounting services because you typically have a longer duration of that relationship whereas a deal is kind of a fixed period of time but let's say you were actually working on a particular project for a client that was a fixed period of time maybe that's a migration or some type of reconciliation or tax work that you're going to do this is where you can actually send a propose send a proposal to the client and actually walk through the different stages that you have so these are all customized stages you can change these to however you know workflow that you have in your organization and you can say once we sent the proposal they you know moved it to the next option and you can actually choose what those different status options are and then you can then know exactly what your standing is with different clients so this is really useful if you know hopefully get to the point where you're working with multiple clients on multiple proposals and you don't want to get your wires crossed in terms of figuring out exactly where you are deals are a really great way to organizing that and then the deals belong to the accounts that you are working with so you can always pull these up directly from inside those accounts and again deals have their own set of information attached to them so maybe you have some attachments here some information that you would like to put in here notes you might have competitor information maybe they said that they've gotten a competitive quote of course these are all customizable and you'll notice that some of these are probably unlikely to apply to an accounting organization but are nonetheless really important even expenses related to maybe securing this deal taking out a client for lunch or sending them a gift these are things that you can log here as well so these are the basics of a crm system now in terms of the customization options i just wanted to take a second to go into the back and kind of show you a little bit of a peek behind the power that you have in a system like this so one of the main functions that you're going to want to utilize is workflow rules so if i go into settings here which was that tools icon and down into the automation section we'll find workflow rules so workflow rules allow us to create if then statements that execute a set of actions so the one that i mentioned earlier which was the welcome email you'll see that this is set up for the leads module and let's actually take a look at what this looks like so it's a very basic workflow it says when a new lead is created right this will be executed when new lead is created we're going to execute this for all leads so i can actually filter this and say i only want to execute this for leads that meet certain criteria so maybe we have a field that separates out the type of client that we are working with so maybe this is a regular bookkeeping client maybe it's a migration client maybe it's a tax client and i can send a different email based on which criteria was chosen when the lead was created so in this case we're doing it for all leads and we simply have an action so that action is send this email notification using this template that we have called welcome email and this is the one that i showed you a few moments ago now we can do additional actions that say and i zoom in to kind of show you what these look like i can update a field so a field update would be changing information on a different module or a different source of information that i have so this could be a field update in a deal for example if i have one that's existing or update inside of the leads module i can apply tags to this maybe there's some kind of categorization that i want to do or grouping email notification which you saw even creating tasks this is actually probably one of the most useful features for workflows which is you can actually set up an automation that says every time you have a new lead you're going to create you know three or four tasks they're they're assigned to different people and that's something that you do every single time and instead of having to manually do this or let that person know that this is something they've got to get take care of you can simply set these up set these up for yourself for example and just have these created and get notified that hey you've got to send um you know certain piece of information you've got to onboard them you've got to execute these tasks that's a really great way to simply automate these functions and not have to try to remember to do them the same goes for creating newer records if you need to do that web hooks are a little bit more complex webhooks basically connect into the apis of another application so whether that's another zoho product or a third-party app that you're using this requires of course some development expertise or a developer to help you with this and then a function is actually writing a custom function that executes um some some other sort of action so these are instant actions and then you have scheduled actions so maybe you want some sort of task or email to be executed many days after this so maybe seven days after a week later you want to send a different email that says hey you've been with us for a few days now and we really appreciate having you reach out to me for um you know for a discussion or maybe 30 days or 60 days later so these are all the sorts of workflows that you can create i definitely recommend that you take some time to do more research on exactly all of the tools that are available to you because the crm system is really only as powerful as the person who knows you know what they're doing inside of it and of course the information that you bring into it so there are a lot of resources for zoho crm going into a product like this you can go to zoho.comcrm and visit the um the resource pages here so there are videos there are classroom trainings there are webinars that you can take just like the one you're in right now but specifically for crm um there are ebooks there's so much information it really is zoho's flagship product and um there are probably enough things to keep you busy there for for a long time but if you do have questions you can always come to us please you know talk to tai get information on how you can best set up in a crm for your organization and really kind of make that step hopefully for this next year to make a commitment to being more organized with your client management so that is kind of it for the demo we have a couple short minutes for a q a um let me bring this back over to nathan either yeah i think so i'll go and take control again and yeah i i included the the website for crm within the chat section so if you want to check that out you're welcome to and i believe nathan we have one more polling question so i'm gonna go ahead and watch it for you yeah so let me go ahead and get it to ty's contact page and our last poll question is just really if you would like ty in the sales seed to reach out to you um she obviously provides a lot of services around the sales for your firm and she um she's been partnering with us for quite some time now kind of putting together presentations like this and kind of be on the lookout for future presentations she's going to be doing for our organization as well before we close out the session i just wanted to ask ty to come back on and give us your last words yes can you hear me yes tyler again yes um famous last words where that was an awesome demo of zombies sadly it didn't even scratch the surface of all it could do you know we that would right a few days for that i think yeah exactly but no it's a phenomenal product and the way it integrates with the swing is is huge but you know really now is the time if you guys are wanting to get um get organized before you jump into busy season it's the perfect time to start planning this out and looking at small steps you can take to take advantage of this even before you start with busy season other than that i just appreciate you all having me on and um hope you have a wonderful rest of the day yeah thank you ty we really do appreciate you uh jumping on this presentation and thank you tala as well for going through crm for us of course and i just wanted to remind everyone please don't close out your session once nathan ends the session for you that's how you can fill out the evaluation and receive your cpe later this afternoon which i'll send out to you thanks everyone and by the way ty is correct now is the time before you get to busy season to get after stuff like this and i think you'll be very pleased you did thank you for being here today all right thanks everyone have a good day