Clues for the Clueless CRM Marketer

Email marketing and CRM go hand-in-hand. This episode talks about the way your sales team can use email marketing to their advantage.

It's important to know if your sales and marketing funnels are producing as they should or where you can improve upon. That's the benefit of creating opportunities in your CRM. Track what is/isn't working.

Paul continues to share his takeaways from the LA Small Business Expo. This time, he talks about the CRM user profile "The Startup."

Paul shares his takeaways from the LA Small Business Expo. In this episode, he talks about one woman he coined "The Techie."

Andy and Paul continue their chat about the LA Small Business Expo. Paul talks about the different types of people interested in CRM. Today's episode focuses on "The Conflater."

Paul Rijnders joined the team at the Benchmark booth at the LA Small Business Expo. So, I chatted him up to find out what his takeaways were from the day.

If you go through the work to set up the follow-ups in your CRM, they will be triggered as new records are added to your CRM. Then, your workflows will be operating as you need from the beginning.

When it comes to CRM, it's all about the setup. Once you get that done, you can let your work flow through it. On day two of having a CRM, you should set up views for yourself to organize the data.

Let your customers and prospects to the work for you! By creating forms and placing them in places where you need to gather data, you can have your customers and leads import their data themselves!

It doesn't always require a CSV to import data into your CRM. In this episode, Paul discusses how to do it via API with integrations.

Now that you're prepared, it's time to start getting that data into your CRM. Paul walks you through that process with expertise.

Like we said in the last episode, there is some preparation that needs to be done with any CRM. In this episode, we talk about how to get the file all your data is on in order before you upload it to your CRM.

There's some preparation that must take place before you start using your CRM. One of those things is setting the permissions and privacy rules within your CRM so that you know who in your company can see what data.

This episode wraps up our CRM Glossary! It's all about verifying the sender of any email communications from your business. It helps combat phishing scams and other favorite tactics of spammers.

There are no rings involved in this type of engagements. That is unless it's in reference to a customer clicking to call you from a link in an email campaign. That's the engagement we mean when it comes to CRM. All the interaction touchpoints you have with your contacts.

You know when you're completing the purchase process online and you click "Purchase," but then it refreshes the screen and some disapproved red text tells you that you missed some key information? That name for that is data validation.

This is another one of those things that sounds like you'd know what it is, and you're probably right, but that it helps to get in context of CRM. Paul breaks it down and makes it easy to understand all things audit logs.

Forecasts let you predict outcomes with your CRM. They're also apparently dad joke fuel for Andy and Paul.

This is how you keep your data consistent when importing it from multiple sources. One tool might refer to one data field as one thing and you might call it something else internally. You can match it up by mapping the fields.

You probably already know this one, but it's important to know for the protection of your data. It's when you have to have a set amount of characters, numbers and special characters, and maybe even upper and lower case letters in your password.

Sometimes to keep things organized in our CRM, it means saying goodbye to old or irrelevant data. That's where deleting and the recycle bin come into play. Just make sure you know what all that data is tied to! Listen as Paul explains.

Sometimes, you don't want to have to talk to someone. Even when you need some help. So, CRM and other SaaS products create a self-service help center and resources to let you solve your own problems.

Paul may have invented a new way to potty train his twins, but that's not really what WYSIWYG is all about. It stands for "What You See Is What You Get." Listen to learn how it pertains to CRM.

Sorry to disappoint, but all this web talk and it's not about Spiderman. Find out what it means in relation to CRM!

Have you ever thought to yourself, "wouldn't it be cool if I could connect this tool with that one?" With APIs, you can. Not that big of a nerd (like us)? Well, you'll still want to make all your business tools and apps more powerful by connecting them.

Your layout is all about speed and efficiency. Lean ideals to the max. A layout makes navigation of your CRM easy, with everything you need right in front of you.

Fields are simply what you can the places you enter each piece of data into. You can have a little or a lot and customize them as you wish.

This sounds a lot more dramatic than it actually is: In CRM, it's important to know that if you delete a parent (which is the umbrella all child objects live under), all the child objects are deleted too. It's really just a matter of organization.

Assignments and rules may not have been your favorite thing when you were in school, but they're important for CRM. Listen and find out why! 

While Paul and I try not to break out into song this episode (you're welcome), we talk about what "home" means in the context of your CRM. It's all about efficiency and speed. Lean, for those of you in the know.

Each moving piece in the CRM is a module. Any section of your CRM dashboard that you're working on is a module. Each module is a piece of the overall CRM puzzle.

There's the people you do business with who are your customers and then there are the people who help you do business. You may, in fact, be their customer. These are vendors and they're another group of people that are helpful to manage in your CRM.

Sometimes, these words are as obvious as they sound. This is simply who is or isn't using your CRM. Listen to find out why it's important to be able to identify both groups.

When you have multiple users in an account, it could cause some acess issues, data privacy issues or something else. With CRM Admin , you an set who has access to what within your CRM account. You have total control.

Templates help you get started, without having to start from scratch. They're the head start you might want or feel like you need with CRM.

You can increase the efficiency and consistency thanks to Macros. If there is a step that is repeated often in your CRM, you can create a macro to handle it.

It's possible to have a customer support representative who has been with your company for two weeks have the same information as someone who has been with your business for ten years. At least when you have a well-informed Knowledge Base, it is.

A large part of any customer relationship is the support your business provides them. That's why having a system of cases and tickets in your CRM is important. Listen to find out what that means for your business.

You may be sick of the word campaigns with midterm elections right around the corner, but that's not the type of campaigns we're talking about. Find out what campaigns means when it comes to your CRM activities.

Listen and hear our "account" of what account means for CRM. It's just one more step in our efforts to tear down any jargon-y barriers that might make you feel clueless about CRM.

Did you know there's a step that comes before a lead? There is! Those people are referred to as prospects. Learn how it fits into CRM with this episode.

Understanding who you're trying to sell to could mean the difference between making a sale and not. That's why it's imperative to track as much information as possible on your prospects.

Back in the day, the information you had on a client or organization might be a file in a filing cabinet. Today, it's a contact record in your CRM.

You can track activities within your CRM. This includes tasks, events and calls. Running all of this through your CRM allows you to have a complete overview of what your team is working on.

Remember the RONCO oven? It's infomercial bragged that you can "set it and forget it." That's the advantage of automation with CRM. You can set up actions to occur when they're triggered, saving you time and making your communication with customers more efficient and effective.

Opportunities, deals or leads, whatever you choose to call them, means there is money to be made. The ability to easily track them in your CRM will be massive for your sales team.

Understanding your sales pipeline or funnel is imperative for any business. Knowing how it connects into your CRM is even more valuable. Thankfully, we've got Paul to explain it to all of us.

Sure, you may have already identified who your core customer is, but have you ever considered that they're not all exactly alike? You may solve a problem for your customers, but they may have different jobs within their companies or different interests. Creating buyer personas of the different types of customers will help you do more relevant marketing and selling of your products.

Selling to a customer one time is good. Repeat business is great. When you can use your CRM to monitor the customer lifecycle or journey, you can connect and sell to them at the right moment.

We continue defining our jargon-y words in the CRM Glossary with a focus today on Segmentation. Learn how to sort the data in your CRM with effective segmentation. 

When it comes to data, does size matter? Listen and learn all about big data to find out.