CRM Specialist | Customer Relationship Management 

December 13, 2015

By  Jeff J Hunter

CRM Specialist | Customer Relationship Management

With all the advancements in business automation, a CRM Specialist has become an integral position in most businesses to improve their customer relationship management.

The days of the excel database to manage your leads, prospects, and customers are over. A CRM Specialist can work to develop customer experience workflows.

From a visitor’s first engagement with you, all the way until after they’ve become a customer to keep them trusting and buying from you again and again.

To maximize your time so you’re not babysitting each of your contacts, automation is key to keep track of your contact’s interests – because we all know that knowing your customer is what’s key to offering true value.

What is a CRM Specialist?

A CRM Specialist is the person that looks at the big picture from start to finish. This is all about the user experience, nurturing your leads or someone who is exploring your website and understanding their process through your website.This person would work with your CRM automation software (like Salesforce or Conversion Marketing 101 for example)

A CRM Specialist can help you develop your messaging on the front side, can help you drive engagement to your website by collecting contact information, and then set up systems to better understand each contacts needs and develop a highly customize experience based on that.

The key purpose of a customer relationship management specialist is to do just that – manage your customer relationships through automation systems so that you can drive more sales, and keep repeat customers.

Here’s how EVERY Sales Funnel Looks, this is SUPER simplified of course to the below three segments:

As you can see in the funnel above, you’re going to have a lot of visitors, a smaller percentage of leads, and an even smaller percentage of leads who convert into customer. Using conversion marketing you can develop an individualized strategy with your CRM Specialist to target people based on specific needs.

Customer Relationship Marketing

To me CRM should be changed to Customer Relationship Marketing because it should be a tool to drive leads down your sales funnel to convert into customers, as well as introduce new solutions to your existing contacts.

We’ve now reached a point in automation technology which managing your contact is very intuitive if you’re using the right tools. Here are a few ways a CRM Specialist can determine the interests of your contacts using a CRM / Automation System:

  1. Knowing what pages, products, or services that a person navigates on your website.
  2. Which pages people contact you on, or what drove them to contact you.
  3. Researching contact information on Linkedin.
  4. Discovering interests on social media like twitter, facebook or other platforms.
  5. Engagement on emails that are sent out (opens / reads, clicks, topics).
  6. Tagging customers / Leads based on content they view on your website.
  7. Set up an active script on your website to place cookie to better understand your audience’s actions.
  8. Develop automation sequences to tag interests and segment your contacts in certain newsletters, podcasts, etc.

There’s actually endless possibilities with the constantly evolving CRM systems, but those give you a good feel for how a CRM Specialist can help you further improve your customer relationship management.

The Digital Strategist

As stated above we’re living in automated times and you should position yourself as a digital strategist. My grandfather who I call “Poppop” was born in the early 1920’s he’s survived a lot, he’s got a Purple Heart from battling in World War 2, and he’s taught me a valuable lesson in life when I was a young boy – “Only dummies work hard” he would tell me.

He never told me what it meant, and honestly – I never really got it until I actually started working. I remember when it sunk into me in my late teens, and I discussed it with him, and he looked at me and said – “You need to work smarter, not harder”.

That’s the joy of automation, as a digital strategist, utilizing a CRM Specialist can develop workflows develop relationships for you – automatically, no joke. When you get rolling, you’ll want to add more to your team like a virtual secretary to keep you moving along.

Create Workflow Automation Segmentation

There are three main types of contacts that any business has in the in their sales funnel. Whether it’s a gigantic business, or a small single-owner operation you’re going to have these three:

Visitor:

Your very beginning phase is your visitor, this is really the top of your funnel. Most people will be in the exploration stage, and they’ll find your page, and your competitors. It’s critical to have a great first impression.

Lead:

Once you have shown value for what you provide and they sign-up they’ve now become a lead. It’s very important to make sure your messaging attracts the right customers. If you haven’t developed your Individual Marketing strategy you should download the individual marketing worksheet.

Customer:

You’ve made the sale, your visitor signed up, you fit a need, and they purchased from you. Did you know that customers are 80% likely to buy from you again? Are you using this to your advantage or are you just letting it go by the wayside? That’s where the automation comes in handy because you should be re-engaging your customers for opportunities.

A CRM Specialist understands no business is the same

One must stay agile in their marketing efforts to adapt in a highly competitive market.

Positioning yourself in an industry is very important, you want to be the go-to, you want to make an effort to have great quality content. You can of course identify your market by understanding who’s searching for keywords related to your business, but that’s not enough.

You need to understand the competition for the keywords. You can check out our SEO Packages if you haven’t already identified these opportunities – now’s the time.

Sales Funnel Analysis

A CRM Specialist can do a sales funnel analysis to see if you are effectively capturing, segmenting, and re-engaging your customers. In online lead generation there are 4 major elements that should be a part of the sales funnel analysis performed by your CRM Specialist.

Online Lead Generation Process

You really should be constantly evaluating what appeals to your target audience, that’s the first step in your online lea generation. You have to have something VALUABLE to offer, that’s the first stage is an offer, whether it’s a free consultation, a free ebook, a free trial, or whatever – you’ve got to give something of value to have effective online lead generation.

Diagram: Online Lead Generation Process

  1. The Offer:

    • In the offer you want provide real insight to a problem a potential visitor faces. You want to solve a problem, I can’t emphasize this enough, you want to SOLVE a problem.
  2. The Call to Action:

    • Now that you’ve identified the problem you introduce the answer to the problem as your call to action. Example “Start Saving Time” or “Get Started Now” or “Request a Consultation”
  3. The Landing Page:

    • The landing page reinforces your product or service. I have found that bullet points work amazingly on landing pages. Make sure the pain points are identified of your audience, and the solution you provide. PS. Don’t OVERSELL – sure way to lose a customer.
  4. The Form:

    • The form is critical, this is the first true capture of your leads / contacts. The form needs to be designed to fit specific needs of your target audience. You need to put enough information required to filter out the quality of contacts you want. Too few fields could lead to garbage entries, or too many reduce your conversion rate drastically.

The purpose of this blog was to outlay the importance of customer relationship management for your business. If you are looking for automation marketing help to manage your customer database, or attract new leads reach out to us and speak with a CRM Specialist now.

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Our team can save you a ton of time and energy that can be better spent elsewhere. 

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Digital Marketing Strategist with background in Information Technology, Project Management, and Business Process Outsourcing. An expert in content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and dependent on Virtual Assistants to survive.

Jeff J Hunter

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