We’ve all been there, that Monday following a holiday break, vacation, or conference. Going into your email settings and disabling that Out of Office autoresponder, the worst. What’s even worse is that huge obstacle of jumping back into your daily routine and catching up to where you left off. Fortunately, there are tools out there for you, and the most important one, a CRM. It’s not just for your customers anymore.
There are many ways a CRM will benefit your business/publication in the short and long run; however, it’ll also take a huge amount of stress off of your shoulders. Here are three quick tips in using a CRM to benefit your back-to-work routine.
TO-DO LISTS
We all have those to-do notes, maybe they are Post-It notes on your monitor, or perhaps you place them in a notepad application on your smartphone. Do you know where they should be? Your CRM. Why place to-do lists in your CRM? Because if you are using your CRM daily (which you should be), then you’re going to look at them the first day you’re back in the office, plus you can assign those to-dos to certain clients/companies.
Before you left for vacation your contact had mentioned to call her when you return. You spend the next two weeks drinking margaritas on the beach, did you remember to call her? If you have a to-do with a notification on her contact file, you did. Skip the pencil/paper and create your to-do’s in your CRM.
CONTACT NOTES
Adding notes and recording calls/emails is vital for a CRM to succeed. Perhaps you were just talking with Juggsy Jones on the phone, and he had mentioned that was taking the next two weeks off to travel Africa. When you get back from your break, you’ll see that note and know when he returns, and also wish him a pleasant return when he’s back in the office himself. Those personal touches are vital to strong customer relations. Take it one step further and with that note assign a to-do task to call Juggsy when he returns. That’s fully utilizing your CRM.
CONTACT RESEARCH
Getting ready to attend a conference? Know who’s going to be there? Now is the time to use all of those logged calls, saved emails, notes, and to-dos to research who you’ll be seeing at that conference. Perhaps you had a call with a prospect from a year ago, and they had mentioned that they were looking to spend additional advertising in a year, seems like a great opportunity. As long as you are properly using your CRM and logging all data/information, you now have an encyclopedia of your prospects, suspects, and clients at your fingertips. That is invaluable information that you couldn’t find anywhere else online. As they say with any CRM on the market, if it’s not in the CRM, it doesn’t exist.
Don’t have a CRM, or your CRM can’t accomplish the tasks mentioned above? It’s time for a new system. Click here to request more information about how MagHub can combine all departments into one system, to run your entire publication.
