Client Relationship Management - The Next Step in Scaling Your Business

1. Last Summer, we decided to turn a corner in our business. For nearly two years, we had run the business on instinct, skill, and our reputation with clients and this served us well. We had the opportunity to support clients from a variety of service industries, added social media management for a handful of clients, and designed some truly stellar brands. But we knew that to grow, we needed to put systems and tools in place to make our lives easier and give us the longitudinal view we needed to successfully grow and scale. One crucial piece of the puzzle was implementing a Client Relationship Management (CRM) tool that would take a lot of the guesswork (and manual processes) out of our daily operations.
   
   CRMs are tools that businesses of all sizes can use to automate and enhance many of their processes. Anything from maintaining a list of clients, curating communications for different segments of your audience, developing newsletters and other visual materials, to creating invoices and processing payments. Going through our own CRM Implementation, we learned many lessons about the research and decision-making processes. We’re excited to share some of our takeaways and hope that if you’re finding yourself ready to take this next step, these insights will be helpful to you and your team.
   

   The Right Time

   Some would argue that there’s never a right time for anything, but for us, we knew it was time to start exploring CRM options when we were spending so much time on the mundane, day-to-day operations, that we were unable to focus on the “big picture/long term” goals we had for our business. We knew that having one tool that could handle administrative tasks, allow us to start cultivating a really strong email list of current and prospective clients, and automate much of our operations, was going to free up the mental space we needed to think bigger and allow us to focus on long term strategy and growth.

   Investment

   Developing and implementing a CRM requires a significant investment from you and your team. This includes the financial costs of the tools themselves, as well as the time and resources you will need to be successful. It’s entirely common for businesses to choose a tool and then lose steam through the implementation process which in turn, creates an expensive and useless resource for everyone involved. Preparing ahead of time so you know everyone is on board with the process and that the right people are involved in the discussion (think end users not just decision-makers). Also understanding the various levels available with each option can help you save costs now as you work up to a bigger package and more functionality. You don’t have to do it all at once!

   Know What You Want & Do Your Research

   We knew we wanted to be intentional about our search so as a team, we spent time reviewing all of our current processes, systems, and subscriptions. We discussed what we liked, what we didn’t like, and what we hoped to get out of a new solution. We took these key takeaways into discussions with potential vendors and asked a TON of questions. Could it do this? How about that? Does that cost more? What if we grow beyond that? Through this process, we also were able to negotiate the costs of our tools based on the number of users we needed and the capabilities we were looking for.

   We hope to bring you more lessons learned as we continue to implement our chosen solution, including more details about the tool itself and why we’ve loved it so much! We also plan to bring more service offerings related to CRM implementations later on this year so keep an eye out for those announcements!