Copper Staff
Contributors from members of the Copper team
Having a broad network is amazing – but if have you an email address for one person, a Twitter handle for another, and a LinkedIn connection with another, you might want to consider putting everything in one place.
If your contacts aren’t organized, you risk losing some really important relationships in your sales pipeline. For any growing business, getting organized immediately sets yourself up for success. Here’s a few tips to help you get started:
Use your CRM…
Customer relationship management systems organize your sales pipeline into stages by making it easy to import contact details from a variety of sources. Customer information (name, company, contact info, social links, etc.) is all recorded automatically. Most programs also integrate with email so that every interaction is attached to the contact. From there, you can analyze and track your communication across the team to stay organized and engaged with your customer base. In turn, you’ll be grateful next time you need to contact “Will Smith” and can’t remember how you’d usually connect with him.
…and go beyond the basics
Customizing fields within a CRM is the best way to analyze the information that you need for your specific customers. Say you run a cupcake shop. You could add a new field that would allow you to track your customer’s favorite flavor of cupcake that they normally purchase from your bakery. Imagine the look on your customer’s face when the employee asks if they’d like their favorite cupcake by name! This is the kind of customer service that’s lacking in today’s world, which will keep your customers coming back to your business.
Keeping notes on customers – birthdays, favorite products or brands, places they’ve traveled, what city they’re from – via custom fields allows you to create a better customer experience. Unless you have a brilliant memory and/or a small customer base, custom fields are a great way to remember these details.
Taking advantage of automation
At the end of the day, you weren’t hired to manually enter contact information. Every minute you’re not selling equals lost revenue. So, how do you eliminate that wasted time?
The magic of some customer relationship management systems is that they consolidate several steps into one. Newer systems (like Copper) scrape contact information in your inbox to pre-populate it in your CRM. This makes it easy to add email addresses, phone numbers, and other contact data with the click of a button. You can also automatically link to all related emails, files and Google Calendar events (more GCal tips here) across the entire company.
Automating data entry not only saves you time but also reduces the risk of data inaccuracies in your sales pipeline. Reps that use customer relationship management as little as possible put very little effort into making sure what they enter is accurate and complete. In fact, Experian reports that 91% of all companies data is incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate – primarily because of human error. Let technology automate CRM data capturing so you can get back to what they do best: selling.
Want more on how to organize your contacts? Download our 5 Golden Rules of Sales here.
