Customer relationship management (CRM)

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a term that refers to practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the goal of improving business relationships with customers, assisting in customer retention and driving sales growth. CRM systems are designed to compile information on customers across different channels -- or points of contact between the customer and the company -- which could include the company's website, telephone, live chat, direct mail, marketing materials and social media. CRM systems can also give customer-facing staff detailed information on customers' personal information, purchase history, buying preferences and concerns.

Multi-level marketing (MLM) is a marketing strategy in which the sales force is compensated not only for sales they generate, but also for the sales of the other salespeople that they recruit. This recruited sales force is referred to as the participant's "downline", and can provide multiple levels of compensation.

All online businesses and those who run them should be and are most likely either using an CRM tool or doing everything manually that an CRM system could do. Manually doing everything is tedious and a big wast of time. If you deal with any type of sales, leads, or communication with prospects then you might already by using an CRM system unless done manually.

I am referring to an autoresponder. If using one, you can set it up with emails to be sent once they have been subscribed for an amount of days and you can have unlimited amount of emails to be sent out on those days for the right price. Those is sales or MLM, you can add your sales copy/ads to it for prospects to help close deals without manually keeping an list and remembering to email them.

FACT: It takes an average of 7 to 13 emails sent before prospects become an client. I learned about this when I was in the MLM industry.

With this being said, what type of CRM tools do you use? Can be an autoresponder or some other CRM tool such as calendars, quickbooks, notes, etc.

 

I'll start...

I recommend Insightly. Even though, it is new to me and what not, looking into it yesterday, it seems to have a lot of tools one would need. Also, for those who are a small business running it by yourself or with an partner, Insightly is free for up to 2 users. After that, you would need to upgrade so more employees can access it.

Here are the CRM features this tool has...

Tasks - You may add in what tasks you need to complete and by when.
Contacts - All your contacts for your business can be stores on there into one place
Organizations - You may place or add organizations you work with in this section. This will create lists of contacts per organization when adding them.
Opportunities - Any type of opportunity in which you may have now or in the near future of any kind.
Projects - This can be used for any type of new projects you have to do.
Reports - Here you can get the stats of all information in the system and over all outcomes.
Emails - Only thing in this section is an unique email assigned to you. You would send an email to that with contacts you want to add to system by adding them in CC or BCC.
Calendar - Dates for all data in the system can be seen in the calendar and others can be added directly into the calendar.

All of this is mobile friendly and can import and export all information in the system.

 

@Albus & @JohnHolling,

Thanks for sharing!