“How’re you Paul?” began Malcolm, one of the best car salespersons I’ve come across.
“And Claire – Is she well too?”
What a memory he has, but it wasn’t his memory, just his CRM reminding him of my wife’s name.
You see I’d booked my Mitsubishi in for its service, Malcolm had a quick glance down the cars in that day and saw mine since he personally sold it to me a couple of years’ ago. He clicked on the number plate and up came my details including Claire’s name.
This is not unusual; many of us have a CRM or customer relationship manager software that captures everything there is to know about your customer, including personal details so you can use them to re-build any relationship, instantly.
Here’s some up-to-date tips and ideas to help you with your CRM
- Have it selected by your salespeople not the IT crowd; it’s salespeople that’ll use it.
- You don’t have to spend a fortune on it; low cost apps cost $10 a month nowadays. Pipeline or Nimble come to mind.
- Tailor it to suit you. Mine has a special field for my customers SDI “Colour” which is a brilliant system I use it to gauge people’s motivation so I can relate to them more effectively.
- Link it to social media so you can hook up with your customer’s LinkedIn, Twitter and so on
- Use it to run your entire business day on. So use its diary, email and contact features.
- Make sure it runs in the cloud so you can access it from any device – your phone is the best one or your tablet or, like Malcolm, your desk PC.
- Update it regularly and use it to your advantage because you want to not because your sales manager says so..
“Your 4 year car plan comes to an end next February, what are you planning Mr Archer?”
“I’ll trade her in Malcolm”
“I’ll make a note on the system then.”
Another advantage of his CRM.
Do you know the strangest thing though, I remembered Malcolm’s name without a CRM, shows we still need our grey matter.
