Harnessing the Power of a CRM
Why use a CRM?
It's simple. To secure leads and boost sales. If you’re not already using a CRM or email marketing tool, you really should be. The benefits are endless, and once it’s automated, it’s really not that much work. Use Clear Estimates alongside a CRM to turn leads into winning bids.
Before we proceed, though, let’s start with, what exactly is a CRM or email marketing tool? To put it simply, it is a way to keep in touch with your leads and customers with an overall goal of driving additional sales. These tools keep track of contact information (most importantly, email) for all customers and leads. This is essentially a database of the people most important to the success of your business.
You can then send various emails, all designed to maintain a positive and more consistent relationship with your contact list. So, what are the benefits of this? On the most basic level, it allows you to store all contact information in the same place. These tools allow you to more effectively manage client information so that you can market and advertise. For example, say you wanted to send out a holiday newsletter wishing everyone a happy new year. In a CRM or email marketing tool, you can set up what’s called a “newsletter” or “campaign”. You can then write one email and send it off to your entire contact list. The contact will then open that email, think of you and move on. This is the important part. By maintaining a relationship with contacts via email, you are always in the back of their minds. This is a very positive thing when it comes to referrals, or sending business your way.
Clear Estimates Pro allows you to integrate with CRMs and email marketing tools. With the click of a button, you can send contact information in Clear Estimates to the tool of your choice. If you’re not completely sold yet, let’s take a look at this in action.
For our demonstration, I’ll be using Agile CRM.
Let’s say I want to send a recently acquired lead an email as soon as I enter their information for a bid request in Clear Estimates. The email is going to thank them for their time, and to have a look at some of my previous work while I finish up the estimate. The first thing we need to do is set up the newsletter in our CRM.
Then, we’ll go ahead and save. You’ll see our newsletter and the specifics. We’re pretty much all set on the CRM side now. So, let's head back to Clear Estimates.
Back in Clear Estimates, we’re going to fill out the new customer information, like we would any new customer we create an estimate for.
Once the customer information is filled out, we can send it to our CRM. To do that, head over to the Customers page in Clear Estimates. Be sure that you have the correct customer selected and scroll to the bottom of the page. Click Send to Zapier. When we do this, Clear Estimates will send your customer's information to your CRM.
Now that we have sent our customer to Zapier, a couple really cool things happen. First, you now have a record of that customer in your CRM. At a very minimum, doing this for all of your leads will produce a nice email list. More importantly, we can begin an email relationship with this customer. Right when their email is sent to the CRM, the email that we set up will automatically deliver to them. Let's go take a look.
Here is the customer in our CRM.
Here is the email automatically sent to them.
How cool is that? With just a little bit of work, you can set this up to send all kinds of emails to your leads/customers.
Remember that all of this can be done using Clear Estimates Pro. To check out a free trial of Clear Estimates Pro, please click here. Of course, if you have any questions about this, or are interested in learning more, please feel free to give us a call!
Thanks for reading!
