How We Maximise our CRM for Marketing Success

Wasted resources and missed revenue opportunities could be hurting your business, but you may not even have a clue that it’s hurting you if you’re not using a strategic CRM. Today we’re going to take you on a step-by-step look through Done By Nine’s exact CRM process of how we both market to, onboard and service new and existing clients using a CRM. You’re going to get a true understanding of how we are automating tasks, we’re keeping track of our key marketing campaigns and social media, and ensuring that the CRM is actually helping us to stay on track towards hitting our marketing goals and our overall marketing strategy.

Hi, my name is Jordan McFadyen. Welcome to the Marketing Mindset podcast. This podcast is designed to help you navigate this cluttered world of marketing and challenge you to move away from random acts of marketing towards planning intentional marketing strategies.

And in the last week alone, literally I’ve spoken with two businesses that either aren’t using a CRM in their business, or they aren’t using a CRM effectively. And both of these situations literally aren’t ideal. Both leave potential revenue on the table. One, because they’re actually paying for a system that they aren’t utilising effectively. And the other, they could be actually saving both time and money and resources by having this process mapped out more efficiently in a CRM. And for these two businesses, simply grasping that core principle of a CRM, and opting for a customised system for them, could actually significantly transform their business functions, spanning their marketing, their sales, their service and their operations as well.

So today, what I wanted to do was actually have a look at the role of a CRM, what role does it play in our business, and also we’ll uncover, and I’ll share exactly, how our CRM process here at Done By Nine works, so that you can see and get a better understanding about where a CRM could potentially take you and your business as well.

So before we get into that, we’ll go back and actually have a look at what a CRM is first, for the uninitiated. So a CRM is obviously a software. It’s a solution that’s going to help you and your business streamline and organise management of your customer relationships. It’s like a central home where companies and businesses capture, store and dissect really customer-related data. And it’s going to make it so much more possible for you to be able to monitor different interactions with multiple different businesses.

And an exceptional CRM, what it should be doing is it should actually try and transcend data collation, and enable a real much deeper understanding of your customers. And it really is a tool that’s essentially going to consolidate everything you need to be able to manage your customers in one place.

So you may be thinking, hold on, Done By Nine, we are a strategic marketing company. What does marketing even have to do with building and implementing a CRM? We need to think of this as the cornerstone of any well-rounded marketing strategy, as it really does act as a bit of a powerhouse for your customers’ insights. And so when you’re using this as part of a strategic marketing strategy, it really does then become the key to holding and collecting vital data about your customer behaviour, their preferences, their interaction history with your business as well.

And for us as marketers, it becomes a tool to help us customise our tactics to better suit the customer’s needs overall. And a CRM’s capacity for segmentation, what this also does is it allows us in the marketing efforts to enable the delivery of precisely targeted campaigns to a particular audience as well. And what this is going to do over time is it’s going to actually help you lead to higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction, because you’re really talking to customers where they’re at at that specific time, whether they’re first seeing you in your business, or whether they have known your business for a while.

So if we have a look at a CRM’s role with Done By Nine, what I really wanted to do was, instead of just going through what a CRM is and ways that you could use it, what I thought was actually sharing how we use a CRM here at Done By Nine. So you could take away some of the ways that we’ve been able to build it, some of the ideas behind why we’ve built it the way we have, and also how we use it. And even just to get you thinking about how you could potentially implement a CRM within your business as well.

For us, it’s about trying to attract and retain customers. But also a big focus for us is also how we actually automate some of the mundane tasks that we have in terms of the onboarding of clients and the attraction of clients as well, which in turn, I believe, makes the overall customer experience even better.

So there’s a couple of pain points that the CRM solves for us here at Done By Nine. Firstly, using the CRM to create a real seamless experience between our team. We’re using it to connect to all our different inboxes, which means that data is captured with daily customer interactions as well.

We use the CRM to track our sales process, so down the different deal stages, which helps with managing and clearing a bit of headspace, because you don’t always necessarily have to remember and remind yourself where a different client is at different stages. Are they just submitted an enquiry? Are they out for contract? If you just got a proposal, you needn’t to get a proposal in front of them. It really helps you get a good understanding about where all those different leads and prospects are for you. Being able to use workflows and email snippets can really help. We track all our marketing activity, our email marketing activity, and we connect our calendars up to the CRM as well.

So what I’m going to do now is we’re actually going to take you through a bit of a walkthrough, a bit of a closer look at those critical core points from a B2B, a business-to-business service provider lens. Now, remember, before we go into this as well, that this process fits with our strategy. So it may not be the exact playbook that you want to use in your business. However, like I say, hopefully it just gives you a bit of an idea of how to implement something similar for you in your business, and hopefully it also demonstrates the importance of running a CRM in your business as well.

So step one is having a well-rounded strategy in the first place. And this one goes without saying. This is something I mention probably weekly on the podcast, is having that strategy is just so important. Any recommendation that I’m providing on this podcast today is literally that. You want to actually go back and ensure that you are working towards an overall marketing and business strategy that requires using a CRM to actually track and to actually improve your processes.

So with your strategy, it needs to clarify some key points. And this isn’t what the whole strategy should do, but this is the parts that I think would really complement a CRM really nicely. So the first one is that ideal client persona or personas. Knowing this information about who you are actually targeting will help when you actually get down to segmenting the lists within your CRM. This means you can communicate key messages to your audience that are relevant just to them. That’s the first one.

The other one is making sure you’re really clear on your key KPIs and your goals as well. You need to know where you’re actually heading and how the CRM is supporting that. And the other third thing that I think is really clear for you to get through your strategy is your brand tone, your style, your communication style, how you talk with your customers.

This one is really often overlooked as people are building out CRMs. If you’re not clear on how you’re communicating with your audience across multiple platforms, your CRMs are simply going to add to the disjointed look and feel that prospective clients are probably having with your business at the moment. These are all things that we’ve learned over time as we’ve built this out. It’s been one of those things that we’ve been able to adapt and develop over time. But those are the three kind of key things that I think that you really need to have laid out as part of your marketing strategy, that is going to help you craft your CRM. And once that clear strategy is mapped out, it’s going to make it so much easier for you to be able to actually implement your CRM as well.

So step two is then actually having a look at implementing and encouraging tool usage across the whole business. So we use as a CRM tool HubSpot. And a CRM like HubSpot can be attached to your team inboxes, which means that the entire team then has visibility over previous communications, visibility over proposals if they want to see that, even expectations of a customer or a client. And what this means is that, let’s say a team member is away or a team member leaves the business, you’re still going to have a real up-to-date record of how that client was actually managed. So that’s the first one, is actually encouraging usage of the tool and connecting it to inboxes, so that everyone’s got a real good oversight into how clients are looking across the board.

Now, step three is actually then tracking your sales process, and then thinking about what you can automate throughout that process as well. Because the true power of a CRM regarding sales and marketing is also how it’s going to help you clear so much headspace for your sales process, using what they call deal pipelines, and automation within those pipelines as well. So going back to Done By Nine, we’ve built our CRM in a way that allows us to keep track of our clients and our prospect pipeline and our client onboarding process as well.

So here’s the system that we use. I’m going to break it down as easy as I can for you. It all starts when a user is filling in one of the forms on our website. This is our Get Started form. There’s different forms across the site. There’s also, if people want to sign up just to read and get our content. But if you want to start working with us, there’s the Get Started form, which is that key form that we have on our website.

So when a form is completed, an automatic response is sent to the client acknowledging receipt. This is something that HubSpot does automatically. The CRM sends that email out automatically. That’s nice and simple. But in the background, what’s happening also is this client and their details are getting entered into the CRM as both a contact and as a company. The form that they’ve filled out is helping us to populate their folder and their file in the CRM, so we’ve got as much detail about that client as possible.

And so when a contact is then created in our CRM, their details are then automatically piped into our Xero account. That’s for future billing purposes, ready to go, set up. Also, it’s sent direct to my Google contacts, which is connected to my mobile, which means that my phone contact records are also always up to date, which means that if a client then calls, or follows up with a call, or we need to follow up with a call quickly, we’re not rushing around trying to find that contact’s details. It’s literally all loaded, ready to go.

If a contact already exists, the CRM is going to update their details as required as well. So it’s something else that’s happening in the background. So what else is happening in the background is that client has then entered into our sales pipeline, and they enter the sales pipeline as a new enquiry. And then the contact details are either entered or updated to a status of new lead.

What we do from there is we then qualify all our leads. We actually go through their applications when they go through our website, and qualify whether they are an ideal client or whether they’re not an ideal client. And we have two snippets created in HubSpot, for leads that we believe are the right fit and one for the leads that we feel are not the right fit. And these snippets are loaded into the CRM. But then, if you followed the steps that we were talking about earlier, we’ve connected our CRM to our inbox, which means that we can insert those snippets direct into the emails, so that we can draft real swift responses to our customer enquiries.

So if a lead is unqualified, we move them to “closed, not suitable” stage in the deal pipeline, and they get the not qualified response. All the other clients get our qualified response, and they move to the next deal stage, which is called Qualified.

So the next step after that is qualified leads are then sent an introduction email. And this intro email really explains a bit more about Done By Nine, about who we are, who we are suitable for, the type of client that we like to work with. We’ve identified that we’ve got to communicate that we focus on strategy first. It’s really important that the client understands how we work, the type of businesses we work with and the way that we work as well, and giving the client an opportunity to also qualify themselves.

So, for example, if a client is looking for a quick win, they’re not really going to be ideal. So we explain that really easily in that first email, so that they can get a good understanding about whether they’re actually the right fit as well. And in that email, we actually include then a “book a discovery call” link. So if they do qualify themselves, because we’ve already qualified them, using the CRM calendar feature, the client then selects an available time from that email, and it’s going to fit in with my calendar and with the client’s calendar as well. So it’s removing that pointless back and forth on emails, trying to find a suitable time. And once a call is booked, again, that deal then moves up a stage in our deal pipeline as well.

So hopefully you can already see that the CRM automation is already saving us a lot of manual process. We’re trying to build out some of those foundations with the client while they’re kind of learning more about who we are and what we do, and hopefully booking in a call with us as well, all while trying to also keep up with the speed on where the client is kind of sitting in the pipeline, and trying to keep them moving along that pipeline as well.

So the next stage, stage nine, they’ve started at that new enquiry, they’ve gone through, they’ve booked a discovery call, and they’ve moved from the proposal stage down to the contract stage. Once the contract is signed, then we move that person to deal won. So once you actually win a deal, that’s amazing. The system then will change that lead status and turn them into a client. Now, the reason we do that is that when they turn into a client, we can then send them more targeted email communications in future.

It automatically then creates a space in our task management system. We use ClickUp. It also creates a folder for that client in our Google Drive, and it does all of that automated. So we don’t have to touch a button. All we have to do is literally move that client down the deal stage and set them to closed won. That’s it. And once we set it at that, all those other things kind of take place in the background.

And we then use that CRM to actually then assist with the onboarding process of our new clients as well. So new clients are then invited to actually start with a 30-minute pre-strategy survey that we use to get further in-depth details about their business, and we download essentially their brain, so that we can jump into our first strategy call with all of their pre-work completed. And what this means is we can actually start generating their strategy and start working with them faster. So it’s getting a lot of those details, and again, this is all automated. Up to that stage, we’re able to automate a lot of those different interactions to be able to get them to that stage and get that pre-survey already done.

And like I say, this process that I’ve described there, it’s our process. It fits with our strategy. It fits with our marketing goals. Yours may differ quite a bit, but hopefully even the ideas, the automations, the capability, and the power of a well-rounded CRM, hopefully that comes across in what we’ve been able to build with our discovery and our onboarding phase that we have with our clients.

So the next thing that we use it for here at Done By Nine is we actually plug all our marketing tactics in as well. So you’ve got the clear strategy. You’ve got your team all plugged in. You’ve got the sales pipeline, the automation all kind of mapped out as we’ve described already. So where we also find that a CRM is really helpful is actually plugging in the different marketing tactics that we’re using to be able to actually get people into the CRM in the first place, and get into our lead and deal pipeline.

So here’s a look at how we’re actually plugging in our marketing activities into the CRM. So firstly, we’re using HubSpot again, and what we’re doing here is we’re actually plugging our social media accounts into the platform. And this can actually help you with both scheduling content that you’re promoting, but also, more importantly, actually reporting on and seeing what content is actually resonating best with the audience. It’s going to allow you to adjust your schedule, track your content, and see how that’s actually performing as well.

Also, all our paid campaigns are integrated, again, within the HubSpot CRM. And this is allowing us to track and create campaigns that are performing well and alongside our marketing goals. Because what’s happening as a system is actually tracking users that come from those campaigns. It also tracks even the pages that they’ve viewed on your website, which is then helping you to report on the return on investments on your campaigns.

For example, you’ll be able to see what campaigns generated a lead, or even better, generated a new client, a new revenue into the business. So having these details within the same platform is allowing you to get a real clear understanding about what campaigns are actually performing and what campaigns are not performing and need to be adjusted. So it’s going to give you a whole heap of data that are going to be instrumental in keeping the CRM working, and keeping the business and the revenue and the lead pipeline moving.

Also, the third thing we use in terms of marketing is our email marketing. So email marketing, we do all out of HubSpot. And this is, again, a really powerful tool for keeping existing customers engaged with your brand, and also helping us to nurture new leads and new prospects. So as I described earlier, all of our new clients, all of our new leads, are all added automatically to different lists in our CRM, dependent on where they are in their kind of discovery phase with us. Are they a new lead? Are they a new prospect? Are they a hot prospect? Are they a current client?

So this is going to allow us to send targeted emails to our database. However, when we’re using the lists, we can reframe some of the content based on where they’re currently at within the system. So as an example, just to explain that, let’s say we’ve got a new prospect. They may get a different introduction to the email that we send out to our entire database, alongside, for example, a call to action to set up a strategy session or anything like that. As opposed to the version that a current client would get: they may get a version of the email that is talking about an offer to add to their existing package, or to share new ideas of how we could assist them in their business, to help them in their business grow further.

So that’s just a bit of an idea about those three kind of levers that the CRM can pull for you. So it’s having a look at your social media and tracking, scheduling, the paid campaigns that you have across LinkedIn, Facebook or Google Ads, and also your email marketing. Three levers that you can pull from within your CRM, and it all kind of keeps everything connected. You’re able to see how all those customers and current clients and prospects are interacting with all of those different levers that you have available to you.

So that’s a bit of a look at how we’ve built and how we utilise a CRM in our business here at Done By Nine. So if I think about it, what kind of impact has that had on us? This has been a bit of a process to build that out. But I honestly think that at the heart of every marketing strategy, there really needs to be a system that’s going to help you and your team attract and engage and delight your audience, both at the prospect stage and also when they become customers, to help retain them over time.

And by leveraging CRM data and processes into our businesses, it’s provided much more personalised experiences for clients. It’s going to help you to streamline your process, provide a better all-around experience for your clients and also for your team as well. And more importantly, as a business owner, it just creates so much more headspace for you as well. There can be so much going on day-to-day running in the business. So having the CRM to actually track your clients’ communications, the stage that they’re at, their onboarding or their sales process, and the ease of reporting on your marketing strategy, really, it’s a massive game changer.

And again, our approach isn’t perfect, but it works for us. And the tools and the ideas that we’ve shared today are just the tipping point about what a well-executed CRM could do for your business. So if you’re wondering when is the best time to actually implement and use a CRM in your business, literally the answer I would suggest is as soon as possible. Adopting a CRM software anywhere in your business journey offers invaluable insights that’s actually going to help you cultivate deeper relationships with your customers. And honestly, the sooner that you start to even map this out, to include it as part of your strategy, the easier it is to then refine and enhance and keep building on that CRM system as your business expands.

And like I say, I think going back to that first point as well, a big part of a CRM and implementing that into your business is actually having that clear strategy behind it as well. And that’s obviously a core part of what we do at Done By Nine.

So if anything that I’ve spoken about so far, about our process, about some of the ideas, the automations that we’ve built, the way that we take our clients or our customers through the onboarding process, if anything that has kind of struck a chord and you think that potentially you could use that within your business, we’d love to kind of take you through that. Obviously, you can get in touch with us and we can take you through that strategy, and think about how a CRM could be one of those levers that you need to use as part of your current stage of where you’re at with your business as well.

You can get along to our website, donebynine.com. You can go to the Contact Us page. You can start the real quick onboarding quiz that we have on there. And then we’ll obviously get in touch with you and see whether you’re the right fit for our business as well. And look, if you found this helpful, you can, of course, go to our website, donebynine.com. At the top, you can click the word “podcast”. You’ll get all the other podcasts that we’ve recorded, all the other resources that we’ve built over time as well. I think we’re up to about, I don’t know, 30 or so episodes of the podcast that have been recorded.

So there’s lots of different information that you can learn. So you can go along to donebynine.com, at the top, podcast, to get all our other resources. And hopefully you’ve been able to find this really helpful as well: a bit of a look at how a CRM has helped our business, and how it could potentially help your business and your marketing strategy as well. And by all means, if you’ve got any questions about anything we’ve discussed, you’re more than welcome to email me as well, jordan@donebynine.com. And we look forward to seeing you at next week’s episode of the Marketing Mindset podcast.