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You are here: Home / Archives for business networking

January 17, 2017 by Stan Robinson Leave a Comment

Why You Need A CRM System

CRM logos

A basic CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system enables a business to keep a record of their prospect and customer information, keep track of communications with these individuals and keep a calendar and record of past and future interactions with them. Although CRM systems are usually associated with sales teams, there capabilities can be used by anyone needing a way to maintain a searchable database of contacts, organize contacts, track communications and interactions with contacts and schedule their communications.

Contact Information

First, it gives you a central place where anyone on your team can access contact information for your customers, prospects, vendors, partners and others you interact with. This includes name, company, phone, email, physical address, and so forth.

Communications

Second, it enables you to keep track of your communications with them. It can capture emails you’ve sent and received, and you can add notes about meetings and phone conversations. Needless to say this information is invaluable, particularly when you have a change in staff and someone new has to take over an account.

Calendar

The calendar feature helps you avoid letting too much time pass between contacts and you can schedule follow-ups and other tasks a day, week, month or year out and not have to worry about remembering them. The CRM system will alert you when these activities are due.

All of us have had instances where we lost opportunities with prospects simply because we forgot to stay in touch with them. When they were ready to purchase we were out of sight and out of mind and they bought from someone else. While an email marketing system can help automate the process of staying top of mind with your community, a CRM system is even more fundamental.

Social CRM

The best CRM systems also include a social component such that they import information and updates from the social media profiles of your contacts. This helps you gain more insights into what issues they may be dealing with, whether they are attending events that may be of interest to you and a variety of other valuable information.

Social CRM tools such as Nimble go beyond this to not only pull in data from social signals but also automatically build individual and company profiles based on information publicly available. One goal of a system like this is to remove as much of the manual work as possible from thee process of creating and updating records. This is brilliant since sales professionals are notorious for avoiding administrative tasks at all costs. The lack of regular use by the sales staff, particularly outside reps, is one of the main reasons why CRM implementations are not successful.

You have to get into the habit of using and updating your CRM system on a daily basis for it to be most effective for you. This is a habit that will pay you tremendous dividends in terms of increased sales, repeat business and improved customer satisfaction.

If you are using a CRM system, how are you making it work for you? Please let us know about your experience in the Comments.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: business networking, business relationships, CRM, CRM System, Customer Relationship Management, professional networking

February 1, 2016 by Stan Robinson, Jr. 4 Comments

7 Steps to Building Business Relationships

Global network dreamstime_17879071Many of us are networking by meeting people online and collecting business cards at live events. Ideally, we will follow-up with those we have met with a “Good meeting you” email, but then what?

Here are some tips for moving from a contact to a mutually beneficial business relationship.

1. Clearly understand who you want to meet. How would you describe the perfect client or customer for your business? This could be by title, function, industry, location, income, age, gender or any combination of attributes. It is also helpful to have a profile of your ideal partners, suppliers and anyone else who is important to your professional success. In addition to being clear in your own mind about who you want to connect with, defining the criteria that fit your ideal prospect helps you search for contacts with tools such as LinkedIn and other online databases. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: business networking, business relationships, linkedin

January 11, 2014 by Stan Robinson, Jr. Leave a Comment

Two Approaches to Making LinkedIn Connections

The founders of LinkedIn intended for its members to use it to leverage and map their personal business networks. This in turn would help them to become more successful professionally.

Like many other social media networks, as features have been added, LinkedIn has morphed into a platform that can now serve a variety of purposes. Let’s look at two approaches to building your LinkedIn network.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: business networking, linkedin, social networks

December 3, 2013 by Stan Robinson, Jr. 1 Comment

Organizing your business network

Relationships have always been fundamental to success in business. We normally think of person to person relationships in this context, but this can also include relationships with a larger audience, community or market. Here the topic will be organizing your person to person network in order to accomplish your professional goals.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: business networking, business relationships, CRM, organizational skills

September 7, 2012 by Stan Robinson, Jr. 2 Comments

Using LinkedIn for Profitable Business Connections

For those who want to develop relationships with business and professional communities, LinkedIn should be an essential element in their marketing strategy. With over 175 million members, LinkedIn is the largest online business network in the world. Using it effectively will pay dividends for your business, and if your business is not on LinkedIn, you will lose credibility as more people come to rely on LinkedIn when searching for information on businesses.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: business networking, linkedin, social media marketing

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