• Nimble sCRM
  

Social CRM

Are you spinning with all the choices and systems you need to communicate with your customers, prospects, business partners and manage your sales funnel?

Until recently there was 'just' email where you wrote and received emails, as well as phone calls, meetings and other communications. Then along came LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, maybe your second and third email accounts and very quickly you have several communication feeds to check and several you can respond through. 

Social CRM is a way to start to rationalise and unify those various channels and activities, so you and your team can gain control, and get on with marketing, selling and customer service, and leverage another layer of support tools. 

As you'll find elsewhere  on this website, CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a very broad term embracing many activities; from contact management, through email marketing and sales force automation to customer service. Unfortunately the Relationship aspect has been difficult to achieve for many people and businesses for a whole range of reasons.

Like most business owners, managers, sales and marketing professionals you need a number of applications and tools to help you to be productive and effective. 

Bottom line it’s about managing Contacts, Calendar and Communications.

• Social Media – as this becomes more wide-spread so the communications channels multiplying, for you and your prospects and customers. Established contact via post, phone and face-to-face has been replaced or extended with email, and the many social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, ecademy, Twitter, and dozens more. This creates a challenge for how you listen and then how you respond. It’s tempting to ignore and stick with the established communications, but that risks letting competitors in. While many people feel that Social Media can be a real time-stealer, it can allow you to develop your antenna to quickly spot and respond to new sales opportunities. If you can get to them quicker than your competitors it gives you a massive advantage. 

• CRM – an appropriate customer relationship system, or sub-set, can be incredibly useful when trying to develop relationships in an effective way. The ability to move seamlessly through from early stages at lead generation through lead nurture to the selling activity has many advantages. It can help you to create the right balance of your time, so you focus on the right people at the right time. A light touch with many people at the start of the cycle and with early stage suspects freeing time to focus 1:1 at later stages with opportunities in the buying phase. However, if the CRM system doesn’t suit your business or your marketing, sales and relationship building processes it can feel as ill-fitting and awkward as wearing the wrong sized pair of shoes – every step is uncomfortable.

• Mobility – if you are commuting or travelling between meetings there are major benefits from having access to up-to-date information while you are out of the office. Having the ability to update information while you travel is another major benefit area. It means you can be better prepared for meetings, you can stay in contact with prospects, customers and colleagues, you can avoid or reduce the administrative overhead of updating information when you return to base, and move things forward in near-real-time. This allows you to focus on the important relationship and selling activities, confident that you have the right communications and systems around you. 

Social CRM is a category of marketing and sales applications coming through to help entrepreneurs, owner managed businesses, SMEs and larger corporations.

Get in touch and let us help you identify and get the most from the different applications and solutions that are crowding the market.

To find out more about the Nimble sCRM application click here.