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I NTRODU C TI ON
FORGET THE SPREADSHEET
Too many agency new business programs are run according to an Excel spreadsheet. Even worse, many agencies rely on one person (sometimes the founder or CEO) with an impressive Rolodex. It’s an unorganized and unsustainable way to grow an agency. And it’s why a 2014 survey by RSW/US found that in 80% of agencies, the tenure of a new business director is less than two years. Compare that with the frequently discussed average tenure of a CMO, which is currently almost four years. With every new biz director that leaves or is fired, the agency has to start over with no idea where prospects were in the sales process.
“ In 80% of agencies, the tenure
of a new business director is less than two years.
“The most important asset of an agency is the knowledge it gains through new business, so it’s really important that that’s not held by an individual,” said David Brown, executive vice president at customer engagement agency Meredith Xcelerated Marketing (MXM). “Agencies all copy each other, so ultimately we have 1% point of difference, but if we can use that knowledge faster, then you have a chance to grow faster than your competitors.” This endless cycle of new business leaders who have to start from scratch harms both the agency’s staff and reputation. And this can be avoided with one tool — a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
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C HAP TE R O NE
WHY YOUR AGENCY NEEDS A CRM With a CRM tool, agencies can create a unified sales process and collect data that will produce clear, actionable insights they can use to improve their sales process, forecast more accurately, and understand their most profitable clients. “The nature of new business has changed in the last two or three years because clients are experimenting a lot more at the moment,” Brown said. “They’re not really committing to agencies, so there’s a lot more development work going on. I think the role of new business is actually becoming more important.” This increase in importance means it is time for your agency to upgrade its new business sales and prospecting program.
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5 Reasons You Need a CRM 1) Identify the Right Prospects Maybe you are blogging, creating offers (ebooks, templates, etc.), or even used paid advertising to drive traffic and convert visitor into leads. But how do you know which potential clients are the right prospects so you can better target your marketing outreach? You’ve been to enough “meet and greets” to know there are some clients who just don’t understand the true cost or time required to design and develop a website or create a public relations strategy. By pairing forms on your site with an intuitive CRM that shows historical data, you can sort prospects by qualifiers that help you understand the prospects most likely to buy. Your team can go into a pitch or proposal process knowing that the prospect is the right fit. Brown’s team qualifies leads based on 10 questions. If the client answers seven of the 10 questions to the agency’s standards, MXM identifies it as an account it has the “right to win.” This is the type of account the agency can pursue with confidence.
2) Recognize Your Best Customers With a CRM and marketing automation platform integration, you can view the full timeline of a lead’s journey to becoming a client — from the initial phone call or visit to your website to upselling the client on a new service to the client providing a referral. Collecting and analyzing this data will you help you understand the clients who become long-term relationships and those who jump to another agency after one engagement. The first group includes the clients you want to spend time more time with, ensuring they are happy with the work and have seen results from the relationship. The second group will be one you want to monitor to understand if the costs to acquire and produce work are worth it.
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3) Understand the Buying Journey Do you know the stages in the your agency’s sales process? Can you forecast your sales for next quarter or even next month? With a CRM, you are able to define the various stages in your client’s buying process, which will help your team understand which prospects are likely to buy, who is unlikely to become a client, and the reasons why a brand chose you or another firm. You can also be proactive about responding to potential clients’ concerns and hesitations. You probably already gather this information. Now you just need to organize and use it to inform your future new business process. And it’s worth it for any sales professional tasked with new business. RSW/US’s survey also found that 66% of agencies felt that their new business professional was unsuccessful because of his or her lack of methodology. Brown mentioned a story about Shelly Lazarus, the former CEO of Ogilvy. She said that Ogilvy & Mather would do new business by night and service clients during the day. “That’s wrong,” Brown said. “It should be mainstream. The new business leaders who are succeeding are the ones who combine both salesmanship with a strategic sensibility. That’s a very rare profile.”
4) Increase Sales Productivity How much time does your new business team spend uploading email correspondence, recording the details of conversations, attaching files, or updating contact information? This type of manual data entry is a waste of your team’s time and resources. With a CRM that logs emails and phone conversations, provides insights on the company or person you are working with, and connects the dots between on and offline interactions, your sales team can do what you hired them to do — land new and profitable clients.
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5) Automate Client Nurturing Campaigns A CRM can also be used to inform lead nurturing and content marketing campaigns for current and past clients and prospects. Imagine if your new business professionals could create a campaign that sends a series of emails to prospects who expressed an interest in reconsidering their marketing plan in two months? The same idea could be applied to the CMO of brands whose revenues dipped in their previous earnings report. You can educate and entice these potential clients, and determine their interest based on criteria such as open rate and click rate. Our buying behaviors have changed. While referrals and networking might produce new clients, it isn’t something you can depend on. It’s inefficient, and it produces an unstable flow of new business to your agency — a problem you can solve by investing in and understanding your agency’s data.
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C HAP TE R TWO
DISCOVER YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS You understand why your agency needs to invest in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. The new business world is competitive, so you need a way to identify the right prospects, increase your sales productivity, and retain your internal knowledge when an employee leaves the company. These are important pursuits, but it doesn’t mean you should go out and sign up for the first tool you find. You need to evaluate your options, understand what you really need in a platform, and decided how to implement the software into your current processes. A CRM should be about saving your employees’ time, making them more productive, and providing you with data to help you run the business more effectively.
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5 Questions to Ask Yourself 1) What are my goals? Before you invest in a CRM, you need to determine your goals. A CRM won’t be effective if you simply use it to store data. You have to actually use the data you collect in a way that improves your business. Consider these questions as you think about how you will use a CRM: • • • • •
Do you want your staff be more efficient and organized? Is it to prevent loss of knowledge when a staff member leaves the agency? Do you want to provide better service to clients? Will you create more targeted marketing campaigns using the data? Is it to better understand your lead funnel, close rates, sales cycle, and other key insights so you can target more profitable accounts?
With this information, you can define your short- and long-term objectives and better analyze software options.
2) How long will it take to implement? The answer to this question is different for every company. Custom CRM systems can take almost a year to deploy. Others, mostly SaaS platforms, you can set up in less than 10 minutes. The timeline depends on the size of the company, the number of users, if you need custom integrations, where your existing data is located, and how easy it will be to import that data. If your sales and client service process is fairly simple, then you should be able to get up and running fairly quickly. However, your main priority should be implementing a system that meets your goals.
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3) Does it integrate with my existing toolset? A CRM should make your work easier, not more difficult, so you need to consider what tools you currently use and if you want these to communicate with your CRM. If you rely on a marketing automation platform, integration with a CRM is key. You can improve collaboration between marketing and sales and see a more complete picture of prospects and customers with the pairing of these two tools. If you prospect on social media platforms or use the data to inform sales conversations, you’ll want to look for a tool that can include these details. If the platform can automatically input the information into the CRM, that’s even better. There is nothing worse than copying and pasting URL after URL.
4) What information do I need to collect to find actionable insights? Based on your goals, you will want to determine what reports matter most to your business. By outlining these prior to investing in a CRM, you can determine if the platform provides enough customization for your use. Consider these questions: • Do you want to check in on monthly forecasts per sales rep? • Do you need different views for different people in the company? • Do you need reports on your current sales funnel? • Is your sales cycle unique? Do you need to customize a system’s deal stages? • Do you need to be able to create custom properties? • What filters will be valuable? By defining this information upfront, it will be easier to evaluate similar platforms and ask targeted questions.
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5) Is it easy to use? How can I motivate my staff to use a CRM? Not every company needs a complicated, feature-heavy platform to manage client relationships and their sales cycle. And simplicity will be a point in your favor when getting your team to actually use it. Remember: A CRM only works if people use the platform, meaning they both input data and pull insights from the program. And it is only worth a monetary investment if it streamlines the new business process, resulting in more new clients, more upsells, or higher project costs. The user experience should be intuitive. But you also need to think about data entry. If your staff starts spending 25% of their time inputing information, you’ve got a big problem. If you decide to test out a CRM or use a system in your agency, you need to get buyin. Managers should require its use, and people should not be able to revert to old ways, such as keeping deal information in a folder on their desktop or continuing to use Excel. It needs to be a company-wide change for anyone who deals directly with clients. Ultimately, a CRM is just a tool. It’s up to you to use it to improve your customer relationships.
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C HAP TE R THR EE
CHOOSING A SOLUTION
A good CRM isn’t just about the features. You need to find a system that works for the way you do business, and it needs to be something you will use to make databacked decisions on how to adjust your sales process, including qualifying leads, prospecting, lead nurturing, and closing. A CRM should help you to • Improve conversion rates • Increase revenue • Reduce marketing spend waste • Increase sales productivity • Increase client account size It should help you better understand your lead funnel and conversion rates so that you know how many leads you need in your funnel to meet your quarterly goals. That said, it can be confusing to know which CRM is right for your needs, especially as many offer different features, different levels of complexity, and have different cost structures. What do you really need, and what is a “nice to have”?
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7 Features to Consider When Evaluating CRM Solutions 1) Contact Management This is what CRMs are built around — the storing of contact data. One of the largest barriers to adoption of a CRM is data entry of contact information, so look for a system that makes it easy to enter data — or does some automatic data capture — and keep contact records up to date.
2) Deal Stages Deal stages should align with your specific sales process, such as Appointment Scheduled, Qualified to Buy, Proposal Requested, Proposal Presentation, Pitch, Closed Won, and Closed Lost. A CRM should allow you to customize the deal stages — to align with your unique sales process — and assign a value system to each stage.
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3) Task Management A CRM should make it easy to organize and associate tasks with each deal or contact so sales reps stay focused and productive.
4) Content Repository 90% of the materials created by marketing are not being used by sales, and sales reps are spending 30 hours each month creating their own or searching for materials. It is a waste of time that could be avoided if sales enablement content and marketing materials were easily accessible and organized for the sales process. Look for a CRM with a content repository that provides analytics so you can track the influence of a piece of content in the sales process.
5) Dashboard Part of what makes using a CRM beneficial for your agency or clients is being able to clearly see how well you are doing in progressing toward your goal each month. The dashboard should highlight how many potential deals you have in your pipeline, what tasks need to be completed, and how the overall team is doing if your agency employs more than more person responsible for new business.
6) Mobile Depending on how your firm is set up, it might be useful to have a mobile-accessible CRM for people to access on the go. Cloudswave found that mobile CRM apps can boost sales team productivity by 15%.
7) Marketing Automation Integration If you use a marketing automation system to also run the marketing for your agency, make sure you choose a CRM with an integration. This will help you tie marketing activities to sales results to see the true ROI of your new business efforts.
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CONC LU SI ON
USING DATA TO DRIVE GROWTH
Hopefully, this guide has given you a clear overview of why you need to invest in a CRM, what questions you need to clarify internally before you begin looking at solutions, and some key features to consider when shopping for the perfect CRM. (To try out HubSpot’s completely free CRM, sign up here.) The goal is to find a solution that works best for your company so you have more insight into how your agency’s new business program actually works. The first step is gathering the data, which is the job of a CRM. The next step is using that information to better target prospects, land new accounts, and retain clients for longer -- all which lead to growth.
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C R E DI TS
CREATED BY
JAMI OETTING As a content strategist at HubSpot, Jami creates content and resources to help agency partners grow their businesses. She is the editor of Agency Post, HubSpot’s blog for the agency professional. INTERACT WITH ME ON TWITTER @JAMIOETTING
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