My Past Life

In a former life, I was a Referral Manager in private children’s social care.

I ensured that every child went from referral to admission as smoothly and quickly as possible. I had to continually analyse the journey to identify any snags, red flags and why some children may fall out of the process? As this was private social care, we had to make sales just like the next business.

I would see over 300 referrals a week, all managed with an off the shelf CRM called Pipedrive. This system was an empty shell when I arrived, so I customised it to manage all the weekly referrals we had, all the children going through the admission process and to manage the relationships we had with our customers (which in this world was social workers and commissioners).

What is CRM? 

A CRM is a Cloud based system. Think of it as a tool to manage the relationship you have with your leads, clients, key referrers and suppliers. Somewhere to keep things in one place.

What does CRM stand for?

A Client Relationship Management System.

OOOHHH Scary!

A CRM sounds Scary, but I use one every day; nothing scary about that! I want to give you some day to day uses of a CRM which will be particularly helpful as we resurface from lock down. Here is tip one from a series of top tips.

Tip One- Welcome you can now join zoom meeting

So, you know how we have been living on zoom meetings?

Many of us are booking 1:1 meeting’s over zoom, all of us eager to speak to our ideal clients and key referrers. The period of lockdown has given us all an amazing opportunity to stop the busy work pattern and replace it with ‘getting to know you calls’ with our online networks and the people around us doing business.

Having had 43 online meetings over zoom during May, I would be lost without my CRM.

My CRM is my ‘go to’ hub. It is where I store the details of the people I come in contact with, where I record the dates of our meetings (as it links to my e-calendar), where I keep notes of what we talked about and where I set reminders of what I need to do following the zoom call. Before I even check my emails in the morning, I log into my CRM and check what tasks I have set myself for that day or for the rest of the week.

The beauty of a CRM is no more embarrassing moments. As we know, all zooms can blend into one and you cannot always recall what you spoke about on your previous chat with that person. Recording key things from the meeting in your CRM will help hugely.

No more getting mixed up with which zoom call you should be on and where, because you can book them in your CRM and it links straight to our calendar.

Better still, no forgetting to send information after the call. This is easily done as you move from one zoom call to another. Just spending 5 minutes after each call updating notes and setting reminder tasks is all it takes.

If you are struggling to manage your growing list of contacts, then drop me a line. I would love to recommend a user friendly and inexpensive CRM for you.

Veronica Kitton

VK Business Assist

veronica@vkbusinessassist.com

07765604510