This week of Love Your Tech Month, let’s talk about your CRM system. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It’s all about managing your relationship with your clients and your leads in a way that is automated, or at least templated, to be efficient and effective. 

CRM systems can serve a multitude of purposes, but we often think of our bulk email systems when we start talking CRMs. It has been in the anti-spam laws for awhile now that you cannot bulk send emails to your leads or customers without the masking of everyone’s information on the email. I shouldn’t have to say this, but it happened to me recently: It’s illegal to send an email from your email inbox to a large group of people with everyone’s email addresses showing to everyone else. And, just because it needs to be said, you also cannot do this from an @gmail.com or @yahoo.com email address. You need a business email address to send bulk emails - and you need a CRM system to send them from to protect yourself from doing something illegally. 

There are many other things a CRM system can do for you and your business besides send bulk emails. You can track your leads, send text messages, schedule appointments, create opt-ins, add tags and lists, and add automations so all the other things happen without you having to do them each time. Sound overwhelming? It can be! Add in the fact that there are thousands of systems out there that do all, many, or one of these activities and now you know why some people are still sending bulk emails from their gmail account.

Let’s break it down and get you on the right track. You are a business and want it to run smoothly so you can go do the “fun” part of why you started your business. I’m going to guess you didn't’ start it because you love to send emails one at a time to potential clients and try to set up appointments by texting back and forth on a Sunday afternoon.

The first thing you need to do is evaluate what you actually need your CRM system to do. This means you need to know the activities that you want to happen in your business. You will also want to account for the growth of your business over the next few years. Maybe you don’t have an opt-in yet but you want to have one by next fall, then you’ll need to make sure the system you choose will accommodate your future endeavors. Nothing kills time and money more quickly than changing systems every six months, so you need to use the “pick and stick” method when deciding.

I created a CRM Comparison Chart of some of the most used CRM systems to help you look at what’s out there. A Google search will for sure overwhelm you! Using this chart, I walk you through a method to decide the elements you need in your CRM system. 

DOWNLOAD CRM COMPARISON CHART

I hope you find or have the CRM System You Love ❤️