Matt Handal has posted some observations about simple and easy-to-implement “hacks” for Customer?Relationship Management?(CRM) software applications. These include:
Identifying Pencil Sharpeners
One of the challenges of being a sub is primes will often ask you to “sharpen your pencil.” That means they ask you to lower your price.
But are they doing it for a reason or just arbitrarily?
M. Sharyn Yorio, director of client development at VJ Associates, “decided to track, in her CRM, every time one of her clients (one of those primes) asked the firm to lower its price,” Handal wrote. “If one of those primes consistently asks for lower prices, she’ll decide to team with a firm who doesn’t.”
Tracking Teaming Partner’s Win Rates
Janine (Zinski) La Marca at The Harman Group, Inc. also teams, as a sub, with firms submitting as a prime.
“As many people do, she assigns a reason why they lost,” Handal wrote. “One of those reasons is ‘Lost By Prime.'”
With this information, she’s tracking how successful or unsuccessful her teaming partners are at winning. And that helps her decide who to team with.
Fore Golfers
Handal says La Marca?”also added a little checkbox in each contact record. It said “golfer.”
Why didn’t I think of that?!?! If you know which clients golf, that makes putting together foursomes or inviting people to golf events so much easier.
So simple, yet so genius!
Converting Proper Names To Those Actually Used
Handal writes:
I’ve written in the past about my use of Zurmo. One of the customizations I’ve implemented is creating workflows that edit first names when contact records are saved.
For example, one of these workflows changes “Timothy” to “Tim.”
That way, when my CRM sends an email, it doesn’t address people with their formal name. The emails can be much more casual and friendly.
Plus, we all know alarm bells go off when we receive anything that uses our formal name.
I do this for many formal names. Richard and William are the only exclusions I can think of.
Handal invites comments and suggestions for other CRM innovations?on his blog posting, and already has received some worthy ideas. You can visit it here.
