Peter Moriarty: Let's talk about how to choose the perfect CRM
system for your business. And CRM is really the heartbeat of
your business. But if you make the wrong choice, it can take a
long time to unwind. Not only is the wrong choice and CRM system
got to hold back your team from getting great results, because
you may have an inefficient system or slow way of doing
something or balls might be dropped in your actual execution
of the business. But it's a big, expensive, time consuming
project to change technology systems. And so a CRM system is
the kind of thing that you put in, and you don't really get to
take out for three or five or even more years, unless you've
got a bloody good reason, because they kind of become like
a database with a central source of information. And you want to
make sure that that doesn't have to be transposed to a new system
18 months down the line, because you've made the wrong choice.
Now, why is it important to have a CRM system in your business?
Well, you want to make sure that you have a system to manage your
deal flow, manage email broadcasts, as your you know,
your interactions between you and your customers. Really, it's
about getting the right results for your business. And getting
the right results means that were getting the objectives met
of our business with our team without us having to manually
chase them and follow them up ourselves. And so it's a way of
getting things done in your way or the business's way, without
you having to be the police to make sure that everything works.
And how do I know that? Well, I know that for me, I work three
days a week, and I take four day weekends, because I've got great
technology systems that support our team. And of course, people
come into it and process comes into it as well. technology
driven business strategy is something that we've relied
heavily on for our business success. And it brings me a lot
of freedom in my life. And that's why I'm here, I'm
basically in semi retired mode, now I could do nothing, and our
team will just continue to grow and the business would continue
to pay me and all would be good. But I really enjoy helping to
grow other small businesses. And I really enjoy supporting our
community of small business owners to get more out of their
business. So let's talk about three different focus areas of
CRM software, because I want to kind of give you like a meta
awareness and a broad understanding of different kinds
of CRM software. So you are equipped to to make you know,
key decisions on what kind of software that you need. First
type of software is focused on deal management, or that's the
kind of software that is really focused on the flow of you
managing deals. This is really ideally for, you know, a sales
team. This is really about making sure that you and your
sales team have what's needed. Now think about like pipe drive
is one of those has really managed, you know, focused on
the different stages of a deal, or CRM has a great deal flow
management as well. Some of the ones that live inside of Gmail
like streak also really focused on flowing deals through
different stages. Next up is one that's focused on workflow
management. And so this is more of a customer database that
happens to have some workflow management type tools as well.
So the kinds of things that I think about here are like podio,
you could kind of count towards like a sauna, or monday.com in
this basket as well, where it's kind of about what are the tasks
that need to be done broadly across the business, and are
there different automations or tasks that pop up as something
goes through different stages, that's more the workflow
management side of things. If it includes a customer database, if
it includes customer records, then it's still technically in
the, the CRM arena. Now, the third one is mail automation.
And so these are CRM systems that are focused on email
automation. So think about ontraport, HubSpot,
Infusionsoft. These are ones that have really sophisticated
email campaign automation. And these ones are really primarily
focused on communicating to your customers. And some of them also
have sales and checkout and transaction modules as well for
you to be able to do business online. So it might be selling
online courses or membership websites, or you just have
particularly sophisticated customer journeys that you want
to have in email campaigns. And you want to have a lot of
automation based on that. It gives you an idea of kind of
like the three different areas of CRM systems. And based on the
business that you're in, you would choose to use different
areas. So for example, if you are a consulting firm, and you
have a low number of new leads that come through, but you have
a number of existing clients that you want to really deliver
a lot of services to it probably more likely be looking at
something that's more workflow focused, because you're looking
at delivering something to your customers. And something like
copper CRM is great for you know, bringing in all the
communication from your Gmail actually having that all in one
place. And if you don't know copper CRM is a solution that we
are affiliated with. And we recommend that to most small
businesses. Say for example, you're an e commerce business or
you're a product bution type business and doing a
lot of online sales. And you want to have follow ups things
like you know automated and in car Follow up sequences and
those kinds of things or customer service follow up
sequences. Although you may err on the side of a email
automation CRM, that one is going to be really more focused
on a volume emails being delivered to two different
customers, right? third example would be if you're a more sales
focused organization, so like, maybe you're an events company,
or maybe, you know, for whatever reason, you're doing a lot of
selling, you've got a large or a sophisticated sales team or
account management team or a relationship management team.
And you really want to make sure that you have great reports, you
can see activity, you can see forecasting, you can see
pipeline, and you have everyone working through, you know, quite
a rigid sales process, we looking for CRM, which is more
on the side of your sales process oriented. So they're
kind of like the three different kind of examples for you. The
next decision that you need to make is do you go for an all in
one versus going for specialist software. And what I mean by
this is, for most industries, you will have an all in one
solution for your particular industry. And so in the IT
industry, we call that PSA or professional services,
automation, basically, an all in one tool that will do tickets, a
little bit of deal management probably does some invoicing,
some project delivery management, basically, it's
trying to be like an all in one solution for everything that
business needs. If you're in the Allied Health Services, you'll
probably be familiar with a tool called clinico. And that is a
cloud based browser based olan solution, which allows for
businesses that are running an allied health practice to have
all of their customers and clients and bookings and
scheduling and, you know, online bookings for customers and all
those kinds of things. If you're a gym or a yoga studio, you'd
probably be using something like mind body, right. So these tools
are kind of trying to do everything for a particular
business vertical, and they have the upside of doing most things
pretty well, because you're going to have a lot of industry
specific features that are really useful for you outside is
they usually only do about 80% of what you want. And so they do
everything, not everything really, really well. Or let's
say not everything best in class, what I'd say as an
example is something like Mind Body online, which allows you to
do online classes and bookings and lets people schedule in
order to for for booking if you've got like a you know, a
hair salon or beauty services or something like that, those kind
of CRM systems are usually not really sophisticated on the
email marketing side of things, you need to like connect them to
MailChimp, you need to use a third party emailing service.
And you can't do like sophisticated automated email
follow up sequences, because they're just not designed for
that they're mainly designed for delivering services for your
particular business vertical all in one solution is going to be
great in that it's going to do things that are specific to your
industry vertical, but it's probably not necessarily going
to do everything you want to do. The second option is to go
through specialist software. And what I mean by specialist
software is you pick best in class software for each, you
know area of business that you're working with. That's the
route that we typically take at it genius. And what I mean by
that is we use copper CRM for our sales process, because
that's where it really really shines. We use it for some of
our emails. But some of our more advanced email broadcasting, we
do through Infusionsoft, which is a email marketing focused
CRM. Now copper, we're actually bringing out email marketing. So
that'll be in the works, we may end up moving that at some point
in the future. But then for other areas of our business,
like project delivery, we currently use a Asana, which is
a great project delivery app. For our customer service and
emails back and forth with our customers, we use a combination
of live chat using Google Google's chat bot, which is
called dialogue flow, we also use a tool called heiva, which
is a shared inbox platform, which works right inside of
Gmail. And we've got other videos on shared mailboxes, if
you check out our YouTube channel, if you're interested in
that. Now, the upside is we get best in class project management
best in class, email, automations, best in class CRM
system and deal tracking, best in class shared mailboxes, and
support delivery because we've got literally 10s of 1000s of
employees that we support across all of our clients. But the
downside is interoperability between those systems. Sometimes
you end up managing multiple databases. And so we need to
build connections and links between those different apps so
that they all talk to each other. So that's one of the big
choices for you to make, whether you want to go for an all in one
or specialist software, it really comes down to you
choosing, you know, what are our business authorities? What do we
want to have really, really nailed with our business
software, and then making the decision from there,
and the key decision metrics for choosing your CRM software, the
actual things that you should be thinking about? And it's just a
matter of literally putting these down on a spreadsheet, and
then writing each solution you're considering and would be
integrations and that is one of their applications is talk to if
it's an all in one, okay, well, you know, maybe the email
marketing is crap. Does it talk to email marketing software?
does it connect to a tool like Zapier, but you can actually
connect your different tools to each other? Using using a simple
solution? What else does it integrate with? Does it actually
talk to your billing software? Are you using xero.com? And is
it going to automatically send your invoices over to zero.com
integrations is the first one that I always look at. And we
want to choose something that we can build an ecosystem of
different apps together for anything that their CRM system
doesn't do itself. Stop is price and value. This one's pretty
straightforward. Some solutions are really aimed at enterprise,
if you are a small business, and you have less than I'd say, 100
employees, stay the EFF away from salesforce.com. It's
hundreds of 1000s of dollars to implement, and maintain. And
every business that I've seen, implemented just as not needed.
And I mean, I'm talking about small and medium sized
businesses here, larger organizations, when you're in
scale mode, very different story. But choose something
that's right for your business, not just for where you are now,
but certainly for where you want to go. But that doesn't mean if
you're a five person team to do $100,000 Salesforce rollout,
just don't do it. Next up is expandability. And that's really
about as your business grows, is this system in solution going to
grow with you? Where are you going to look like in terms of
the business in three years or five years, because the absolute
worst thing for you to do is pull a system out and have to
replace it with something else. And part of this, for me is
really about backing the right horse, when I evaluate a tool or
a technology system, I don't just want to look at the
features of the tool, I really want to also look at who's
behind the company, where are they based? How much venture
capital do they have? How are they sitting in the market
compared to other people? Are they going to be successful in
three to five years? Do I know the executive team? Or do I have
context to them, who I can choose whether or not I think
this is a good solution. Now for me personally, I not only have
to make choices for it genius, but for the 1000s of customers
who run small businesses that we serve. And so when we look at
recommending a solution, we put hours and hours and hours of
research into making sure that we make a really, really great
choice, because we have to train up our team. And so we know our
way around pretty much every CRM system that is out there. And
hence we're able to consult to businesses on making the right
choice. So next up is accessing usability, it should go without
saying that, you know, having a good mobile app and being able
to if you are someone who happens to work on the road, but
having good usability, there's nothing worse than an IT system
that is hard to use. Because my God, your team will not use it
if it's a pain in the butt to use. And so making sure that you
are, you know, aware of what the day to day use is going to be
like, is a real big one. And that's why we do a test drive of
copper CRM. So our customers can actually test it and implement
it and play with it and use it themselves. And we build out
demo workflows, so that you get an idea of exactly what it's
going to be like before you pull the trigger and move ahead with
it. And next up is the implementation and maintenance.
And so is that I mean, hopefully no one's rolling out CRM systems
that get installed on servers anymore, although I have heard
of it from time to time. But you know, what is going to be the
path to implementation. And I would recommend, of course,
working with some kind of consultant or partner, if it
makes sense, rather than you just doing it all yourself. So
there's three kind of like tiers of CRM systems. And this will
give you a bit of an idea of where they are in the market.
And what the kind of different you know, the levels are of your
of your different CRM systems to give you a bit of an idea of
things like costing, and level of sophistication with your
different CRM solutions. And so we call these the three tiers.
So the first tier is our basic tier, our solutions that are you
know, really just focused on, you know, deal management. And
most basic workflow management don't have accounting systems
built in, they don't have sophisticated email, you know,
tools built in, they may just have basic reporting, our pipe
drive is getting much better these days, it's probably more
in the intermediate zone, certainly straight podio and a
number of others are really just about delivering the basics. I
put Google Sheets in here on the slide as well, because some
people just use a spreadsheet for their CRM system. That's,
that's kind of included in there as well. It's that we have our
intermediate here, our solutions that don't just do one function,
they'll do multiple functions. So they might do workflow or
pipeline management, plus email marketing, or they might do in
the case of Zoho, you have things like email marketing, and
you have,
you know, there's other productivity services in there.
And you have the ability to build apps on the Zoho platform
for workflow management. Something like Infusionsoft will
do lots of emails, but it will also do checkouts and online
sales as well. Active Campaign does pipeline management and it
also does emails as well. HubSpot does landing pages, it
does check outs that are Plenty more as well. Now for these,
they start to get a little bit more sophisticated in pricing,
I'd probably put HubSpot at the top in terms of pricing in this
group intermediate, because it's a little bit more expensive than
other solutions. Zoho is a road that I don't often recommend
customers going down. Because the customization is great, but
a little bit like salesforce.com, you end up
paying consultants to actually build things out. And then
you're very deeply locked into the system. Although if you're
someone who wants a lot of customization, that might be a
way for you to go fusion soft, I really love. But the usability
is not fantastic. And the deal management absolutely sucks, I
can say that as after being a customer for many years, our
automations great and most of the system in terms of, you
know, sending sophisticated email campaigns out is
excellent. But don't try and use it, if you've got a sales team,
I would not recommend it at all. A final area, we have
enterprise. And this is really for businesses that are in scale
mode, you've got the resources and the budget to really
implement something sophisticated, that's going to
stay with the business 10 years or more. Now, solutions like
Oracle, Salesforce, I would put NetSuite in here as well, that
is basically going to include your accounting ledger. So you
don't need a third party solution for your accounting,
all of your your p&l will literally be inside the CRM
system, because all your orders and everything else will be in
there. This is I mean, technically, these are all in
one systems because they run the whole business, but they're not
industry specific. And so they require a high level of
customization and a high level of input. Honestly, for any
business less than 50 employees, I'd stay the hell away from
them. Because it just gets way too expensive way too quickly.
They just get bigger than bigger than Ben Hur. So I've had some
questions that have come through which I wanted to cover. How do
I write ontraport? I think ontraport is kind of on par with
Infusionsoft not great on the deal management side of things.
But in terms of overall overall emails, it's pretty good.
Overall, you know, automated campaigns, it's pretty good as
well, price wise, it's priced effectively for small
businesses. And they've now brought out a visual campaign
builder and some other great tools, which makes it a pretty
great tool. We have a lot of customers who have ontraport,
which we build dashboards for in Google Data Studio. And so we
can actually pull data out of ontraport and publish that
inside Google Data Studio to get insights from your data. Someone
has also asked about fresh sales and the fresh sweet. Yeah,
there's an interesting trend that I've seen with a few, you
know, Business Solutions starting to branch out into
other areas. One of those is teamwork calm, which was a task
management tool like a sauna. But, I mean, personally, I
always found it just that little bit more cumbersome. You know,
as a signer requires a few less button clicks, less
sophisticated. But, but you know, I prefer the experience of
Asana, and teamwork then went and built out chat, and they
went and build out a ticketing system as well. Freshdesk
started as a ticketing system or a customer service system, and
have now built a CRM function into that. I don't know heaps
about that personally. So I don't have much of an opinion.
But what I would say is, in general, if you have a software
solution that has started building out other apps to
really know, well, what is their core competency? For Freshdesk,
it's really the core competency is around customer service
delivery and ticketing. So if you're in a service based
business, or if you're in a business with a high level of
customer service required, then that would make sense to roll
out that system. But if you're looking for something, you know,
just for sales, or for really sophisticated email marketing,
because you're an e commerce business, might not be the
solution for you. But great questions. And I appreciate you
guys sharing that with me. So some of the reasons why we love
and we recommend copper CRM to most small businesses that we
consult to, of course, have a chat to our team if you're
interested in this. So we can get you access to discounts and
other advantages of purchasing it through us. We've got
basically the key focus of copper is that they are designed
and focused on being the deepest integration with G Suite, or
what was G Suite. Now Google workspace possible. Basically,
they set out to create the CRM for Google workspace. And
they've deeply deeply integrated the whole system into the
workspace platform, which is excellent. So what that means
is,
it automatically pulls in all the data from your emails, or
you so you don't need to do any manual notes or anything like
that. It's automatically going to bring it right into your CRM
system. So there's no manual data entry. You can see here
that it lives inside of Gmail in the little widget on the on the
side here. And not only that, it's also got an amazing deal
flow system as well, where you're going to be able to have
accurate reporting on pipelines, and managing and monitoring all
of your deals as they're going through. Now we're going to have
more content coming up in copper in the near future. One of the
things that I love about copper Which I've mentioned in other
videos is that it actually uses AI, and automations to
automatically pull in data on your prospects. And so if you've
got a prospect in your CRM, it's automatically going to bring in
their LinkedIn profile. And so with one click, you can connect
with them on LinkedIn. And you know, just before a sales call,
best thing you can do open up someone's LinkedIn profile, and
actually have a Converse, you know, have a little bit of a
peruse there just before you have a conversation with them.
Now, not only that, but copper also includes x, absolutely
excellent reporting on your lead sources, right down to the
activity of your sales reps. It even shows you, you know, all of
your reporting on the you know, return on investment and your
conversion ratios and how you converting your leads into
opportunities. It's just an absolutely amazing, amazing tool
for visibility right across the business, if you are running a
sales team, or any kind of team that is doing deep relationship
based customer service, or partner management. It's an
absolutely phenomenal tool. And it also integrates with other
Google tools like Google Sheets, and also with Google Data Studio
as well. And so what that means is that you can actually take
any data from within copper, and visualize that into a dashboard
and Data Studio, you might not be able to see it right now. But
on my TV, I've actually got a live dashboard with things like
sales, statistics and deals closed and how much we got the
pipeline, and what we closed last month versus this month.
And so all of that is absolutely automated. If you're interested
in that jump on one of the links below and have a chat to our
team, we've got access to exclusive discounts. And we've
even got a test drive service where you can get your hands on
copper CRM, and we'll do an audit of all of your business
needs and see how we may be able to assist you making a great
decision on your business software. So I want to say a big
thanks for joining this video learning about CRM. today. If
you are a small or medium sized business owner, I recommend you
head along to our YouTube channel. And check out our
playlists for the different stages of technology adoption,
based on where you are at in your business right now.
Basically, we want to help all small businesses, whether you're
a one man band, right up to large organizations who are
scaling and growing quickly to make sure your technology
strategy is in place. And it's going to help support the growth
of your business. Now we've got playlists set up on YouTube for
each stage of business that you're at, so you can get the
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Google world. Thank you so much, guys, we will catch you in the
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that get access to the classroom. We're uploading new
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series on running your business remote, basically going
completely open book on six years of completely remote
management of our business. We now have 55 or employees across
the group. And so yeah, basically we want to, you know,
share with you guys how we actually run the business, how
we've been successful, we don't compromise you'll be successful.
We're just sharing what we know, and what works for us. And yeah,
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out and see you later.