Why your agency needs a CRM
For an agency, every client matters. It only takes the loss of one valuable customer to cause problems filling your staff’s workload and keeping your business alive due to the loss of revenue. Many digital marketing agencies are experiencing these unfortunate effects as the average client-agency relationship is significantly shorter than it was in years past, dropping from 5.3 years in 1997 to less than three years today. This has a huge impact on your sales forecasting.
Everything from stronger competition to higher expectations from customers has made hanging on to clients more difficult and attracting potential customers is more difficult. Agencies must provide more customer-centric experiences to meet expectations for customer satisfaction, and create long-standing relationships with clients one customer interaction at a time. A happy client will keep coming back to your agency again and again, leading to a thriving business and a happy team.
To provide the world-class experiences clients expect, you need strong pipeline management and the ability to visualize every detail of each engagement. Agencies that rely on spreadsheets and other outdated tools have no way to organize all the important information needed to run the business effectively. Plus, they waste time on repetitive tasks that can be easily managed by workflow automation. A CRM lets you see the details of every interaction you have with your clients. Inquiries, contract details, and any other conversation are all stored in a single place. This allows you to tailor your communications and services to the unique needs of each customer.
Agencies must also implement streamlined systems and processes in order to provide better service to clients. A lack of standardized procedures reduces productivity and hampers collaboration amongst teams. The more clients you have to juggle, the more problematic this becomes. A CRM can simplify complex processes using sales automation so that sales teams, marketing teams and really everyone can work more efficiently. Integrations with third-party apps can also simplify the daily tasks of team members.
In addition to managing client relationships, you also face the challenge of managing your leads. If you’re marketing effectively, you will receive plenty of inquiries on a consistent basis and you’ll want email campaigns to nurture them. However, only some of these leads will be a good fit for your business. You don’t want to spend your valuable time and energy focusing on the wrong leads. A CRM gives you a platform to manage every single lead, allowing you to prioritize each based on its importance. Plus, with customizable dashboards, you can see that status of every lead at any time.
Key functionality to look for in a CRM for web designers
Now that you know why a CRM solution is vital to your agency, you’ll want to find a solution that works for your business. There are a variety of CRM platforms on the market today; some are better suited to agencies and their unique business needs than others. Let’s examine some of the important features to look for when considering a CRM for your agency:
Pipeline management
A CRM provides a comprehensive tool to view, manage, and customize your sales pipeline. After you verify that a prospect is a good fit for your business, you can move them to your pipeline and then track their progress all the way through your sales process.
A CRM pipeline is also a useful tool for building revenue forecasts. You can see the total opportunity value for each pipeline stage to see exactly how much potential revenue your business has in the works. This can keep you in tune with hiring needs – both short and long term.
Task and process automation
Administrative tasks are a big drain on your agency’s resources. Most agencies don’t have separate sales and customer service teams, which means the same people responsible for meeting client deadlines also need to handle non-client-facing tasks like sending emails and following up on payments.
Instead of drowning in these manual tasks, your time should be spent winning new clients and delivering positive outcomes in your current engagements. A CRM leads you to automate administrative tasks and sales processes so that you can focus on what matters most. You can integrate it with time tracking software to keep accurate records of your team’s effort allocation. In addition to being free of mundane tasks, your team no longer needs to spend a huge portion of their time in lead routing as a CRM helps you automate communication across multiple channels while routing leads to the right sales rep.
Email functions – send, track, and save
Agencies rely on email for most communications. Everything from cold messages to leads, follow-ups with prospects, and nurturing existing client relationships take place via email. A good CRM reduces the manual input needed to organize and send email communications. It does so by allowing you to create templates and automating messages based on where a prospect is in your sales pipeline.
More importantly, you can manage all your communications straight from the CRM. This eliminates the need to hop back and forth to different tabs to use your email client or autoresponder. A good CRM will track your email statistics in real-time and notify you when a recipient opens your message.
Lead management
Winning new clients requires you to thoroughly understand their business and what they need from an agency partner. A CRM system helps you gather insights about your prospects from social media and other touch points so that your team has everything they need for future communications. As you fill your pipeline, the CRM can immediately route the leads to the appropriate team member so that they can begin nurturing the prospect while the interest is still fresh. Plus, a CRM can track leads all the way from source to sale. This helps you understand which of your marketing campaigns are most effective and which ones need improvement.
Why Insightly is the best CRM for graphic design agencies
A good CRM for agencies simplifies essential tasks and comes packed with features, empowering your team to work more effectively. Insightly does this and more, making it the ideal solution for fostering strong relationships with your clients. Here are some of the key reasons Insightly is the best CRM for agencies:
360-degree pipeline visibility
Insightly brings all your customer data into a single platform to give you a holistic view of all your engagements. You can visualize each contact’s path through your sales process with a timeline view of your pipeline. Every email, event, and task are saved as activities so that your entire team has visibility into each client interaction so they can know exactly what’s happening with each deal to easily pick up where others left off.
Insightly is highly customizable with the ability to adjust the pipeline to suit your business by adding as many stages as needed and naming them however you’d like. You can segment different services and prospects into separate pipelines so that each gets the experience ideal to turn them into a customer.
Workflows and automation
You want your team’s attention on coming up with new ideas and seeing to client concerns, not constantly grappling with repetitive manual tasks. With Insightly, you can take the monotony out of running your agency by setting up workflows for your business processes. For example, you can send an automated email to someone that completes a form. Or, set a task for accounting to ensure you get a new client’s payment details. You only need to set up this automation once, and they will run indefinitely without needing to worry about them again.
Reporting and dashboards
Unifying all your customer data into a single system helps you make timely, informed decisions to allow your agency to operate with greater agility. Insightly lets you create a vast amount of reports as well as custom visualizations to build your dashboards. There are plenty of pre-built reports to help you get started, and the drag and drop interface makes it easy to create the view needed to best understand your performance and business activities.
Seamless project management
Your projects are complex. They require you to manage people, files, and an endless flow of information. Insightly ensures you are always on top of every project detail so that nothing slips through the cracks. The moment you close a deal, opportunities are converted to projects without losing the data you’ve gathered. You can create tasks with a variety of inputs including due date, assignee, and progress, and you can link all your task to projects so that the whole team can work within the same system.
Explore a unified approach
While the Insightly CRM is a powerful business tool on its own, you get the opportunity to implement Insightly Marketing as a marketing automation tool and Insightly Service to manage service and support of your client base. These applications all run from the shared database, storing client information in one convenient place and giving teams the ability to align by working from one shared platform. Your agency can deliver a unified, elevated customer experience with the Insightly platform.
Grow your digital agency with Insightly
CRM software helps agencies provide the client experiences needed to retain loyal customers. With Insightly, you have a powerful tool to visualize and know every detail of your sales pipeline and you can create repeatable processes to boost productivity so your team can focus on what they do best. Get started with a free trial of Insightly CRM today or request a personalized demo to see how it can help your agency.
