As we always say, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a system that optimizes customer service and helps to build a sales funnel from the first contact to making a deal. CRM is indispensable if the business cares about the amount of profit and the number of satisfied clients. On top of it, CRM comes in handy when forming a marketing campaign.
Still, today we would like to skip talking about the general aspects of working with CRM, and rather to dig into its functional components with the example of Bitrix24. What does CRM consist of? How one should work with its key components? How to set everything up so that it would be easier for managers to work with clients? Keep reading to find out the answers :)
Basic principles
The main reason for implementing CRM is the need to centralize and organize information about the customers. In small companies, sales managers usually start by manually registering customers: they keep a spreadsheet in Excel or Google Docs and write down all the names, emails, and phone numbers. They may even come up with a way to track the interaction history, but sooner or later there comes a time when neither the head of the department nor the managers can keep up with processing the info at an adequate level. It takes the slightest technical failure to lose the database. In addition, it is easy to imagine what can happen when a manager leaves the company for this or that reason. Lucky, if he takes the customers with him, and that is it. But what if he decides to sell the base to competitors?
Customer database is a value, and it must belong to the company, not to a particular manager.
It is at this stage when the companies usually turn to CRM. There all customer data is stored in a single space, and the leader can assign manager with limited rights sufficient for their work. For example, a manager can be assigned with the right to see his clients and not have the opportunity to upload the entire company's database.
In CRM, the customer database consists of two key elements: Contacts and Companies.
Contacts are individuals who can represent one or more companies, or may not be tied with any legal entity at all. In addition to standard fields like name, surname and contact details, it is important to indicate the type of contact. It can be especially useful when creating marketing campaigns. Say, if you want to run a mailout only for the company's business partners, all you need to do is to filter the contacts by the required type.
Companies are legal entities and individual entrepreneurs. You can tie several contacts to one company, add annual turnover, tax ID and other important info.
The standard process suggests that managers manually enter contacts' and companies' info into the system. We suggest going a little longer — but perhaps a more efficient — way and start processing clients from the Lead stage.
Leads
Lead is the primary entry point in CRM. Any piece of information about a client can become a lead — phone number, email address, message from a social network.
Keeping track of leads in CRM helps to analyze sales. You can track both the quality of the attracted audience and your managers' productivity (how often their actions propel into leads conversion to hot contacts, companies, and deals) right in the course of the ad campaign.
There are several ways to add a lead to CRM:
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Enter the data manually (click Add and fill in all info that you have).
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Import a ready-made list (upload the database in .csv format).
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Get the data automatically via CRM-form and/or widget on the site (all data is automatically registered in Bitrix24).
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Get the data from incoming calls and emails (when using Mail and Telephony in Bitrix24, all calls and emails are automatically registered in CRM).
Lead's transition is determined by its status. In effect, status is a current stage of communication with the client. The number of statuses, their names, and sequence are set by the customer. To do this, go to Settings → Start Point →Statuses and Dropdowns.
You can move the lead to a different status right from the lead card — just click on the desired stage. The same way you can change the lead's status on the main page (when using the list format). If you use kanban, just drag and drop the lead card into the desired column.
At the final stage of the lead processing, you must assign it with the final status: whether the lead is successful or not. Successful lead is a potential client, it can be converted into Contact, Company, or Deal. Unsuccessful lead is the one that has not become your client for this or that reason (for example, there was a call, but a person just got the wrong number).
A basic summary on Leads is available at the Reports tab.
As said above, the Lead can be converted into other CRM elements: Contact, Company, or Deal. You can create all three entities at once or choose any possible combination: Contact + Company, Contact + Deal, etc. If you have chosen the ultimate combination Contact + Company + Deal, the system will first ask you to choose the Deal Pipeline. The Contact and the Company will be automatically created and linked to the Deal. If the Lead card does not contain enough information to create a Contact and a Company, the system will ask you to fill in the missing pieces first.
Of course, you can work with CRM without Leads and create Contact and Companies right away. However, Leads let you track the quality of incoming contacts, employees' productivity, the effectiveness of the current sales funnel, and so on.
Deals
The Deal in its turn is the main business goal and the result of clients engagement. You can add a Deal:
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by converting a Lead;
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manually in the Contact or Company card at the Deals tab;
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at the Deals tab or by clicking plus under the corresponding menu item in the upper menu bar;
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in the Actions menu of the Quote or in the Quote form.
Moreover, if you add a Deal to the Contact that is interlinked with one or several Companies, the Deal will be added for the Company as well.
While working with Deals, you can change the interface from list to kanban and back. The main advantage of the list interface is that this view allows you to edit items massively, all together.
Kanban looks more like a board with cards. Its main advantage is prominence: you can see how many deals there are at each stage.
Deals stages make your sales funnel. Its structure depends on your business specifics. For instance, the order of the stages may be as follows: Request received, Quote sent to Client, Invoice issued, Invoice paid, Goods delivered.
By default, Bitrix24 provides a standard list of statuses and stages for Leads and Deals. More detailed settings are totally up to you. Go to CRM → Settings → Start Point → Statuses and Dropdowns. There you can set the stages that a Lead or a Deal should go through. You can change the order of the statuses, rename or delete them, as well as assign them with any color of your liking.
By default, the Deal has only two hard-coded parameters: it must have an initial and two final stages (whether the Deal is successful or not). All other stages are optional. In the Deal card you can find all related data, change a stage, or issue an invoice.
Automation
A huge part of the client service consists of routine, repetitive tasks: send an email, a message, a basic quote, schedule a meeting, set a task, and so on. In Bitrix24 CRM there are two types of tools — automation rules (aka robots) and triggers. They help minimize managers' efforts, save time and improve the quality of communication with the clients. Let's explore each of them in more detail.
Automation rules
An automation rule (further we will refer to it as a robot) is a planned algorithm for processing leads and deals. It is launched when an element gets transferred to an expected status. For example, a robot can automatically create a new task when a new lead is registered.
There are four main rules categories:
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For employees (add a comment to a lead or a deal, book an employee for a set period of time, set a task, send a message to the responsible person in case a major deal is registered, create a document based on the chosen template, etc.);
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To communicate with clients (make an automatic information phone call to a client, send them an SMS, an email or a message in a social network with some preset text);
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Advertising (add customer data to the list of your ad's target audience);
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Your robots (you can connect some third-party services to Bitrix24 by using webhooks or install one of the apps from the Marketplace).
We will not get into details of how to set up each of the robots listed above, but we'll go through some basic steps.
You can customize the robots' behavior right in the Lead or Deal card, but remember that these settings are saved for all items.
In edit mode, you can move or change existing rules, and create new robots. Each action is linked to a specific status. Therefore, to create a new robot, select the required column, and click Add.
You can customize the execution time for each particular robot. For example, a single-time robot can be executed right away, at a set time, after some time, or within a time period. If you select "After the previous automation rule", the system will wait for the previous robot to execute the rule and only after that it will launch the next one. For example, if during the algorithm construction you choose a pause "in 2 days", Bitrix24 will first wait for the previous robot to complete its work, and only then will begin the two-day countdown until executing the next one.
With robots, you can create a flexible logic of processing leads and deals. In addition, robots can significantly accelerate the execution of daily operations.
Automation rules for Leads and Deals are available for all commercial plans.
Triggers
Unlike a robot, a trigger is an action coming from a user, for example, a call or a click on a link, that triggers the non-linear logic of Leads and Deals processing. It means that after some action from the user's part, a deal can skip the stage and go the one after that, or get closed altogether.
A trigger can mean a whole lot of actions from the client's side including incoming emails from clients, outgoing emails to clients, following links from emails, incoming calls, filled out CRM forms, first messages from clients in chats, and so on.
You can configure triggers right in the Lead or Deal card.
By default, triggers can move a lead or a deal only to one of the next stages. If you want to automatically move the entity to the previous status, select this option in the settings section.
Triggers are available for all commercial plans.
For sure, we cannot describe all the capabilities of Bitrix24 CRM in one piece. For more it's better to try it out once than read about it for hundreds of times. Register your Bitrix24 for free and test all key CRM elements yourself.
