Setting up your customer relationship management (CRM) software is like setting up a new computer. Once you bring it home, you can customize it by purchasing and installing the apps that you need. You protect it with a password, choose a wallpaper you like, and arrange folders and desktop icons according to your preference to benefit your productivity.
Similarly, CRM setup also involves customizations that will:
Maximize the CRM features that your business needs
Help your teams collaborate
Increase your team’s productivity
Streamline your processes for growth
Not sure where to start? This blog post will discuss CRM configuration basics, how to set up a CRM, and why setting up your CRM is important.
There are so many CRMs of different types and capabilities on the market. Even if you choose the CRM with the most significant number of features, it won’t benefit your business if you don’t configure it according to your processes, workflows, and needs.
Setting up your CRM also involves training your team members to make the most out of your CRM’s features. This step guides your team to success and efficiency, ensuring you maximize your investment.
How to set up a CRM
Below are seven CRM setup best practices that your business can employ:
CRM aims to nurture relationships with your customers and prospects so they purchase from and remain loyal to your business. You can cultivate relationships by providing a painless experience for customers to find you, interact with you, buy from you, and ask after-sales questions.
For a customer, a pleasant experience begins when a brand understands their needs. Customer journey mapping helps businesses like yours identify your customers’ pain points. In addition, it also helps you:
Discover how prospects search for solutions to their problems and how they find your business: Do they search online before visiting your company website? Or do they stumble upon solutions through your social media posts?
Find out when prospects are ready to buy: What moments indicate a prospect is intensely interested in your product? It can be downloading a product brochure, signing up for your newsletter, or filling out an online form.
Understand how you close deals and sell: Here’s your finale. Identify what makes a good customer fit. Based on your historical data, how many times do you interact with a lead before they purchase from you?
Gather details about your customer’s journey with your business and organize the information your team can easily understand. This is an essential first step in setting up your CRM.
How to map the customer journey
How can you map your customer journey? Follow these 6 steps:
Define your buyer personas: Look at the data you have about your customers, such as demographic, psychographic, and firmographic data, and create descriptions of your typical customers,
Identify customer pain points: Identify the challenges and issues potential customers face throughout your sales process so you can determine how to address them.
Identify customer touchpoints: Identify all the interactions a potential customer has with your business during your sales process, from website content to ads to interactions with sales and support staff.
Identify customer actions: Identify the actions leads take throughout the decision-making process that move them forward. These might include actions such as downloading content, scheduling demos, and requesting quotes.
Map out the process: Create a visual representation of the customer journey, including touchpoints, actions, and other points mentioned above, and label each stage.
2. Define your business processes and pipelines
Once you’ve mapped your customer journey, you have the information you need to map out your internal business processes as they relate to the customer journey. These internal processes and pipelines show what the customer journey looks like from the perspective of your sales team as well as teams like marketing, support, and customer success.
When mapping out these processes, you’ll want to identify factors like:
The actions team members take, such as sending marketing emails or scheduling sales calls
The channels used, such as email, social media, SMS, phone, and videoconferencing
Who is responsible for each task
What team members need to accomplish to move a prospect to the next stage
You’ll also want to name and define each stage.
Why is this important in your CRM setup? By defining your business processes, you’re also identifying the CRM tools your team members need to keep your customers happy.
For example, let’s say you provide deep-cleaning services. Does your team send SMS and email reminders to your customers before their scheduled appointment? Does your customer service team send surveys via email after closing a service ticket? If so, email automation might be a helpful feature for your business.
Understanding how your customers move through your sales pipeline stages is also an essential part of your CRM setup. Your sales pipeline is the series of steps your prospects take as they go from new prospect to customer.
The sales pipeline focuses on the actions taken by the sales team and separates the sales process into repeatable stages such as prospecting, qualifying, establishing a connection, presenting solutions, handling objections, closing the sales, and following up.
3. Customize your CRM’s custom fields, pipelines, and workflow automation
After mapping your customer journey and understanding your processes, customize your CRM according to your business’s needs. Create unique elements and automation flows that will help you manage your customers’ data:
Custom fields: Your CRM includes standard fields like name, contact details, and company. Set up your custom fields for any critical detail you need to collect. Purchase history and categories of products purchased, for example, can help you understand your customers’ needs and possible needs in the future.
Pipelines and stages: Many CRMs allow users to create pipelines, each with unique stages. Based on your customer’s journey, customize your pipelines and stages to support your sales, marketing, and customer service activities. When you create pipelines in your CRM, you can easily keep track of leads as they move through the sales process.
Automation: To improve your team’s efficiency, create workflow automation to streamline manual tasks and reduce “non-selling activities.” Nutshell Pro, for instance, enables you to automate and customize assigning leads to your reps and build automation such as automated email sequences into your pipelines.
Connect with your future buyers and spend less time doing it!
Define your ideal customer and ProspectorIQ does the heavy lifting, so you can add new contacts to your CRM and start making more sales!
With your CRM set up with custom fields, you can directly migrate your customer information. Most CRMs support importing data using a CSV or Excel file.
When importing your data, it’s important to make sure your data is accurate and organized. Before adding data to your CRM, set up policies for how you want to manage data and ensure the data you import is clean and accurate.
To nurture your relationships with your customers and leads, ensure your messages are tailored to their needs. Deliver relevant and valuable offers to them.
If you own a dog and your veterinary clinic emails you about a special offer on cat food, you’d think that they don’t know your needs well enough.
That’s why customer segmentation helps improve your outreach to your contacts. You can segment your contacts according to their demographics, like location or the products they’ve purchased from you. You can then customize your outreach based on the information they provide.
When configuring your CRM, you can segment your customers by adding tags to them or placing them in audiences. This lets you filter your contacts by key characteristics and reach out to only select groups of customers.
With customer segmentation, you reach out to your contacts with helpful information and relevant offers. As a result, they’re likely to read your messages and take action.
6. Integrate your CRM with your other tools
Most CRMs allow integration with third-party platforms, like email, messaging apps, lead generation tools, and analytics.
Make it easy for your team members to use your CRM by integrating it with the apps you’re currently using. This will make your team more efficient in building customer relationships.
Pro tip: If you’re still looking for a CRM for your business, consider getting one that integrates with the current tools you’re using. You can integrate Nutshell with various platforms—from accounting tools to social apps.
7. Define the role of each team member and onboard your team
Grant permissions to team members who will use your CRM. Define each team member’s role so their data access matches their responsibilities. For example, customer-facing roles should be able to add notes about your contacts.
One of the CRM setup best practices you shouldn’t skip is onboarding your team members who will use the new platform. Training is critical for your team members to adopt new tools, maximize your investment, and deliver results.
Improve your processes and CRM use by gathering feedback among your users. This can help you make the most of your investment.
Streamline your business processes with Nutshell
If you’re looking for a CRM that can streamline your sales process and grow your business, consider Nutshell. An easy-to-use and flexible CRM, Nutshell is a growth platform you can easily customize according to your business’s needs.
