It was approximately 6 years ago that I was first introduced to the term and the concept of social media. At that time, the phrase itself made little sense, and I associated it with people on Twitter talking about what they had for breakfast or folks on Facebook sharing cute pictures of their children and pets. These uses struck me as a waste of my valuable time. Surely, there must be business-related applications for what appeared to be a promising new phenomenon.
While large brands were quick to recognize the power and benefits of this medium, for the average company and small business in particular, acceptance of these ideas and practices took a little bit longer to formulate. Thankfully, this focus gradually began to take shape, and small businesses began to pay attention.
As a business owner or manager, you are probably not interested in investing in something that, while novel, offers little more than that novelty. You are interested in results, nothing more and nothing less. Any investment that you make, and that is in terms of both time and money, needs to provide a return that is in excess of that investment, and this return is most easily measured by increased revenues.
Your business and customers have both evolved dramatically over the past several years. Much of this has to do with the explosion of the Internet and of social media specifically. Quite simply, buyer behaviors have changed, and smart businesses must learn to adapt to these changes. Certainly, there are challenges. More importantly, these shifts in your customers' behaviors represent opportunities for those companies who know how to find and then nurture them!
Whereas customers used to rely on your business and your sales and marketing staff to educate them on your product or service, many of these buyers are now doing this research on their own. They are going online, and even a simple Google search will provide them with much of the information that they seek. Moreover, they are asking and getting product recommendations from friends, family, and from people whom they know and trust, and they are using social networking as the preferred platform to secure these.
Prospective buyers are talking to each other, and they are talking about their needs and pain points. In some cases, they are even talking about you. What happens if you are not even there to listen and participate in these conversations? The answer is "nothing," and the result is the same. You will miss out on the opportunity to create a new customer or to further cement your relationship with an existing one.
About 4 years ago, I first recognized that there was an issue with traditional CRM (Customer Relationship Management). I was now talking to people on the social channels, but I had no way to track and monitor these conversations. So, I began to do the research for possible solutions and to write about my findings on this topic. While there were many add-on type products that would, for example, add a social layer to Outlook or Gmail, there were seemingly no CRMs that were designed to address this need. This has now changed!
Social CRM (SCRM), Social Customer Relationship Management, is the new breed of CRM which was itself preceded by what we called Contact Managers (CM) in the 1980s. Contact Managers focused on managing our customer and prospect data in the 3C areas: contacts, calendars, and communications. While all of this data is very important, despite the name change to CRM, there remains absolutely no relationship element to be found in these legacy applications. The focus of traditional CRM has remained on data rather than on people. For many, it is little more than an electronic rolodex.
SCRM, on the other hand, places relationships in the front and center in the company/buyer process. Think about this. Business has always been based on relationships. As consumers, we buy from those who we know, like, and trust. Relationships are developed by getting to know our customer and their needs. It comes from assisting them to get more from your product or service. It is secured by placing their needs above your own. We educate more than we sell. We make every effort to stay in touch consistently. Relationships in business are absolutely no different than those found in our personal lives. We show them the love, and the effective use of Social CRM will allow you to do just that!
This book has been written in an easy-to-read and step-by-step practical format. I have written this for small business, because I am a small business and I am a small business that uses Social CRM as the absolute hub of my sales and marketing efforts. As someone who has served in the roles of salesperson, sales manager, and owner, I understand the needs of each and the psychology of sales personnel in particular. Each chapter will include helpful tips and action items for you to take prior to moving to the next step in the process.
Chapter 1, Exploring the Key Benefits of Social CRM for Your Small Business: By the end of this chapter, you should haveu a solid understanding of Social CRM basics and how these might be deployed in your small business. This will be critical as in our next chapter; you will be laying the groundwork with your team to begin the discussion of Social CRM, which will then be followed by defining your needs and finally choosing and implementing your system.
Chapter 2, Social Business – the Foundation of Social CRM: Social Business is the business-related application of social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and so on), and this concept is the very foundation, the supporting structure that we find under Social CRM (SCRM). You have determined that SCRM may be right for you. We'll define Social Business and then discuss the four major social networks and how each can be applied to your small business.
Chapter 3, Laying the Groundwork Before Making the Move to Social CRM: By this point, you should have a solid fundamental understanding of Social Business and how Social CRM (SCRM) will allow you to manage and leverage these fantastic new opportunities! This chapter will describe the first steps that you will you want to take to prior to choosing your product or even thinking about implementing it. In fact, these steps will help ensure the right choice of a Social CRM, it's successful implementation, and your business being able to realize the long-term benefits of this system
Chapter 4, Define Your Social CRM Needs Prior to Any Investment: Understanding your needs and goals today and anticipating your future needs will be critical elements in choosing which SCRM will ultimately be right for you. Without a clear vision of your needs, the features that you will require, and how you plan to use your SCRM, choosing your platform will be difficult at best. Your business is unique, and we will help you define what that means in terms of your ultimate SCRM selection.
Chapter 5, Choosing and Implementing Your New Social CRM: There are many choices out there, and you need to be able to filter through the mass of information in order to determine the right SCRM for you today as well as one that will be able to effectively scale for your anticipated growth and which will also be able to accommodate your additional application needs. This chapter includes helping you make your choice of vendor and support options.
When it comes to actually implementing your system, will you do it yourself or will you want help? Regardless, there are a number of critical steps that you will want to take prior to your SCRM going live, including creating custom information fields, data cleansing and import, and user training.
Chapter 6, Training and SCRM Best Practices: In order to gain the most value from your new system, you must establish routines for its use. Through repetition, you establish a foundation for success, which we can then continue to build upon. Haphazard and unstructured usage will render your investment useless. This chapter will focus on the most common application of basic CRM features in your business, but it all starts and ends with great training!
Chapter 7, Exploring the Social Elements of SCRM: An SCRM is a CRM that adds a social layer, and SCRM is what adds the relationship into a CRM. The key to building relationships and uncovering opportunities will be your willingness to engage with others. This social element of SCRM will result in increased revenues.
Chapter 8, Enhancing Your Social CRM with Third-Party Applications and Integrations: Most SCRMs today are as much platforms as they are applications. This means that you can integrate them with many third-party applications in order to expand and enhance their capabilities. Some of these might include proposal preparation, advanced pipeline management, and marketing automation. We'll discuss these applications and many more.
Chapter 9, Managing Your SCRM and Evaluating Your Investment: We'll begin this chapter with a short recap of our previous discussions, and then we will move on to our suggestions to manage your system day to day as well as key things to consider as you evaluate your investment. Finally, we'll wrap it all up with a few closing thoughts and tips to ensure that your new Social CRM will deliver maximum results.
Appendix; We will have discussed several applications during the course of this book, and the appendix will include links to all of them.
If you are a small business owner, a sales manager, a salesperson, or even a solo entrepreneur who is looking for ways to significantly increase your revenues, this book is written specifically for you! As a small business, you likely wear many hats. While these varied responsibilities should be working together in concert, we often find ourselves fractured and disorganized. On top of that, we are busier than ever, and despite our best efforts, we have never managed to squeeze more than 24 hours out of a day. This guide will help you maximize your productive hours.
Ultimately, your single biggest challenge is generating new revenues from both your existing customers as well as your prospective ones and this book has been designed to show you how both can be accomplished with the deployment of SCRM. Wouldn't it be great to have one central location that will serve as the hub of your sales and marketing efforts? How wonderful would it be to discover and nurture new customers who do not even currently fall within your circles of influence? Wouldn't it be nice to have a stream of customers who are coming to you instead of you always having to prospect for them? Regarding your existing clients, will they buy more from you? Are they providing you with the quantity and quality of referrals that you would like to see? All of these are specific benefits that we will discuss within the pages of this book.
You might be thinking, "What I do now seems to be working alright". That's wonderful because SCRM is designed to take what you do well now and make you even better at doing it! SCRM is not magic, but it will take your sales and marketing efforts to the next level. SCRM works because it makes sense, and we will do our best to remove any mystery that might be surrounding it! Let's get started!
Please note that we will be discussing many SCRM features but that not all of these features will be available in every vendor's SCRM. As I am a Nimble Social CRM Solution Partner, screenshots will be shown from this platform for example purposes, but this is not to say that Nimble is the only or even the best choice for your specific business and for your specific needs.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
New terms and important words are shown in bold
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