Centralized CRM Systems: The Hidden Key to Accountability, Growth, and Protection

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Let's go. What's going on, guys? Sean Derrick here with Legacy Sales Engineering. I want to welcome you back for another episode of the Sales Process Podcast.

Each week we're diving into the sales tips and automation secrets that help businesses grow every single day. If you find something in this episode that's helpful to your business, I'd love to invite you to join me and my online community at jointhelb.com. We meet twice a week for live calls in a group setting where we're helping each other answer questions in our business.

We're discussing sales tactics and strategies, automation and implementation, how to use AI. Hi, it's a lot of fun and I'd love to have you there. So what is a CRM? You may have heard this word before.

I'm really surprised. There's a lot of people that say, Sean, what's a CRM? I don't know what that is. Well, it stands for Customer Relationship Management System.

And it's just a place that we database all of our customers' information as much as you can all in one central platform. And one of the things that we struggle with a lot in business is getting a tech stack that is condensed. And what's that mean? Well, if you've been in business for any amount of time, you probably have more than one monthly subscription to some type of service that helps your business grow.

And you get all of these different pieces of tech that you keep this piece of information over there and that piece of information over there. And before you know it, you got a little bit here and a little bit there, and it's everywhere. You can't control it. And a CRM databases is all of that stuff.

You bring it all into one place as much as you can all into one location. And it puts it in a box that you have access to that you can go back and reference, and it keeps the record for you. So today, we love to use the go high-level CRM in our business. We white-label it and resell it as weekend CRM.

You can actually visit weekendcrm.com and purchase that. It's like 97 bucks a month, super powerful, but you get a copy of it, an unlimited actually amount of copies of it when you join our mastermind community. So one of the fringe benefits of being in the legacy builders community is you get as many CRM accounts as you want for you and your family.

So you can get a CRM for your business, a CRM for your wife's business, all your kids' businesses, anybody in your household, they all get CRMs. So it's like Oprah, you get a CRM and you get a CRM and you get a CRM. So come check us out, shameless plug. But that database is so super important to your customer and to your business because it really creates consistency and continuity in your business.

So what are some of the things that a CRM does for you? Why do you want it? Well, the first thing it does is it keeps that data central. Like I said, all in one place, all in one nice, neat little box.

And with our product, with the Go High Level product, you get to kind of customize it and set it up however you want to. You can organize your fields. You can create custom data fields that you can store anything you want to from data information to numbers to pictures to documents. It all gets put in one place.

You can put notes in customers files and keep notes that just you can see or just your team can see to have access to records Our CRM also centralizes your communication with a client And so you able to get all of your text messages phone calls emails in one sequence that you can see So you're able to, to really understand what has happened in that customer's life cycle in chronological order, all in one place as a business owner, especially if you've got a team, There's nothing worse than when something goes wrong, trying to dissect what went wrong and how you prevent it from happening again, if all of your customer communication points are on your team member cell phones.

And so maybe you've got Bob in the field and Larry in the field, and one of them had a phone call that wasn't recorded. And one of them had seven text messages that you don't have access to. And the customer says this and they say that. And it's really hard to correlate a timeline of events because you just can't make sense of it all because you don't have access.

Well, when you centralize that communication, it allows you to record your phone calls and to keep a record all in one place so that you can go back and really figure out how to prevent it from happening again. What's the best way to address it? And how do we move forward as a team and make ourselves better? And so there's a lot of power in having that for just your business, not to mention all the benefits and how it helps you serve your client better.

But there's a lot of safety that it gives you as a business owner too. There's no searching in all those places for those records. When you need something, you can come to one place. You can find everything you need for that client.

If you have created a habit of implementation, the best CRMs in the world aren't going to help you if you don't use it, if you don't implement it and leverage it in your business. And so you have to be diligent and, and, you know, be really purposeful about updating things and putting the data in and keeping the records current. When you change things, when you talk to a client, you got to go in there and leave the note. You got to connect email so that it integrates like our, our system, you can plug into your email.

So all your emails just automatically come in and tie to the record that has that email address on file. So if you're sending something from your Gmail, your Microsoft account, and that email address that you're sending to is also in your CRM, it will actually pull that email into the system and put it in the customer's record. And you know that, hey, on Tuesday at 7 p.m.

, the client had an email conversation with the sales team, and this is what was said. So you've got a lot of ability there to have some insight if you want it. It also really keeps everything accessible to your entire team. And so it's super valuable as your team is growing that everybody has access to the same information so that they can make informed decisions.

If you've got two team members on different parts of town and one of them is responsible for maybe picking this up and one of them is responsible for communicating to the client and there's something that's lost in communication when things don't go right, it's really hard to keep everybody on the same page when all that data is everywhere. versus if you've got a central system that you can tag each other in, comment, push data back and forth, that everybody can look and see what's going on.

If the customer called and rescheduled the appointment and I'm in the contact and I can see, hey, there was a call from that client 15 minutes ago. I wonder what that was about. I can listen to it and understand exactly what's going on so that I know the exact same things that the person in the office knows while I'm in the field. So there's a lot of value there for your team to be able to all be on the same page, to communicate congruently with that client and keep things consistent.

From a communication standpoint with the client, it also creates a lot of consistency because they're not getting phone calls from seven different cell phones or four different texts. If you have a CRM that has the communication piece built into it like Weekend CRM does then you able to actually make that phone call come from the same phone number every single time there an outbound call We even have the ability in our CRM to spoof or fake a caller ID so that maybe you have an established office line already that you've had for years and you don't really want to port it into the CRM, which you can do, but you don't want to go through all that trouble.

You just want to make it look like when we're calling from the number that's in the CRM, that it looks like you're calling from the office. Well, we can do that. That's pretty easy to do. So a lot of capability to create consistency, continuity there with the client.

The final thing that it does for you is it creates a lot of accountability in your business. And it's a lot of different ways. It's not just how you would think. And let me tell you what I mean by that.

So it's going to, one, it's going to hold you accountable because you're going to have a lot more purview into your business. You're going to be able to see trends. You're going to be able to look and say, hey, we got this many calls during this timeframe. We spent this much on the time on the phone.

We're able to look, for instance, with one of our clients. He wanted to know, hey, what staffing decisions should I make on my office team? Well, we're able to look at calls for a full year and run that call times and see, hey, what times a day? How long were the calls?

When are the hot points? We were able to put all of that into AI, visualize a heat map on that so we could see what times of the year, what times of the day we needed to have the most staffing based on the call volume that they had had in that system. And we were only able to do that because we had a reporting for that inside of his CRM. So there's a lot of accountability there that it gives you as the business owner.

It also helps you hold your team accountable because you're able to get some level of tracking on their in-home rates, their percentage rates. But you also, in order for that to work, you have to hold them accountable to dispositioning those appointments, to inputting their data, and to working the system. But if you do that, then you're going to get an extra layer of insight into what's not working in the business. and finally it actually gives you some ability to hold the client accountable too and what that that sounds kind of weird but it's important we live in a world where there are people out there trying to take advantage of your business there are frivolous lawsuits there are false reviews there are atrocious things said about people all in the name of profit clients don't pay their bills They are always forthcoming.

And sometimes you need to have a legal leg to stand on as a business owner to protect yourself and to protect your brand. And so one of the things that you're able to do is, one, we record all of our phone calls and we give a legal notification before all of our calls that this call is being recorded for quality and training purposes. Well, that then allows us to use those recordings in a lawsuit should we get sued. We now have verifiable, informed proof that what we said is what we said, and we can use that to protect ourselves.

And so you get a layer of security there with a call recording. But beyond that, you actually have a record of every single text, email, call recording in chronological order that is now available. And you can use that to create security for your business in a lot of different ways. I'll tell you, very recently in one of my businesses, we had somebody give us a bad review over a price increase.

and the bad review was actually about price increase and he did admit that that was actually the reason that he left the bad review. It was $5 per service that he left us a bad review over equated to $20 a month. But in the review he said that the reason he was actually leaving a bad review was because we had not been good communicators that it took too long to get ahold of us We were non all the time and that he just couldn't do business with us anymore. Well, because we have our CRM and because we have a system, I was able to actually go back and look and say, Hey, like every time this guy has ever done, like reached out to us that the largest gap in communication was about five hours, which I think is pretty reasonable for client response.

If somebody, you know, doesn't get, you don't get ahold of somebody and you get back to them the same business day, I think that's pretty reasonable. So, you know, what I did is I was able to call him and talk to him and try to reason with him. And, you know, eventually as he just got hotter and hotter, I was, I finally was just able to say, sir, listen, like, I understand that, that, you know, you're not happy about the price increase. And I'm sorry about that.

You're not under contract. Our costs have gone up and, and, you know, I'd love to help you. And I actually even offered if he would go back into a contract, if he wanted to get into a contract to honor his previous price, and he wouldn't do that. And so what I said to him, I said, well, listen, I said, I, it sounds to me like we're not going to come to a reasonable outcome here.

And so what I can tell you is that I have a record of every communication that we've ever had with you. And what you've said in your review about us not communicating with you is not true. That's false. You've lied.

And so my next phone call is going to be to my attorney. And if the review is not done down by tomorrow, then we're going to proceed with legal action. And I hung up the call and the review was down in about 10 minutes. And so I had a legal leg to stand on because I had records.

We gave legal notification. We informed all our clients that were recording conversations. And so we were able to say, hey, listen, what you're saying is not true. And we're not going to let you hurt our reputation over 20 bucks a month.

You need to get over yourself. And so there's just going to be times in your business that people are going to be unreasonable and you're going to have to protect yourself. And having a good CRM, a good system allows you to do that beyond all of the other amazing things that our systems allow you to automate and process and build in your business and create efficiency. That accountability piece is single-handedly the single greatest argument for having is a good customer relationship management system in your business.

It's very important. It's not something that I would skimp on And it really should be the central hub, the backbone of your operating processes day to day. It's a, it should be where your business lives and it can be really, really impactful if you do it right. It can save you a lot of time or it can create a lot of heartache because it's so, so vital to being successful.

So I hope that that helps you understand why it's so important to have a good customer relationship management CRM in your business. I hope that if you don't have one that you'll start to find one. there's a lot of free options out there. If you can't afford to pay for a product, there are, there are options out there that are free.

HubSpot offers a great free intro product. It's very expensive. If you start to pay for it long-term and start to add on features. But if you need some help, holler at me, I'd love to be a resource for you.

We've got a lot of great options for, for low barrier entry. If you need some stuff like that, let us know. We'll see what we can do for you. So my name is Sean Derrick with Legacy Sales Engineering.

Again, I'd love to invite you back out to join the lb.com for our legacy builders mastermind community. If you learned anything today, I hope you'll check us out and dive in a little bit deeper there. Until next time, I hope you sell lots of stuff this week.

Go sell something. This episode of the sales process podcast has been sponsored by legacy sales engineering, helping you sell great products with a great sales process. Visit www.legacysalese.

com to discover your solution for every step of your business sales process. Subscribe to the Sales Process Podcast on your platform of choice today.