Making the Most of your CRM
Consider this: You’re a growing pest control or lawn care company. You have a few people on your sales team who are reaching out to potential customers all day long. Each salesperson talks to 20 customers a day. Some people might be ready to move forward with your service. Some people might want to wait a few months.
How do you keep track of your leads? How do you know if your sales process is working? How do you keep prospects from slipping through the cracks?
In Donnie Shelton’s book, Grow, he states, “What gets measured gets done.” Measuring your data allows you to manage your processes, refine your processes, and see improvements. This is especially important when it comes to managing your business relationships. There are tools out there that specifically help keep your business relationships organized. It’s called a CRM, or “customer relationship management” tool.
According to Salesforce, a leading CRM software, “customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: improve business relationships. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.” Nicely put, Salesforce!
A CRM is a critical tool in any sales process. It’s a way to keep track of exactly where you are with any business relationship, current and future. A CRM can be used for more than just the sales process. Depending on the CRM, it can track technician efficiency in the field, scheduling, reporting, and billing.
A few common CRM’s in the pest control, lawn care, and HVAC/plumbing industries are Housecall Pro, Service Fusion, and ServiceTitan. Our personal favorite, however, is PestPac.
We reached out to Josh Baker, the Vice President of Sales for our sister company, Triangle Pest Control, to talk to him about how he uses PestPac day-to-day and why it’s important to use a CRM. He’s Triangle Pest Control’s PestPac guru, and acquaintances from all over come to him asking for help with making the most of their CRM. Each company is different, so without telling you exactly what reports to run or how to run your company, here are four main points Josh tells all his colleagues about their CRM.
Step 1: Understand your data
A large part of what Triangle Pest Control uses PestPac for is reporting. While it’s great that it has other uses like scheduling and billing, the most important in Josh’s day-to-day is the reporting tool. You can’t set up reports without understanding the basics of what your CRM is tracking. For example, before running a lead report, take a step back. First, define what a lead is to your company. Second, figure out how it will look in the system. Make sure to keep in mind the long-term goal of what the report is doing. If your leads report is meant to show you a high-level view of your leads, keep it simple.
Step 2: Set Systems
There is no point in having data if you aren’t going to use it. PestPac makes reporting incredibly easy, and it will even automate the reports to send to you whenever you’d like. Setting up these systems might take time on the front end, but it will end up saving you time and energy in the long run. It will also allow your management team to feel more connected to both the day-to-day and high-level operations of the business. It all goes back to goals. What are you wanting to track? What are your main goals? What are your revenue goals? Your CRM is gathering the information. It’s up to you to figure out how best to use it in your company. This is a big benefit of PestPac according to David Floyd at ThePestInformer.com, and something that every local service business should be looking at.
Step 3: Enforce Systems
Placing rules around the usage of your CRM will help you hold your team accountable. Explain why your team should be taking advantage of this tool and how it can benefit their department. Josh Baker explains that at Triangle Pest Control, they have a rule that their technicians must follow up with new leads the day that it come in. Every day, they have an automated Lead Report and a Past Due Lead Report that come out. If their team doesn’t follow up with a lead the day it came in, then their name will be on the Past Due Lead Report. Any technician who has a lead on the Past Due Lead Report will be written up. You can use reports to enforce systems for all levels of employees, from technicians to management.
Step 4: Implement Change
Reports from your CRM will help you make data-driven decisions. Occasionally, these reports will open your eyes as a business owner, and you may realize that some tough decisions need to be made. Having reports to backup your decisions can help with some of the employee pushback that you might receive when making company-wide adjustments. Reports will help you understand where your company is currently, so you can make educated decisions on how to improve.
Using a CRM is a critical part of growing your business. If you can’t track where you are with your current customers, future customers, technicians, or goals, how can you expect to grow?