Every business has clients to manage. Whether you are a full-service firm or a specialist in your area, you likely have multiple contacts to manage across your team. 

While you might be able to manage a few contracts' worth of contacts on your own, over time, you need a tool to help you keep track of them all. A CRM solution is not only your ticket to keeping track of your contacts. It will also help you professionalise your sales and marketing processes.

CRM software is more than an address book for managing names, emails, and phone numbers. It is a tool intended to help you manage many facets of your company. A CRM is designed to give you the functions and flexibility you need to oversee and grow your business.

In this email series, you'll learn how CRM can help you improve all business processes. We'll cover everything from tracking professional contacts as they hop between jobs to utilising intelligent reports to examine how you spend your time.

Tracking prospects

Every professional introduction you make, and every business card you pick up represents a wealth of opportunities. Formalising new acquaintances as leads clears a path for you to make contact and treat the introduction as the business opening it is. Despite the benefits of tracking those new people, it’s rare for professionals outside of salespeople to take an aggressive approach with their new contacts.

Your CRM can change all of that.

Entering your entire network, including anyone you’ve met in any context, into your management system as leads gives you and your business a better understanding of the possibilities on the horizon.

Introducing Pipedrive CRM

In Pipedrive CRM, for example, leads can be sorted by first name, last name, date added, or most recent activity. This will help you remember to engage when the intro is fresh or recall an acquaintance by name.

You can also segment leads with custom fields to group them later in any way you want. For example, you tag a contact as "referred." Later, you can pull out all of your referral contacts. 

Once you’ve deepened the relationship and determined what kind of opportunity that person provides for your firm, you can convert lead information into an individual or company contact card with one click.

Pipedrive CRM sets prospects apart from the rest of your contacts for easier organisation. Select the Leads tab in the navigation bar, which appears at the top of any screen in the CRM and see a clean display of every lead’s contact information. Scroll over the names to view email addresses and phone numbers, or connect with somebody directly within Pipedrive CRM with a button.

Organising Contacts

Contacts are leads who have been qualified and confirmed as definite business prospects. Converted leads need even more attention from your firm. It is essential to keep them organised. A deal may encompass many individuals, especially when your clients are businesses, each necessary for helping your firm execute your work.

With Pipedrive CRM's holistic approach to contact management, you can create contact cards for individuals linked with the company the person works for and the deals they are associated with.

You can take organisation further and add tags to help you recall critical information or search efficiently. For example, attaching the tag "contractor" to any contacts with that profession will help you quickly identify any existing connections in that field.

Contacts are also searchable by location. Say you're working on collateral for a job in the city.

Through Pipedrive CRM, you can pull up all of your contacts in that postcode and use the work to check in, let them know about the event, and inquire about future opportunities.

Pipedrive designed the contact cards to be intelligent and super easy to use.

Contact organisation is crucial to keeping track of your contacts. Each contact represents future business opportunities at the organisations they move to. With the average professional making fewer than seven career transitions, you must maintain relationships as people switch jobs. That's the beauty of social integration. Connecting contact cards to LinkedIn, Facebook, and X (Twitter) profiles lets you stay in touch with contacts even when their business emails, titles, and cities change.

Centralise your data.

There is no reason you should limit your contacts exclusively to the people who pay to work with you. Instead, keep all of your contacts in one central location. Not only does it make it easy to pull up contact information when you are looking for help, but it also allows you to link those contacts with the deals you’ve hired to help you within your database.

Staying on top of your contacts is the first step to building solid relationships. Pipedrive CRM makes data entry straightforward and lets you and your co-workers focus on the people and the deals.

Managing and Improving Proposals

As a Financial Service, you get plenty of incoming inquiries for work, and you send out an equal number of proposals. Without a CRM solution, you likely rely on a combination of assorted templates, chaotic email threads, and crossed fingers. If you don’t have a tool to organise and track proposals built into your processes, you'll be left waiting for potential clients to get back to you.

Pipeline management puts you back in control.

With Pipedrive CRM, you can create a fully customised sales pipeline. No matter how your firm moves through the client process, Pipedrive CRM can adapt to fit your preferred workflow. Just enter the names of the different pipeline stages and order them in the best way for your business.

Let's look at a simple example of a sales pipeline. A new lead will usually be placed into the first sales funnel stage, "Incoming." You evaluate this lead, and if it is qualified, you forward it to the next stage in the sales process, the "Qualified" stage. Once you've gone through discovery with the client and are ready to give a quote, you can move the deal forward to the "Quote" stage. Once you prepare the price quote and send it to the prospect, you can move the lead to the last active stage, "Closure". You will sort out the final details, and the negotiation will usually occur. After the Closure stage, you will either win or lose the deal. You can then convert the opportunity into a project.

In Pipedrive CRM, all the stages are fully customisable to your business to reflect your unique sales process.

Document Management

Using pipeline management, you can keep all documents and contracts associated with a deal in one central location. You can review all relevant documentation on the phone with a client or put together a new proposal for upcoming work. There is no need to dig for that one email attachment; you can find everything you need in your CRM.

Automated Tasks

A robust CRM like Pipedrive CRM also helps you remember to follow outstanding bids with the Tasks feature. Select Tasks from the toolbar, create the to-do item, assign it to a staff member, and set a due date. The person responsible for the proposal will get a reminder in their dashboard (and email) to contact prospects when the time is right, improving client follow-up and helping you land more gigs.

All tasks are easily accessible to team members, so they know what’s coming up and when.

Performance Reports

Pipedrive CRM's comprehensive reports can also improve your proposal process over time. For instance, with the Deal Lost Reasons report, you can track why your proposal was declined in the past and work to improve the areas of your workflow that are preventing success. Pipedrive's reporting can offer invaluable insights into how your firm's team members perform, giving you a more precise direction for making improvements and securing more projects.

Use the Deals Lost Reasons report to know why you’re not converting prospects into clients and work to improve in the future.