Managing a CRM
CRM stands for "Customer Relationship Management", it is a big name in order to say that there is software which is hosting data about your customers and to a large scale, your visitors. You will of course have to choose this software and there are many. One of the big proprietary software you will hear about is Salesforce. In this course, we will only deal with open source one and by chance, MAUTIC is a CRM. It is not like a 100% CRM as it does not have all the features that you will need, but it is providing you enough information in order to get started if you are only dealing with a website.
Ok, let's get started
The purpose of a CRM, let's make it straight, is to make money out of it. The idea is to use it in order to record any contact you are getting with your leads and customers. The idea is to better keep track record of it and to be able to share those information with your colleagues. The big question which will come next is "why should I use a software for this? I already have emails". Well that's the all point, email software are messy, it means that your colleagues cannot see what you are doing, information is easily lost within the conversations, it is not suitable in order to know at which step of the transaction funnel you are and so on and so forth. CRM are here for that, so to say, your emails will be know sent from the CRM and/or you will now integrate your emails within the CRM.
Ok, how does it look like for real?
A contact is recorded in MAUTIC as far as the MAUTIC tag is loaded. So to say it becomes a contact even if you don't have yet his email address. In order to see that, you need to go on contacts and then use the following syntax within the search field, is:anonymous. Once done you will have the list of all your contacts. Anonymous contacts are useless until they gave you a way to contact them (phone number, social network account identifier, email...).
In order to start counting visitors, you need to have a tracker on your website that you will deploy on all the pages on your website. It looks like something like this:
<script> (function(w,d,t,u,n,a,m){w['MauticTrackingObject']=n; w[n]=w[n]||function(){(w[n].q=w[n].q||[]).push(arguments)},a=d.createElement(t), m=d.getElementsByTagName(t)[0];a.async=1;a.src=u;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,'script','http(s)://yourmautic.com/mtc.js','mt'); mt('send', 'pageview');</script>
When this tracker will be executed it will consider that every new IP address which connect to your website is a potential lead and so, a contact.
After this, you are the one who will fullfill the data about this given contact in order to convert her/him into a client, then a referral, then an ambassador. It is as simple as this.
Using a CRM is a lot about psychology
I would say that the main challenge with a CRM is to get your team on board. In fact this software is supposed to be the main software used by your sales team. If your sales team do not understand the interest of using it, if they are keeping their old way of working this is where you will get into troubles. The best thing is to have your sales team on board when you are choosing the right tool and make sure that they understand the benefits of it and use it on a day to day basis.