5 reasons why creative agencies need CRM

Creative agencies don’t always conjure up the same mental imagery as a business selling a physical product does. Sometimes not even to those doing the work themselves. Those in the business themselves may not feel the need of a platform to improve their efficiency. However, there are incredibly important reasons why such firms should adopt a creative agency CRM, and they all center around enhancing customers engagement and organization of information.

A creative agency wouldn’t have anyone to sell that beautiful art, designs or witty slogans unless they have a regular flow of customers, & without a consistent, reliable way to engage and manage leads, there won’t be any customers. Comprehensive data tracking, analysis, marketing and communications keep those customers and leads around.

These are all problems solved with a customer relationship software. Here are five specific reasons why your agency needs a CRM.

1. Data, Data, & Data

Customer data management can mean either your business sees amazing financial success or death. Things can be more complicated given the many communications channels companies use to interact with customers these days.

A CRM solves this by serving as a single platform for information collection and tracking every interaction your teams have. Your sales and marketing teams can always see the same data. A CRM allows you to quickly check customer preferences and past concerns, and it gives you a 360-view of the contact.

A creative agency CRM also helps prevent redundancy issues. There is no stacking of old data and no duplication. The information is always fresh because your teams are all working, updating and maintaining within the same system.

2. Give Your Revenue Stream a Jump

CRMs are proven to increase sales productivity, ROI, sales rate quotas and can even increase the size of purchases made by leads. The numbers get more interesting when sales teams have access to a mobile CRM like Agile CRM. In fact, 65 percent of sales reps hit their quotas with a mobile CRM versus 22 percent without mobile software. As far as productivity goes, sales teams see a boost of more than  26 percent in productivity.

CRMs also have a fantastic return on investment. For every dollar spent, the average ROI is anywhere from $5.60 to $8.71, according to one study. There’s no question that every creative agency needs right agency software to function properly and CRM is a wise purchase from a numbers perspective.

From a creative perspective, agencies whose focus is more artistic have to bounce between a lot of tasks at the same time. There’s creating the art and design and words of a project, pitching that project and making modifications based on the customer needs.

A CRM serves as the perfect way to maintain schedules and organization in this case. All communications can be recorded. Account executives will never question when a client has been called or when they need to be contacted again.

All-in-one software also assists in spotting trends among customers. Your teams can use those trends to—if needed—change the way they interact with clients to both better serve the customer’s needs and boost the chances of a sale.

3. A CRM Leads to More Referrals

There have been a lot of conversations about the effectiveness of cold calling, but all signs point to this practice being a huge waste of time for businesses and customers. One study by Baylor University’s Keller Center for Research in the Hankamer School of Business showed that 6,264 cold calls yielded only 19 appointments. Further, of those calls, 28 percent were answered, 55 percent were not answered, and 17 percent were non-working numbers.

Instead, the golden calf for companies is referrals. The way to get referrals is by providing top-notch customer experiences and building relationships, which is something CRMs do very well. One academic study concluded that a “CRM is the most effective approach in maintaining and establishing relationships with customers.” That’s news you can take to the bank.

4. Keep Your Customers for Life

One simple fact of business is that retaining customers is easier than trying to find new ones. That means retention and loyalty should be of paramount concern for your business. A CRM helps with this in a myriad of ways.

A creative agency CRM allows for a better understanding of the customer journey.. It gives your business the opportunity to target customers through tailor-made offers. You can use a CRM to create loyalty programs to reward clients who stick with you. Perhaps most importantly, it grants you the ability to truly personalize the experience for your customers, which solidifies your company’s relationship with them.

5. Lead Segmentation and Organization

Although we wish this wasn’t the case, not all leads become customers. In addition, different customers take different priorities. A CRM naturally lends itself to the creation of organization by classifying clients and allowing your team to determine who needs what level of attention and when. Higher risk leads or leads that aren’t as hot should not get the same levels of attention as leads who are in other areas of the sales funnel.

Lead and contact segmentation within a CRM is the perfect way to tackle this challenge. Any team member should be able to filter, view and organize contact data inside the software. Beyond that, a good CRM should also allow for at least two different kinds of segmentation: one using predefined filters and one that has been manually tagged by your team. Agile CRM is one such system—and it even has robust automation systems in place.

In some ways, creative agencies have more to juggle and manage than traditional companies. They have to meld sales with more artistic endeavors. They have to keep the client happy over the course of creation through to execution. Due to the nature of their business, even the product itself has the potential to change during the customer’s journey. All of these challenges are solved, however, by investing in a CRM for your creative agency.