Executive Coaching Global Streamlined Data Management With Agile CRM

Collecting and managing data takes time. Nearly 20 percent of each workday is spent managing business data, in fact, a number that’s hard to believe until you actually consider all the pushing and pulling of data and reports that most of us perform on a regular basis.

This was a big problem for Executive Coaching Global (ECG), which wanted to cut this data management time waste and instead focus more energy on its core business of coaching and research. So the company went in search of a tool that could easily handle data management. As a secondary goal, the company also wanted to dip a toe into the fast-growing marketing automation market.

How Agile CRM Helped ECG Boost Efficiency

ECG, run for the past 14 years by CEO Michael Beale, is an online coaching institute that provides senior-level coaching and training programs to clients worldwide. Among other clients, ECG supports a major UK business school with research on various aspects of corporate coaching.

As part of this work, ECG maintains a list of more than 6,000 business leaders and other contacts it mines for business trends and advice. Maintaining this list and nurturing its network of contacts via email campaigns was challenging with its old system of Gmail and spreadsheets.

The task of managing contacts and communicating with them was made significantly easier when ECG adopted Agile CRM, however. With Agile CRM, ECG estimates that it has improved its data and communications efficiency by 85 percent.

Using the Agile CRM’s contact management feature, the company now segregates contacts into different categories. With this segregation, it can easily identify which contacts are most helpful for its research and the development of its coaching lessons.

In addition, Agile CRM has improved ECG’s communication efforts through email automation. After adopting Agile CRM, the company now can schedule emails for research questions, trigger bulk emails that inform its network of contacts, and track all the communications within the company.

The marketing automation features within Agile CRM, such as newsletter creation, email tracking and task management, also have helped save the company time, streamlining repetitive tasks.

“Agile CRM does the job I want it to do effectively and efficiently, and it is very competitively priced,” said Beale.

Adoption Made Easy

While Agile CRM dramatically improved ECG business processes and was easy to set up, the company still struggled with the software at first because it had been using its more limited, homegrown system for so many years. As with any migration to a new system, there were growing pains as the company adopted its new CRM.

In particular, the ECG initially had trouble understanding and integrating Agile CRM with its internet service provider.

While Agile CRM helps businesses automate marketing and sales, the company doesn’t use technology as a stand-in for live, human customer support. Agile CRM support agents helped walk ECG through the transition process and help it set up its system smoothly. Agile CRM also helped ECG roll out automated email campaigns within the CRM system.

Agile CRM’s customer service also was one of the keys to the company’s successful client management and email marketing, according to Beale.

“Agile CRM’s support people have effectively and efficiently helped me solve all the challenges we’ve had in running the system,” he enthused.

Gone are ECG’s headaches with managing its data and staying connected with contacts. Agile CRM has made a significant difference for the company in terms of data efficiency and marketing automation. And for this coaching firm, that’s an obvious lesson in smart business.