How Your Firm Should Be Leveraging Your CRM to Close More Deals

If you want to scale your business beyond founder-led sales (and let’s be honest, which one of us in C54 doesn’t?) you’ll need to come face-to-face with a three letter acronym: CRM. 

Yes, the customer relationship management (CRM) piece.

To truly scale your firm (and sales), you need a centralized and consistent way to manage customer data, prospect conversations, sales opportunities, and engagements. However, in today’s world – you could probably do that with a shared spreadsheet. So why look at a tool like HubSpot, Zoho, Salesforce, etc? 

It’s not about the tool. It’s the way you build your tools and system that drives revenue. 

Let me explain. 

Professional services have 3 primary sales and marketing motions: 

1. Referrals
2. Thought leadership (speaking engagements, webinars, podcasts, books, etc.)
3. Events (trade shows, booths etc.)

The reason those strategies work is that people don’t “buy” professional services — they hire experts they trust. And those three methods are the most effective at establishing trust that leads to a sales conversation. 

But what does that mean when setting up and using a CRM like HubSpot? Here’s where the rub lies. 

Most professional companies we’ve worked at Simple Strat have set up their CRM to track customer information and deals – emails and where a sale may be in the pipeline. But they haven’t truly optimized the setup or processes around their core revenue-driving activities (such as the three mentioned above) marketing campaigns, or leading metrics that are professional services-specific. 

So how do you set up your CRM in a way that helps you generate more leads AND close more deals in professional services? Here are 3 ways you could approach this.   

1. Track and Get More Referrals

If you’ve ever tried to generate more referrals, it can be difficult to know where to start. Yes, you could send an email campaign to ask for referrals, but that’s not really how referrals work.

In order to be referral worthy, your referral source (or clients) need to be reminded of:

• Problems you’ve solved
• Wins you’ve generated for clients

To do this, your CRM should be set up to:

1. Identify your top referral sources, the companies they have referred and the overall value of those referral deals
2. Track referrals toward a referral “goal” (for example, every week we’re looking at what deals were generated from inbound vs referral vs returning customer)
3. Create automated workflows to nurture these relationships with regular updates, thank-you messages, and reminders to keep your firm top-of-mind, thereby increasing the likelihood of these referrals turning into business opportunities.

2. Maximize Events and New Relationships for Long Term ROI

The speed at which you can communicate value in a new relationship is key to driving revenue potential.

Unfortunately, many founders I talk to struggle to prioritize follow up with their new relationships – not because they don’t have the best of intentions! It’s usually lack of process and not really knowing how to do it well without it taking a lot of time – especially for people we meet that don’t have a sale opportunity NOW (which makes up most new relationships at events).

To generate ROI from events and new relationships, your CRM should be set up to:

• Track new relationships and where they came from
• Categorize contacts based on value to the firm – such as the opportunity to collaborate on a webinar, or referral source, or potential customer
• Leverage event follow-up templates that make it easy and fast to get a custom email or message out to a new person that stands out from the noise
• Automate tasks and follow ups so that the person keeps you top of mind even if they don’t have the time or budget-based need right now

We’ve all been to an event where someone placed us on a “follow up email campaign” with a bland, vanilla message from the corporate email. I don’t know about you, but that’s usually lost in my inbox.

But a customized email from someone I met at the C54 summit? That stands out.

3. Get Insight into Prospect and Lead Activity 

The most important part of sales in professional services is establishing credibility and the trust that your firm is the best expert to solve the problem. But it can take 15-30 touches to make that connection. If you don’t have visibility into the way your prospective client is taking action against your content, you’re missing key insights that are needed to move the lead forward to close the deal.

At Simple Strat, we host a YouTube channel where we feature weekly tutorials showing how to get more out of HubSpot. These videos are also sent weekly, along with monthly webinar invites. Knowing which webinars and videos get interest from a prospect tells me a lot about what they’re challenged by or want to know more about.

Your CRM should be set up to:

• Identify engagement history of contacts, including but not limited to:
  • Email opens
  • Engagement/clicks
  • Marketing campaign interaction
  • Webinar registration and/or attendance
  • How long they attended the webinar
  • Any social engagement (LinkedIn)
  • Video views, etc.

All of this is context to understand what the prospective client may be facing and the interests they are pursuing relative to your expertise and offering.

Your CRM should also be setup to:

• Automatically score leads based on their engagement. This allows you to segment your audience and tailor your outreach, prioritizing leads that show the highest potential for conversion based on their score.
• Provide real-time notifications if your high intent or target leads take action such as visiting a pricing or service page, view a quote/proposal, or register for a webinar.
• Automate the creation of human-based outreach/tasks when a client or prospect activity wanes (they stop opening emails, or the email bounces, which may signal they changed jobs, etc.)

Don’t settle for using your CRM like a spreadsheet – make it a professional services sales engine

Your CRM should act as the single source of truth for all client interactions. Integrate it with other tools (email, calendars, project management) to consolidate every touchpoint in one place.

And don’t forget to use your CRM’s analytics to monitor data on sales performance, customer engagement, and campaign effectiveness, so you can refine your sales and marketing strategies.

By focusing on these strategies, your CRM can become a powerful tool not just for managing customer information, but for actively driving revenue growth in your firm