Marketing, advertising, and media agencies have a tough job. Companies across almost all industries are tightening their belts, meaning an ever-growing number of agencies are competing for an ever-shrinking amount of work. On top of that, once you do land a client, they have so many options that the days of decades-long partnerships are all but gone, and keeping clients around is a constant struggle. In such a harsh business environment, anything your agency can do to make life easier for both your sales and creative teams is a worthwhile pursuit. Customer resource management tools represent just such a competitive advantage, and the following are three ways advertising agency CRM software can help you solve some of the biggest problems agencies like yours face every day. 

 

Problem: Differentiation in a Sea of Competitors

The modern digital ecosystem has brought with it a democratization of information that has broken down barriers to entry. Today, anyone can put up a website and call themselves a marketing or advertising agency, and thousands and thousands of people have. On top of that, the brand and marketing managers at the companies you traditionally target are increasingly deciding they can do it themselves, especially in areas like social media marketing and contextual advertising.

Solution: Wow ‘Em with the Little Things

The solution to giving clients a reason to sign on the dotted line and convincing them your agency is where they need to be is the delivery of unparalleled service. With the exception of the most specialized or high-budget projects handled by a small handful of agencies, it’s very difficult to stand out on product alone, especially with today’s hard-to-define success metrics, like engagement. Instead, stand out by wowing your leads and clients with personalized service. 

A CRM offers the ability to capture and organize the details from effectively every client or prospect interaction – in CRMDialer’s case, even telephone calls. That fast, easy access to every piece of relevant client data you’ve ever generated makes it possible to make every client feel like they’re the only client – something your competitors operating without a CRM will have a very hard time doing. Your work speaks for itself, but a CRM can turn the quality of your interactions and service into the extra competitive edge that puts you over the top. 

 

Problem: Managing Client Information to Ensure Smooth Workflows

You need a full roster of clients to ensure the bills get paid every month, but juggling multiple projects is an enormous headache, and organizing client and project information effectively is a big challenge. On top of that, breakdowns in communication between your sales team and your creative team jeopardize both the quality of your work and your relationships with key clients. 

Solution: Make Information Management Easy Through Centralization

The more splintered information is, the more difficult it is to manage. An agency environment where you have two distinct sides to the business – sales and creative – each working on a handful of different projects or different pitches at any given time, is an environment primed for splintered, siloed information. 

A CRM is an ideal tool to break down those communication barriers because it’s specifically designed to make the storage, management, and retrieval of important client and project data as easy as possible. By adopting a CRM, you create a single point of control – a single information repository in which everything important is stored and in which every member of your team has access to the same information (unless you set permissions specifically to block certain things out.) Certain platforms, like CRMDialer, also come with internal chat systems that add the functionality of team management tools like Slack right into the CRM. The result is clearer, more open lines of communication, far better access to information on an agency-wide basis, and smoother project execution overall. 

 

Problem: Keeping the Sales Funnel Full

In a highly competitive environment like marketing and advertising, sitting back and waiting for clients to come to you isn’t good enough. But your sales team can only work with the leads they have, and tightening budgets and DIY attitudes are making qualified prospects harder and harder to come by. 

Solution: Automate Capture and Do More with Each Lead

There are two keys to maintaining a full sales funnel: keeping as many leads as possible flowing into the top, and squeezing everything possible out of each one – including the ones that aren’t ready to work with you yet. The odds of a new lead needing your services right away are low, but if you can learn to nurture prospects over the long-term, you’ll be ready and waiting to meet their needs the second they arise. 

A full-featured CRM makes it easier to collect leads and provides advanced tools to categorize and manage them, ensuring your sales team will always have full situational awareness over the status of each prospect, and that no good lead ever slips through the cracks. With CRMDialer, the system will automatically create new lead accounts from information captured from web forms, email, SMS messages, and even inbound phone calls. You can also import existing leads from outside the system, and manually create new lead accounts in just a few clicks. Once a lead has been entered into your system, CRMDialer automatically tracks and captures each new interaction to the relevant account, makes categorization a breeze, allows you to quickly set follow-up reminders or add tasks or appointments, and offers advanced analytics on your entire lead database.

The above represent just a few of the many benefits that agencies can enjoy by embracing customer resource management. If you’re ready to see everything CRM software can do to help your agency rise above the noise, land more clients, and keep them around longer, start your no-commitment free trial of CRMDialer today!