Thanks to the emergence of a sea of local digital firms, competition in the marketing and advertising space are fiercer than ever. To ensure your agency stands out above the crowd, you need to give your team the tools they need to perform their jobs better and make client interactions more impressive than the competition. Customer resource management is the ideal solution, and many advanced, modern CRM platforms offer marketing agencies everything they need to take account management and creative development to the next level. But not all CRMs are created equal, and the following represent three of the most important areas your marketing agency should focus on when shopping for customer resource management software. 

 

1) Client and Prospect Management Features

One of the biggest daily challenges of running a successful marketing agency is client management. Whether it’s a new lead mid-way through the sales process or an existing client that’s already spent big money with the agency, account managers are constantly under pressure to deliver the best experience possible. Your CRM should make their lives easier. A good, advanced CRM should come with a complete suite of lead and account management tools to ensure that everything from scheduling meetings to remembering a client’s favorite Starbucks order is easier. CRMDialer’s lead management suite fully integrates with all other areas of the CRM, including the communications tools and power dialer. That means every interaction with a client is automatically logged to their account in your database, and accessing that information never requires more than a few clicks. Your accounts team can also add manual notes, upload documents, create and manage calendar items, and perform a variety of other tasks all from within a lead account, making their days far easier and greatly improving the personalization of your clients’ and prospects’ experience. 

 

2) Creativity and Collaboration Features

While your account executives are busy keeping clients and prospects happy, your creative team is hard at work generating the brilliant ideas that keep new clients coming in the door in the first place. Creative production is all about collaboration, so any tools you can provide to your team to help them collaborate will go a long way towards improving their output. A good CRM will include productivity, communication, and team collaboration features designed specifically to knock down information silos and make the internal sharing of information and ideas more frictionless. CRMDialer comes with a built-in internal chat platform that offers the functionality of popular collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, all from right within the CRM. That means your team can collaborate on projects without ever having to leave the same platform they use for all of their other daily tasks, from scheduling to email, and beyond. 

 

3) Billing and Payment Features

While your creativity drives your reputation and your client services generate repeat business, the long-term success of your agency is dependent on healthy financials, and that means strong cashflow. The key to staying liquid is to minimize accounts receivable by improving your invoicing and ensuring clients can pay with as much convenience as possible. Your CRM should augment your agency’s billing activities to ensure that invoices can be generated and sent out as quickly as possible and that clients can pay electronically as soon as those invoices land. CRMDialer’s built-in billing and payments suite does both. On the invoicing side, easy-to-use and fully brandable templates enable invoice generation in a matter of minutes. Once an invoice is sent out, CRMDialer also enables payment to be handled electronically via any major credit card and even echecks. Because the payment suite is fully integrated, your team can accept payment on the web, via email links, or even right over the phone, all from within CRMDialer. 

 

For more information on how CRMDialer’s complete line of sales and productivity tools can help your agency streamline and improve your client management, collaboration, billing, and much more – start a 14-day trial of the fully functional software with zero strings attached!