September is well underway: The summer holiday season is over, and your clients and candidates have returned to their desks. Now is the time to be reaching out in order to understand their hiring plans for the next 4 months, as well as find out where the candidates are and what the market looks like.
We don’t have to tell you that business development is now more important than ever – it will give you opportunities to meet your end-of-the-year targets and prepare for Christmas blues. Luckily, you don’t have to drown in tasks, lists, and emails. With the right CRM, you can supercharge these activities to carry out your BD more effectively, manage your daily and weekly tasks quicker, and build up the market knowledge to excel in the last few months of the year.
Here are 3 top CRM features that will make your BD tasks easier than ever:
One of the most important aspects of developing new business is making sure you build on the relationship over time, especially with cold calling or new prospects. You can make this much easier and save hours of marking your Outlook calendar! How? By scheduling these follow-ups during the call, and then receiving action on your To-Do list when the time comes to make a call - all within your CRM.
After adding the notes on any client call in Firefish, you will be prompted to set a follow-up date whilst everything is still fresh in your mind. This means you will build stronger relationships with prospects and beat out your competitors - who often give up after one call (or simply forget to follow up).
An email is a great tool for reaching a large number of prospects and clients with minimal time and effort – and that’s whilst retaining the personalised approach through templates and merge fields. But you can make it even easier for yourself! With a CRM that enables 2-Way integrated email, you can send bulk campaigns with market insights, blogs, Spec CVs, and much more from within your CRM. This speeds up the process of contacting and nurturing cold leads and allows you to easily add value and build reciprocity.
You will also receive the replies directly into your CRM, which saves hours of copying email responses into candidate notes and ensures you never miss a reply – after all, it could lead to a warm prospecting call or even new vacancies!
Searching your database can be a frustrating task when doing business development, especially in niche industries where these searches are heavily filtered and very specific. With saved searches, your CRM will remember that mile-long Boolean string or the extensive list of filters you need to pull out the clients and prospects you want to target. What this means is that all of your searches are saved in the contacts tab and can be edited before being repeated.
This will also update each time you search to include new contacts and companies that fit the specifications of the search. Not only does this make your life easier, but it allows you to send bulk email campaigns or pull a list of clients to present new candidates to – all a lot faster than your competitors.
To find out about all the other ways you can make your BD easier and more efficient, book a call with one of our team members below!