If you’re frustrated with your CRM and are certain there’s a better solution out there, you’re right and you’re wrong, says Susanne Pugsley, Founder of Pugsley Sidwell Business Development, a business development consultancy for the professional services sector.
“It’s really a matter of checking to see whether it’s a problem with the CRM, or a problem with the information that’s held within it, and the processes used to access and update that information,” she explains. “I think that there are plenty of CRMs on the market that could work perfectly well, but they’ve been populated and maintained badly.”
CRM as a Glorified Address Book
Even with a team that steadfastly updates and maintains a CRM, Susanne fears they are still nothing more than glorified address books.
“They need to be seen as a business intelligence tool, and the only way to make them a true business intelligence tool is to have the relationship element at the forefront,” she says. “Switching CRMs won’t solve that, but having something that unearths those relationships does.”
This is critical, Susanne explains, because the true competitive differentiator for professional services are how effectively they build relationships.
“People may say they’re buying a service, but at the end of the day, they are buying a personality and investing in a relationship between themselves and the service provider,” she says. “Many services can be provided by anyone. So there’s a huge opportunity cost in any firm that doesn’t understand their relationship strengths and who knows who within the firm.”
Putting Reputation at Risk
This can be exacerbated at large law firms and Susanne calls this a “massive reputational risk.” She relates a scenario where two lawyers from the same firm meet with the same prospect in the same week.
“It does not engender trust in the professionalism of the firm as a whole,” she points out. “And no one will get the business. You waste time and energy, and create conflict when people cross over each other and don’t know who knows who. Having a system that gives insight into relationships firm-wide will solve a lot of problems.”
How to Enhance Relationships, Professionalism with CRM
That’s why Susanne looked to Introhive. when she was selecting CRMs for a law firm where she was serving as a business development executive. Introhive works with your existing CRM system to:
- Eliminate manual data entry by automatically updating CRM data.
- Automatically extract data from a broad set of external and internal sources including emails, calendars and social networks.
- Package that data and deliver it to you on the platforms you prefer, so you can easily understand customer and prospect relationships, and what needs to happen next to move them forward.
Susanne discovered Introhive when she was looking to bring a CRM solution to the law firm where she presently provides business development services.
“Introhive really sparked my imagination, because the biggest issue with any law firm CRM project is the data. I implemented CRMs in three global firms with a lot of legacy systems which had a lot of irrelevant, useless data,” she explains.
She appreciates that Introhive can sort through data, even from lawyers who save every email and contact, and pinpoint the most relevant relationship information without asking lawyers to lift a finger.
“It takes effort away from the lawyer,” explains Susanne. “It shows them things they should already know and often don’t, and it populates the CRM with the most recent information. For those who are hoarders, there can be huge amounts of data that may be old and out of date. But Introhive focuses on the most immediate, relevant information so you’re not wasting time cleansing useless data.”
This time savings for lawyers and their staff is critical because, especially at law firms, time is money.
“We charge by the hour, and every hour that you spend not doing billable work is a cost to the firm,” says Susanne.
Even though Susanne has worked with firms of all sizes, including ones without an international or global presence, she would not do business without a tool like Introhive.
“A CRM will not work without it, in my opinion, because then it’s merely a repository of data,” she says. “It’s not giving you the relationship intelligence you need to move your business forward.”
Are you ready to make your CRM investment work harder to attain better relationships and the revenue that comes with them? Set aside about 15 minutes to see how Introhive would work for your firm. Schedule a demo today.