This is the most frequent question people ask us here at popcorn and Database First Aid. If you’re expecting a 10 second answer (i.e. a name of a database), you will be disappointed.
Imagine you are buying a car for a moment. What are you going to use it for? Do you pull horses around every weekend? You need something heavy duty and four wheel drive. It’ll probably have Land Rover or Range Rover written on the bonnet. Or something like that. Love whizzing around the country and taking your car to a racing circuit? Probably Porsche or Lotus. I admit, you can buy second-hand cars, but budget will be important too.
It’s much the same with your CRM database. Run events? You need your database to have an event management feature. Send emails? It needs to be able to do that obviously. Manage leads and prospects? It’ll have to be able to have some sort of sales funnel, where you can take the record and move them through the process, running reports on who is where. A one man band and only have two clients a year and only ever want one more? Don’t get a system at all. Far more hassle than they are worth if this is you. Stay with Outlook and your memory.
See, it all depends on what you want to do. But there are a couple of aspects about a database that can help you determine its quality right way. Firstly, a good system will do some of the marketing for you. It will also automate some of the tasks you would normally have to do manually. For example, when you add a new person into your database, you have a ‘welcome note email’ scheduled to send after you press submit. It’ll say something like: ‘great to meet you, we’ve added you to our database and will let you know about stuff’. Or if you have a contact you scheduled a meeting with, your system pings you an email a few days before your meeting with an overview of any recorded activity with that person in your database.
Now that’s what you need. No matter what else your requirements. That saves you time. Time to spend on better things that pressing the ‘go’ button all the time.
Article ‘What a good CRM database looks like’ Written by Simon McNidder from Database First Aid .
popcorn is a smart, easy-to-use and efficient platform that not only helps you compose beautiful emails and newsletters but also helps you manage your sales funnels and leads. If you would like to test popcorn and see if it could help improve your email marketing game, you can sign-up for the free trial here.
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