We all know that CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management – but did you know that you can use a CRM for tasks outside of a traditional sales management role? If you’re working with people, then chances are that you can benefit from a management system to help keep those interactions optimized. From event management to sports to universities – today we highlight some creative ways to use a CRM.
Event Management
Optimize Your Contacts
If you are someone who travels for outside sales or frequently attends trade shows, then you definitely know the pain of trying to keep track of every potential client or business contact that comes your way. Whether you’re collecting business cards, storing names in your phone, or collecting information in an excel sheet, contact information can get scattered and easily lost.
With a mobile-friendly CRM, you can enter new contacts on-the-go directly into the CRM from your smartphone or tablet. If you like to be even more organized, you can create a Campaign tag in the CRM for the event you are attending and quickly tag new contacts for future marketing campaigns.
For example, let’s say you just booked an event in Nevada and want to start prepping your marketing strategies for prospective clients. You can create a campaign in your CRM as “Nevada”, prep your emailing templates, then tag new contacts under “Nevada” during the event. When you’re ready to reach out to all your leads, you can easily pull up anyone you exchanged information with by filtering for “Nevada” and then send personalized emails or other outreach campaigns tailored to your specific event.
Eliminate Missed Opportunities
When you’re managing dozens of customer relationships, it can be difficult to manage new clients that come your way. How many times have you started off strong only to let the conversation die down until it’s too late to grab their interest again? Another creative way to use your CRM is to set reminders for when you need to reach back out to a lead. Let’s say you reach out to someone earlier in the year and they respond that they won’t be ready to have a discussion for another few months. You can set yourself a reminder to reach back out later in the year and still keep all their information on file. When the time comes, you can jump back into the discussion without missing a beat. Or if you have shorter sales cycles, you can use your CRM to take detailed notes of your customer’s unique pain points and improve their overall customer experience.
Professional Sports
Know Who Your Customer Are
A flexible CRM can have a huge impact on professional sports teams. This might be a little confusing since sports teams aren’t directly selling anything – they’re just playing a game, right? Well, a large portion of a team’s value comes from its fans. They contribute by purchasing game tickets, season memberships, fan gear, and more.
A creative way to use a CRM in sports is to gather measurable information about your fans. By gathering basic customer information, you can track which game days have better attendance, what marketing strategies are bringing in additional sales, and how to best target your fans based on their interests.
Boost Your Sales
Did you know that a CRM can help boost your marketing efforts and increase your sales? By tracking your customer data, you can create personalized marketing campaigns based on the interactions that you’re seeing with your fans. For example, you can send out promotional tickets for birthdays, email last-chance ticket reminders to frequent ticket purchasers, and send membership promotions to increase your profits.
FIFA World Cup implemented a CRM platform to help manage the massive follower base during world cup events. With their CRM, they were able to connect to social media platforms to market to new audiences. Through their improved marketing efforts and operational optimization, they were able to increase their call volume from 1,000 calls to 15,000 calls per week.
Acquire Sponsors
One proactive and creative way to use a CRM is to acquire sponsors to fund your team. How is this possible? Companies that are looking to invest in sponsorship have one big question: Is this investment going to be profitable? In order to help answer that, they want to know your fan base demographics. Factors like gender, age, and fan base loyalty all play a role in how likely your followers will be influenced by the product the team is advertising. Having this information readily available will not only help you acquire new sponsors, but you can also be more proactive about reaching out to sponsors you think might be best for your team.
Educational, Training, and Academic Facilities
Manage Student Enrollment
Universities easily accumulate thousands of student applications a year and with that comes high school transcripts, SAT test scores, and letters of recommendation. With more of these interactions being submitted online, you need a digital filing system to help organize prospective student records. This requires a robust system that can handle a high volume of data without having to purge old information. With a CRM platform, you can create a classification system to sort your students by enrollment year and create subcategories for programs, enrollment status, or part-time/full-time status.
Track Academic Performance
Each student has different needs, interests, and academic careers, so maintaining a personal relationship with every student can seem almost impossible. So how do you keep students from falling through the cracks? With a CRM, you can set notifications to alert you when a student reaches below a certain threshold. Whether that means they’ve stopped enrolling for classes, repeatedly miss a class, or start performing under a certain grade level, you can identify these issues before it’s too late.
Improve Student Engagement
A CRM is a great solution for campuses looking to ramp up their student engagement. When setting up their profile, students can select their preferred methods of communication, like social media, email or text, so you can reach students in the way they want to be reached. You can even customize your CRM to integrate with other messaging platforms to directly send messages through the CRM for a centralized system of communication.
Set Up Targeted Campaigns
A CRM is also a great way to send highly targeted campaigns to your students. For example, you can create a campaign to target students by their degree program to provide services or extracurriculars that are relevant to their interests and degree. Or if you’re looking to connect with alumni, you can filter for graduating students to provide post-graduating resources, supplemental classes or certifications, and upcoming job fairs.
More Ways to Use a CRM
There are plenty of other creative ways to use a CRM that can be unique for your business. If your business involves interacting with others, then chances are you could use a CRM to get the most of those interactions! Interested in learning more? Try our OroCRM demo today.
