22 February 2022Justin WilkersonComments Off on Tips to Optimize Your Direct Marketing CampaignsCRM, Reporting, Visual Reporting
You’d probably sell more policies if you had an infinite marketing budget.
But odds are you don’t have a money tree in your lobby.
In fact, the average business has a marketing budget of around 7% of their gross revenue, according to the Small Business Administration.
That’s why tracking your direct marketing campaigns is so important to your company’s finances: When you know who becomes a customer and how you hooked them, you’re positioning yourself for sustained revenue.
For example, it might be that people in Illinois respond well to direct mail for vehicle service contracts and websites make more sales in Colorado.
Inline CRM’s advanced reporting can help you pinpoint the campaigns that won, lost or have real profit potential with the right tweaks.
Let’s cover some of the proven ways to put those analytics to use, broken down by media type:
Personalize Direct Mail
If you notice one of your direct mail campaigns didn’t generate the pull you expected, what should you do?
20 January 2022Justin WilkersonComments Off on Does Your Extended Warranty CRM Have These Features?Uncategorized
It seems like there’s a new CRM hitting the market every day. After all, 90% of businesses with more than 10 employees rely on a CRM, so there’s no shortage of need.
With so many options to choose from, how do you know your choice will work best for your business? What are the must-have factors and call center solutions your CRM should include?
Let’s find out!
You Can Customize It
Your competitors might sell the same things as you, but they aren’t the same as you. Your business will have different focuses, different goals or priorities—and you need a CRM (like ours!) that allows you to be as flexible as you like.
We find that customers who use custom fields, custom email templates and even custom queues of data can boost profits by as much as 95%! And our advanced API can also help you customize just about anything exactly how you want, especially your all-important dashboard.
You Can Integrate 3rd Parties
No CRM can do everything (but ours comes close). That’s why your CRM should be able to integrate software from other parties to keep your sales agents on top of their game. And since a sale doesn’t happen without communication, you should ideally be able to integrate:
Lead generation software to fill your prospect pipeline
Email platforms from Outlook to Gmail
Calendars, especially since 70% of adults rely on digital notifications to manage their life
When you have all the tools you need integrated in one location, you’ll be much more productive.
You Can Use It Anywhere
Can you believe some CRMs still require downloads and only operate offline? There’s no excuse for this, especially in 2022.
Old systems like those usually require an IT staff to maintain and run updates, not to mention their legacy infrastructure usually means they can’t adapt or integrate the applications mentioned three inches above.
New systems like ours are easily accessible wherever you have internet or data—even on mobile.
After all, you never know when or where you’ll need information to help seal a deal.
All-In-One Customer Profiles
Let’s pretend you have a customer who owns a home, a car, a motorcycle and an RV.
That could make for a pretty big extended warranty sale, right?
But if you’re using the wrong CRM, it could also lead to a pretty big headache. That’s because some CRMs (not ours!) will make you click around and around to get to the same customer profile. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just sell that customer profile and manage those opportunities from a dropdown menu like this?
With Inline, you can!
Sure, you could work in some workarounds, but then everything wouldn’t be in the same workflow. And that seems like a lot of needless busywork.
Now you can assign certain leads to certain groups, know exactly when or how to follow up with a customer based on their place in the funnel and a lot, lot more.
With this functionality, who knows? Maybe your sales reps will be able to make 70 calls a day.
Automatic Commission and Cancel Calculations
There is an almost infinite amount of ways you could structure commissions and bonuses. By the number of policies sold. The amount of the policies. The type of policy. All of those conditions combined.
The list goes on and on.
That level of complexity could make even the most seasoned accountant feel dizzy.
With Inline we can help you code the precise commission payout based on whatever criteria you want, including cancellation rates.
And it happens automatically.
Simply put, you won’t find that functionality in any other industry CRM.
Customer Service
Okay, this bit of technology is a little analog.
Somewhere along the way, you’re going to have a question, an issue, or problem that needs to be taken care of right away.
And if it isn’t taken care of to your liking, there’s a good chance you’ll end up canceling.
That’s why we bend over backwards to answer as soon as you call or email. Because even the best CRM can’t replace help from real people in real time.
Is there a feature your CRM needs that we didn’t cover? Schedule a test drive and we can show you all the bells and whistles that come with Inline.
Running the right report can mean more money for your business—lots of it.
But making that report (and interpreting it) can also take time away from your business—though it doesn’t have to.
Which reports can help you sell more extended warranties? How can you save hours creating them?
Read on and find out!
The “Whatever You Can Think Of” Report
CRM usually stands for Customer Relationship Management.
At Inline, our CRM stands for Custom Report Magic. That’s because you can create just about any report you want:
Policies expiring in the next 90 days
Cancellations that happened on a Tuesday
Warranties sold for Toyotas with exactly 145,926 miles
Prospects with the first name Tina
We’re not sure why you’d want the last kind of report. But we do know that even though our software comes with 143 standard reports, you know best what information will help you make more sales.
And our tools make it possible to learn pretty much anything you’ll want to know.
The “Performance by Campaign” Report
You spend money to make money, right? And your money might be spread across multiple marketing campaigns and channels: Direct mail, emails, web leads and more.
Now, some of those dollars will do a better job than others. And our CRM will help you decide how to direct your budget to more effective tactics—without pivot tables, filtering or formulas!
Here’s a more specific example: Let’s say you notice a dip in response rate in a certain time frame that just happens to coincide with data you used from a new vendor.
Given that bad data can cost reps $32,000 in sales, you might want to have a discussion with the provider to see what can be done to improve their performance (or not use them again in the future).
The “Let’s Keep Cancellations From Happening” Report
Cancellations are going to happen. There’s no getting around it. In fact, 40% of customers will end up cancelling a service at some point, regardless of the industry or product.
Okay, you knew that already—but what can you do about it?
Run a report, of course!
You’ll be able to see cancel rate trends in addition to other important data.
Let’s say you notice one particular rep has a higher cancel rate than others. You could offer to coach or shadow them to see if they’re over-promising certain aspects of the warranty being sold.
The “Hey, This Is Really Selling” Report
You probably have a decent idea which policies sell the best. But to be as profitable as possible, you need to know without a doubt.
It just so happens there’s a report for that.
A couple clicks is all it takes to see a lot of useful information, including:
Most profitable term lengths
Most popular warranties
Profit ranges
If your money-makers aren’t selling, consider promoting different features or benefits. If certain term lengths aren’t being bought, consider dropping the price.
What you do with the information is up to you—and you won’t have to work hard to get it.
The main takeaway here is to keep taking the time to follow up with prospects—and emails are a smart choice for how.
Inline can set up automated follow-up emails to customers who have received a quote and help you avoid relying on the sales person to do the follow-up.
After a while, you’ll see how successful your efforts are (or have ideas on how you can improve the response).
Your sales reps deserve every last cent of commission they earned. But figuring out exactly how much commission they’ve earned can eat up a lot of time—literally days— if you’re not using the right software.
Did that client make their first monthly payment? Is the sales rep getting tiered or residual commissions? Did they hit a multiplier bonus?
Cutting a commission check shouldn’t be so confusing!
With Inline, it isn’t.
We can code every commission condition exactly the way you want for fast and accurate paydays. And happy sales reps are productive sales reps.
We can even code commission for your fronter, takeover, collection, and retention teams.
27 October 2021Justin WilkersonComments Off on 5 Warning Signs You Need a New CRMCRM
You know how lucrative the extended warranty business can be. In fact, the global market is worth more than $120 billion!
You also know the boost using a CRM can give your bottom line. Research shows a 29% sales increase thanks to CRMs.
With so much profit at stake, you should probably evaluate whether the tools your business uses are maximizing your money-making potential.
Here are some signs you should consider getting a different CRM:
1.) It Has Limited Functionality
Here’s an interesting stat: Only 11% of people will make lifestyle changes even if they are told they could reverse diabetes, restore their health or live longer.
Well, what does that have to do with changing CRM systems?
It shows how resistant we can be to change! Most people have used their existing software from 2-5 years. That’s practically a lifetime of fresh features and improvements they might be missing out on!
If it’s been a while since you considered switching, you owe it to yourself to find out what new functionality you can get (like built-in refund calculators).
2.) Extra Processes
Wondering if your CRM might be outdated?
Well, the average sales process has six steps from introduction to close. The proper tools should keep that number low, even lower wherever possible. So, if you’re making things more complex or constantly updating your processes, it might be time to move on.
After all, your CRM should accommodate you. Not the other way around.
3.) Working Around
If you’re adding more processes, those might lead to more workarounds. And that might lead to a workaround around a workaround to the point you can’t keep track of the extra processes you have in place because your extended warranty CRM doesn’t do what you want it to.
It can get confusing, just like that last sentence.
Looking to see what other options are on the market can save you time—not to mention some aspirin.
4.) It’s Not Cloud Compatible
Can you imagine doing your job without the internet? Probably not, especially when more than 45% of workers work remote at least part-time—and that number will only increase in the future.
That underscores the need for web-based, mobile CRMs.
With access to customer data anywhere, anytime, 65% of salespeople who use mobile CRMs met their sales quotas. Compare that to only 22% of salespeople who met sales goals without a mobile CRM and the math makes sense to move to an online CRM (like Inline!).
5.) You Have to Write Reports
You probably have a lot of different reports to make: Sales, payroll and maybe even the dreaded cancellation report.
Those reports can provide the insights to improve your business. But they can also take up time. Maybe too much time. It’s estimated that managers spend at least one working day each week on manual data tasks like reporting—hours that could be better spent doing just about anything else.
Upgrading to a CRM that creates the reports for you in a nice and tidy visual format, including custom query reports, can improve the way your business operates.
What Is Your Current CRM Missing?
Schedule a free test drive and find out what you can do with Inline.
