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Whether you’re in real estate, legal, insurance, mortgage or any other number of service-based businesses battling for new clients or looking for foolproof ways to retain current ones, you’ve no doubt experienced the crunch of competition.
Converting your prospects can be an uphill battle. Properly servicing existing clients takes up tons of bandwidth. Managing your staff requires patience. Using a multitude of apps and services is expensive.
How often have you lost out to a competitor because you or staff failed to follow up on a lead inquiry promptly?
How much time have you spent this month doing repetitive client admin or data entry?
How much money and labor have you squandered landing and servicing clients that were never even a good fit for your business in the first place?
The secret to lowering your lead costs, boosting conversions, streamlining your sales process, managing your team, and improving client satisfaction isn’t actually a secret–a better business starts with three little letters that play a massive role in all successful businesses: CRM.
We sat down with Shape Software CEO Anthony Gutierrez to learn why companies big and small need a CRM.
What makes Shape different from other CRMs on the market?
We’ve spent almost a decade building business software for a variety of clients, and we have thousands of hours of learnings that allowed us to precisely create the kinds of CRM businesses need to thrive. For example, our mortgage users needed effortless ways to assign and prioritize leads, so we built a robust lead management features that are now available to all our users. For our law firm system, we wanted to create a seamless online document solution with e-signature, and now every user can add this to their own system as well. We do a ton of R&D to build new features that end up positively benefitting all of our users.
Secondly, and this is hugely important to the point above, Shape is entirely configurable to your needs. While our out-of-the-box CRM and sales and marketing automation solutions are ready to go for your industry on day one, if you have more specific needs or require integrations, we can accommodate them. The advantage here is that you get everything you want in a business management software and nothing extra for one flat fee. None of our competitors are willing to work with you in that way.
Lastly, Shape is incredibly intuitive. Once you see it in action, you quickly come away with the confidence that anyone on your team can use it. You don’t need to hire an administrator and pay them a 6-figure salary to run Shape at your company. There’s no intensive onboarding or training needed (or mandatory fee to get set up), so that means your implementation time is minimal and painless. We think Shape’s award-winning user experience makes a difference to businesses anxious about starting on their first CRM or making a switch to new software.
Q: Who can and should use a tool like Shape Software?
We currently have over 15,000 users in industries like mortgage, real estate, solar, legal, debt settlement, higher education, and many more. If your business wants to simplify lead intake, create seamless new client onboarding, send and manage online documents, automate your marketing, run in-depth data reporting, manage payments, and much more, Shape is for you.
Not only is Shape a full-featured CRM and data management tool, it also comes packed with a complete sales and marketing automation suite. If you compare marketing and sales pipeline software for most of our industries, you’re looking at adding on thousands of dollars in monthly fees and implementation costs, but these features come standard with Shape.
Q: What’s a huge mistake you see your clients making before they switched to a CRM?
One of the biggest mistakes most new or growing businesses make is thinking they need specific software for every task their business has–an email marketing app, an invoicing app, an e-signature tool, etc. Those monthly costs start to grow exponentially and over time and can prohibit a streamlined workflow.
How many of these systems sync with one another? How much time is wasted toggling between them? How much manual data exporting and updating are you doing?
The way we designed Shape was purposeful. We wanted to cut down on the wasted time, so we built powerful automation into the system. So many business owners we speak to aren’t doing enough to get rid of all that manual work, so when we demo the system and see their eyes light up with all the possibilities, it becomes really rewarding.
All that said, we understand there are just some tools your business can’t work without, and this is why so many users love Shape. We offer hundreds of simple integrations to make your workflow as effective as it can be.
Q: What are some of the common pitfalls businesses can avoid by using a CRM?
There was a Harvard Business School study that pointed out how incredibly bad most businesses are at following up with new lead inquiries. The research shows that if your business can respond to an inquiry within the first hour, you have a 7x greater chance at converting that client.
The problem is sometimes those inquiries come in when your office is closed or busy. Support staff can get tied up helping other clients and just like that, that lead has slipped through the cracks and found its way to your competition.
That scenario is extremely common and exactly why we built our CRM with tons of lead automation tools, like auto-responders, online intake forms, drip marketing campaigns, and more so that you never miss out on a potential client again.
Another pitfall a CRM can help your business avoid is support staff wasting time on manual processes and data entry. Consider the recent study in The Atlantic about office productivity–nearly 55% of employees say they “waste” time on frequent administrative tasks. The beauty of CRM software is that once you build your workflows and processes, these tasks can be automated to any degree you feel comfortable with. Even better, when the process is standardized, you can deliver a consistent customer experience every time.
Q: As more of business gets automated, how can companies be mindful of customer service?
If you run a service-based business, customer care and communication are of utmost importance. Most brokers, agents, and law firms see the most significant bump in revenue and growth due to referrals, so you want to be as mindful to the client experience as possible. For lawyers specifically, the #1 complaint to the American Bar Association is for “lack of communication.” You always want to keep your clients and prospects in the loop.
There was a Nucleus Research study that uncovered that 47% of businesses that use a CRM saw a boost in client satisfaction. By automating the act of sending documents, or updating a client on the status of their new home purchase, you create that great customer experience without increasing your workload. Why wouldn’t you do that?
Q: Do you think most service-based businesses are doing a poor job at managing data? If so, how can they improve?
I think most businesses struggle with data at times, and that’s why CRMs exist. New leads come in, but maybe you’re busy helping current clients. Your staff gets sick, people take vacations. Information can get misplaced, or we simply forget about the phone call we received from the potential client over lunch. We’re human, and these things happen.
A CRM can really help by serving as a failsafe of sorts–it’s your backup plan for the human element. A “digital filing cabinet” that stores all your client admin, project work, and documents in one place, so everyone is working off the same information. I can’t tell you how much time is wasted going back and forth trying to track down basic project details or missing documents.
Having your business data in a secure, searchable, central location has 3 key advantages:
- You never lose client info ever again
- You always know what the status of every client/lead/payment/document/etc is
- This data management allows you to run in-depth reporting
That last point is critical to running a better business. Curious to know which lead sources convert the best for you? Want to see which team member closes the most deals? Proper data management will eliminate ambiguity.
A staggering 40% of small businesses claim they have no way of tracking the ROI on their marketing. If you don’t have data, you don’t have the full picture. How can you expect to launch your next big marketing campaign or bring on more staff if you don’t even know the basics?
Q: How important is marketing automation to your clients and what have you seen prove successful?
Many businesses tend to treat marketing as an afterthought and believe a simple Facebook ad or email blast will help generate conversions. The truth is that for many in the mortgage, real estate, and even legal space, the process of winning a client is often not a straight line. Depending on the lead, the sales cycle can take weeks or even months. Having all the tools at your disposal to nurture leads is essential for growing your business.
The good news is that if your teams put an emphasis on nurturing, your campaigns will be more successful and you’ll drive far higher engagement and conversions. There has been considerable research into lead nurturing and its effect on business: 80% of business’s leads never convert to clients because they weren’t nurtured.
However, nurtured prospects generate 47% more revenue than non-nurtured prospects. The choice is pretty clear.
Q: What’s coming up next for Shape?
We’re doing more than ever to provide our clients with the only software they need to run their businesses. That includes launching our new client portal where your leads and clients can securely log in to upload and execute documents, pay invoices, and keep track of their information.
In addition, we’re in the final stages of launching our mobile app for iPhone and Android and putting the finishing touches on more integrations to make switching to Shape even easier.