As a consultant, your clients pay for your expertise and trust your advice. In order for you to provide the best service, you need to understand the full picture of your clients' problems and pain points to help them succeed. This can be easy to do in your head when you have one or two clients, but gets trickier when you're following up with ten or twenty clients. Here are 5 ways you can customize your LACRM account to help with this:
1) Group up your clients based on the services they've hired you for.
Groups function as tags and labels in LACRM and allow you to categorize your contacts, companies, leads, and everyone in between. One way to use groups for your consulting business is to group everyone up based on the services they've signed up for.
This way, you can easily see what services you're working with a client on on their profile page, and you can jump into any specific group to see all the clients you have for any particular service.
Another benefit of grouping your clients up based on service is that you can sync these groups with your Mailchimp audiences or tags. Now whenever you have news on a specific topic, you can pick and choose which set of clients to send that newsletter to -- ensuring that everyone is only getting emails that are meaningful to what they are trying to accomplish.
Click here for a tutorial on how to create groups in LACRM.
2) Create sub-calendars for your various types of meetings and follow-ups.
As a consultant, your day is jam packed with different types of meetings and tasks. It can be hard to know what your day is like if everything is thrown together onto a single calendar. Instead of maintaining one Primary calendar, with every type of event thrown into it, try separating your events and tasks up into different calendars based on the type of event or task it is.
Now you can look at your agenda and know what your day is like without having to look through every single contact to get additional context.
Click here for a tutorial on how to create sub-calendars in LACRM.
3) Save client anniversary dates as a custom contact field.
Strong relationships with your clients include knowing them personally as well. The benefit of a fully customizable and simple system like LACRM is that you can set up whatever fields you need to capture dates that are most important to you. The date when your client first became your client is important both as a milestone to celebrate, but also works well to let you know how long a client has been with you.
This date gets automatically logged onto your calendar each year, and LACRM will remind you when that's happening so that you can send out a quick personal email to your clients.
Click here for a tutorial on how to create a custom date field.
4) Use a custom text area to log information on pain points, or problems to solve.
On top of tracking anniversary dates, custom fields can also be set up to help you "pin" important information to the side of a contact's profile page. Namely, once you've onboarded a client, you'll have a better understanding of their pain points and goals. Why not create a field to save this information so that you can always reference it when you're on a contact's page?
Now you won't need to scroll through all of your History or written notes to find the most important information about what your clients' needs are.
Click here for a tutorial on how to create a custom contact field.
5) Track each meeting with a "Booked Meeting" pipeline to log meeting notes, dates, and topics covered.
When you have a million and one meetings and calls a day, your separate sub-calendars (see tip #2 above!) can help out. But when you're managing the notes and dates for these meetings? You'll need something more. By using a pipeline to track each booked meeting, you can make sure that each meeting's notes are logged to the individual meeting itself, and also lets you immediately see how many meetings you've had with any client.
By attaching a new "Booked Meeting" pipeline to your clients whenever you schedule and attend a meeting with them, you can essentially create a "folder" for that specific meeting -- way more than what you can do with your calendar event. Now you have a way to organize each meeting, and can even search through meetings via your Booked Meeting report.
Click here for a tutorial on how to create a new pipeline.
These 5 tips are just 5 ways you can set up and customize your LACRM account to manage your consulting business. There are many more, depending on your specific needs, and how you like to work. If you have any questions, or want to chat with us on how to set up your LACRM account, just reach out!
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