Hey artisans, Let’s talk about a CRM
What is CRM?
CRM stands for ‘Customer relationship Management’ in general. But in wholesome CRM is strategy, techniques and tools which are used by companies and individuals to acquire new customers and strengthen the relationship with old customers.
CRM is a system to manage data of your clients, potential leads and tasks at a single place. CRM system brings all data from different touchpoint under a single roof. Companies can use that data to build a customer profile. Using such a tool will reduce the extra time of data entry. Some CRM tools may give you trends and business forecasts thus helping you to create better policies.
In essence, CRM is
- Collective strategies to build customer relationship
- Software or tool which helps businesses achieve this.
In this series, we will focus on the second aspect of CRM which is software. We will build a business agnostic CRM from scratch. Although our primary focus is software, We will try not to neglect strategies.
Who can use CRM?
- Individuals like freelancers and artists
- SMBs like a family-owned cafe
- A startup like new emerging E-commerce website in your town
- Enterprises like Tesla, Pepsi etc
CRM can be used in any business whether it is B2B or B2C.
What are the types of CRM?
- Conversational CRM
- Leads and deals CRM
- Contact CRM
- Marketing CRM
In this series, we are focusing on Contact CRM. Sometimes we want more human touch in business. When the business owner remembers customers birthday, Orders, likes and dislikes — they will be much more likely to make a personal connection. Thus achieve the main purpose of CRM. You can know more about CRM types here.
What are common terms in CRM?
- Contact — Contact are people. Just like someone from your phone’s contact list.
- Leads — These contacts are special. These are people who want to do business with you soon. Businesses should pay little more attention to them.
- Opportunity — Opportunities are evolved leads who are interested in your projects. These are people approved your initial proposal or added product in the cart. These are your potential customers
- Items — Items are products or services which you are selling.
- Quote — You took efforts on business and turned that contact into an opportunity. Now you quote the price of your product or services.
- Deal — Deal in Quote you proposed whether it is won or lost.
- Customers — Customers are your contacts who bought your product and services.
- Activity — Activities are action performed on entities like leads and contacts.
What we are building?
We are building A contact CRM which will have the following features
- Contact management
- Lead management
- Quote and proposal management
- Email interaction
- Notifications to contacts
- Sale pipeline management
- Followups and little automation
- other small features.
Please note that the main objective of this series is Laravel development. we will try to focus on features of Laravel. But I assure you that the end product will be production-ready and you can use that for you or your client.
See you in second part…
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