21st Century Musician Episode 2: STOP Wasting Your Time
Time is the most precious commodity there is. Today, I teach you how to save a whole lot of it!
Artist of the Day: Adron
Anyway, today's topic is a part of a series I'm doing called The 21st Century Musician, and it's all about empowering people to kinda move from 1970’s mentality to present day mentality, giving them tips and tricks to succeed in this 21st century world that we live in today.
So today, we're gonna talk about CRM, Customer Relationship Management.
CRM is a technology that manages all of your customer relations, a CRM system does wonders for business, it helps them stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and helps improve profit margin. The numbers don't lie. So let me give you a few of them that may encourage you to after this video, take action and install one yourself. On average, people who use a CRM see the following results number one, 30% increase in lead conversions, number two, 30% increase in sales, number three, 35% increase in customer satisfaction, number four, 38% increase in faster decision making from the client, and number five, a 25% increase in overall revenue, what... As far as expenses that I've incurred as a business owner, this by far has been the best tool to organize all of my information that I receive and also give to my clients, it's really remarkable. And whoever invented this, which I should probably look that up, I wanna buy you a drink someday, you have saved me hours of work, so before I dive into it, here's a couple of notes for you to clear the brain on... Alright, let's dive into it with four points.
Number one, lead capture and autoreply.
I want you to envision going to sleep... No, not right now. I mean, let's say it's like 11 o'clock at night, you've had a long work day and you're tired and you're just trying to go to sleep, and all of a sudden you hear that you've got mail sound... You recognize that sound and you realize it's probably someone wanting to inquire about your services at 11 o'clock at night, so what do you do? You roll out of bed, you grab your phone, you turn on the light, you start texting, Hey, I'd love to talk to you. Let's set up a time to talk. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Not ideal, right? You're trying to get some sleep. Not anymore. Those days are over with the CRM, so install CRM with your contact page on your website when someone messages you, vet CRM will automatically kick back a message that says, Hey, thanks so much for checking out my website, would you like to schedule an appointment or a consultation? Any of this type of information that you want to have related in your initial response for you, you could even have things like a link to a calendar page that has direct access to your calendar, and they can schedule a meeting with you right there without even talking to you, without a text message and without being woken up in the middle of the night, say they don't get back to you in 24 to 48 hours, well, you can have your CRM set up to schedule as many followup messages as you like, and again, all of this is done without taking a single ounce of your time.
Number two, contracts.
You can save all of your contracts in the CRM and send them electronically for people to sign electronically, they're very easy to alter because we all know each gig that we do as creatives are completely different, require different set of logistics, etcetera, and just like the auto reply, you can have it programmed to send every 24 to 48 hours if they don't get to it. Again, a huge time saver.
Number three, client billing.
So say someone signs a contract with you for you to show up and do your creative work, once that contract is signed, you could leave like an hour buffer to make sure you could go back when you get a kickback notification saying that they did sign it, just to review and make sure everything is good to go, you could program to say in an hour after that for your deposit information to show up, that first initial billing will automatically be sent out on your behalf and just like the contracts, and just like the auto reply you can have a program to send every 24 to 48 hours if they forget to do it, so no more bugging the client about, Hey, did you pay the deposit yet? Because the CRM will just do that for you. And what I really like about this is it sort of takes the emotions out of the game, people are busy and clients are busy doing whatever it is they do all the time, and we as creatives are constantly looking around, seeing what money is coming in and out, and it can be really overwhelming at points to where if you don't have control of your emotions, you could say something that might upset the client, even if they're late on getting you the payment, so by having that automated message just reminds them, Hey, don't forget you owe this amount, etcetera, and giving them a window of time to sort of complete it in, it just sort of takes you out of the equation and all of your emotions, and it just makes for better client relations.
Number four is logistics, and this one is maybe my favorite one out of all of them.
So once the lead comes in, once the contract is signed, what's the initial deposit is given, then you're in the period of waiting, just waiting for the date to show up for so you can do your work as a creative, right, every client wants to talk leading up to the event to make sure everything is in order. So a CRM can really help in this aspect of your business because you can preprogram inquiry forms to go out to your client at a certain date, in certain time leading up to the event, this could be like, Hey, what special songs do you want... Hey, what time do you want us to load in and set up our equipment, what time do you need is to be set up by for the event to start? You know, all those little idiosyncrasies that sometimes get lost in the mix, this is an invaluable tool to help create consistency across the board for both you and client with the information, so say you require certain information at 90 days before the event or maybe 60 days before the event, or even 30 days before the event, you can program all of these forms to go out to the client for them to fill out, and... Yes, they will automatically resend if they don't fill them out, it's unbelievable. At any point, I can just check in on the forms and see if they've been missing them or if they've been filling in all the information correctly, it really makes for clear communication and it doesn't take hardly any time out of your day.
One final part about this, say you don't own a big music business or something, and you're just an individual musician, all of these concepts can be applied to your own individual music career, think about how much time you waste just trying to get a hold of people as to saying, When I'm I gonna show up for a gig, when am I gonna do this? When am I gonna do that? You can install this in your own individual artist career, just to send to the people that usually hire so that you can fill out all the information, it keeps you from getting lost in the fray of logistics and billing and contracts and all that kind of stuff. And keeps you focused on what's most important to you, which is your art, so I hope this has been helpful.