One of the pleasures we get in developing BuddyCRM is in deliberately not building a product that does everything. Instead, we concentrate development on making sure everything in our CRM works to assist you in making a sale, keeping in touch with your sales leads, and recording that progress. Thus, keeping features within defined parameters, our approach to building BuddyCRM is to create a product that does exactly what you need within at least three clicks. There’s no deep dive hunting for results in BuddyCRM.
With BuddyCRM handling your customer contact activity, we let other apps and programs do their part. So if you want to record the accounting activity of a customer you might use Xero or Sage, after all, they’re the experts in accounting. But we believe you don’t have to silo that financial information and should share important details with your sales team. Then they can connect with customers and prospects knowing the full picture. We can create a single customer view on BuddyCRM that includes information from many different sources.
Integrating with other apps and displaying their information on a customer record within BuddyCRM is bread and butter stuff for us. If your third-party app has an API, we can connect to it.
Let’s look at some use cases where we connect BuddyCRM to other industry-leading software packages.
Accounting eg. Sage
With a connection to an accounting software package, you can have the account balance of a customer, their latest quotes, invoices, weekly, monthly, yearly revenues and more visible on their account record within BuddyCRM.
Our deep integration with third-party software means that your sales team can even raise invoices and quotes directly from BuddyCRM and they will appear natively in that application.
Email marketing eg. Mailchimp
Email marketing is an incredible tool for digital prospecting and lead conversion. Contact through professional emails can spur leads, promote new products and ideas, and provide a reason to get back in touch with a potential customer.
There have been fantastic developments in online email builders over the last decade which has made these facilities affordable and available to all. Companies such as Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor and Aweber have simple systems that are dedicated to the creation of emails and successfully sending them.
Yet, your data is held in the CRM. The important information on your contacts, defined targets and activity data rest there. The solution is to connect your CRM with one of these email platforms and take advantage of their design and targeting features.
An integration between BuddyCRM and Mailchimp means your contacts will be routinely synchronised allowing you to design and send your email campaigns to them. Sync your custom fields, activity data, industry type, basically anything you store in BuddyCRM. Now you can filter your contacts and send targeted email shots to segments of your contacts database. Any recorded information that Mailchimp creates you can return to BuddyCRM too. eg. email open rates, date of sending, unsubscribed, etc.
There are many email marketing platforms available and we have successful integrations with Pure360, RedEye, Campaign Monitor, and Dotmailer. If it has an open API we can connect to it.
Inventory management eg. inFlow
Connect your inventory and order management software to BuddyCRM and you’ll have a clear view of customer ordering history. You might also want to bring through live prices for products with current pictures so you can build a quote or presentation to send to a prospect.
So if you’re hanging back on adding CRM to your business requirements because you’re unsure how it will work with your current information systems, don’t.
The more information you can share with your sales team, the more knowledge they’ll obtain, the more leverage they’ll acquire in negotiations with prospects.