For the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to set up a sales team. I wanted everything to be a pre-thought as possible to avoid having to make any decisions on the go and keep everything organized.
Got the data base to work with, interviewed the sales people, created email content, sales guides, graphic material… it seemed like the only thing left to do was find a good CRM to centralize and keep track of the sales process and everything would be ready to take off.
And that’s when I discovered the parallel universe of CRMs. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and is basically a tool that will allow you to keep track of customers all the way from the first contact, to the first sale, to future sales and updates. It will remind you when you have to reach out to the customer based on events you create and basically show you each and every single contact and communication your company has had with that customer in the past so that you can pull it up before and call and have it in front of you so that the customer feels like you actually remembers what you talked about five months ago.
I had never used a CRM before, but had always heard about SalesForce, so I decided to sign up and give it a try. After 4 hours trying to figure it out I decided to quit and move on. I then stumbled upon several alternatives to SalesForce, some of them with better design, others with cheaper prices, but at the end of the day all trying to make a customized tool for each and every single customer, no matter if it was a 3 people sales team or 3000…
I was finding this extremely frustrating. How hard could it be to build a software that allowed you to keep track of calls, e-mails and meeting with each specific customer? Apparently very!
Finally I came across ClinchPad, which have a very particular approach to tracking sales. They base their software on a funnel that goes from first contact to sale, that’s your main screen, everything you see, and the only thing you can do is move potential customer from one step of the funnel to the next and write notes on what did you talk about during your last call or anything else you might find useful in the future.
Our sales team is set to start working next week and I’m pretty confident ClichPad was the right choice, at least for our under 5 people current sales team.
Fruto de la difícil situación que está viviendo el mundo de la construcción en Catalunya son muchos los arquitectos que se ven obligados a emigrar a otros países en busca de mejores oportunidades laborales. Pero ¿A dónde emigran los arquitectos catalanes?
Recientemente he estado trabajando en un proyecto que de forma involuntaria me ha llevado a dar con una primera idea de cuáles son los países preferidos para emigrar por los arquitectos catalanes. No se trata de un estudio exhaustivo y seguro está sujeto a imperfecciones, pero aun así el resultado me ha parecido interesante y digno de ser compartido.
Antes que nada explico un poco de donde sale esta información. Recientemente enviamos una promoción a la lista de mailing del COAC (lista en la que figuran todos los arquitectos actualmente colegiados) para promocionar www.archcase.com, y como en cualquier campaña de mailing obtuvimos varios informes tras el envío para valorar la campaña. Entre los datos del informe se encontraba uno al que en principio no íbamos a prestar atención, que era desde qué país se habían abierto los e-mails. Erróneamente y sin darle muchas vueltas habíamos supuesto que se abrirían todos desde España, sin embargo no fue así.
Este es el top 5 de países desde donde se abrieron nuestros e-mails (la base de datos tenía un tamaño de algo más de 12.000 subscriptores):
- España – 82%
- Estados Unidos – 14%
- Japón – 0,6%
- Holanda – 0,45%
- México – 0,3%
Desde luego parece que Estados Unidos es el destino preferido por los arquitectos catalanes que optan por emigrar. Aquí quedan los datos para que cada uno los interprete o analice como crea apropiado ;)