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How To Use CRMs For The Changing Auto Body Industry

The body shop industry has been adapting to the changing times driven by the recent growth in the electric car market, and the push towards “greener”, safer transportation around the world. For example, electric car sales has nearly doubled in Canada with close to 35,000 units sold by the end of September. European countries have also seen an uptrend in hybrids last year.

With so much going on in the auto industry, shop owners are scrambling to stay current with their customers. Let’s look at some of the factors that will change the way we do business in the auto body industry and how a customer relationship management software can help better serve your customers.

“Green” Cars Are on the Rise

Green cars are becoming more popular over the years, and we might see an influx of buyers and customers in the not-so-distant future. Technology is starting to mature on these high-tech vehicles with significant improvement in speed, acceleration, range, and power efficiency compared to their predecessors.

Hybrids and fully-electric cars have come a long way, and now we have Plug-in Electric vehicles (PEV) like Tesla Model 3 leading the charge (no pun intended). Major companies like Toyota, Ford, and BMW are also digging in to get their share in this emerging market. We could see more adoption in the near future as competition grows and PEVs diversify to meet various needs (Think Nissan Leaf hatchback, Jaguar I-PACE SUV, and Rivian R1T pickup truck)

Its Impact on the Auto Body Industry

Working with hybrids and electric cars is in many ways different from conventional methods. Body shops will have to work with aluminum more often which requires specialized training and a separate facility for aluminum collision repairs. Same applies to gas-driven cars by Ford and GM which are also using much lighter aluminum over conventional steel to increase MPG.

Body shops will also need an entirely different skill set for dealing with electrical components like the induction motor, inverter, battery pack, electronic sensors, etc., as well as OEM certification when servicing these parts. The question is, would it be worth putting the extra time and money? Note: electric vehicles also requires maintenance despite having less moving parts.

The Solution: Be Quick to Adapt to Customer’s Needs

Regardless of how big or small your business is, your ability to quickly adapt and stay current with your customers is the key to surviving a fast-changing environment. Here’s what you can do to help prepare your auto body shop business.

Research the market. Check the stats in your area. Do you have a large enough market to justify the cost of upgrade, or are they pretty much a niche market as of this time? Looking at the charts, we can see, for example, how electric vehicle sales in Ontario grew by 209 percent last year, followed by British Columbia and Quebec at 151 and 131 percent, respectively.

Given these numbers, there’s a fair chance of customer demand for maintenance and collision repairs in hybrids and electric vehicles (EV). However, this may not be the case in countries on the other side of the world, where people might actually buy good old gas-driven cars to take advantage of price cuts as demand for oil starts to dwindle. Either way, always be ready to take action when opportunity presents itself.

Invest in technology. Whether you’re dealing with older vehicles or high-tech EVs, it is worth investing in technologies that will help increase efficiency and productivity for your business. You can either choose to upgrade your auto body shop to serve a broader range of customers or increase throughputs by adding more bays and introducing IR curing systems. You can also improve other aspects of your business such as keeping track of your customers’ job order, in which case, you’re going to need a CRM to help you stay on-schedule.

Let people know you’re in business. After spending considerable amount of time and resources upgrading and improving your services, people need a way to know about it. Small Business Dream suite of tools helps business owners by offering a cost-effective way to reach out potential customers in multiple channels using automation (email autoresponders), semi-automation (email templates and phone script), social media marketing, and other useful features such as client acquisition (landing page and sales funnel), A/B testing, survey builder, and so on.

Stay in touch with your customers. Your current customers are an important source of information to help push your business forward. Throw out a survey from time to time to get into your customers’ head. Are they keen to have an electric vehicle in the future? If so, which model and make are they most interested in? Would they prefer to have both types (legacy and EV) for specific purposes? You can get a lot of useful feedback by just using Small Business Dream’s survey builder. Or, you can have them sign up to your auto body shop newsletter to keep them updated with your latest upgrades and services so they never miss out on anything and keep your business top-of-mind.

Learn more on how you can successfully build your auto body shop business at SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

How Small Businesses Can Take Advantage of Boxing Day Sales

Sales and discounts are everywhere this time of the year as businesses gear up for the shopping spree. For many small businesses, this could be their chance at getting more customers, boosting sales, and reigniting old customers. Customers who missed out on Black Friday and Cyber Monday would certainly be scrambling for Boxing Day sales, so take the time prepping up for the holiday frenzy.

Gear up for the Occasion

As a small business owner, this could be your chance to reengage customers who haven’t bought from you in a long time. What better chance than to entice them back with a nice juicy Boxing Day Sale?

Try to be competitive with your pricing. Finding the sweet spot is a fine balancing act which requires some knowledge in marketing and managing your cash flow. However, since every store in the city will be dropping prices as much as 25 to 50 percent, you might want to consider a sale if nothing more than to stay competitive with your competition. Think of price cuts (also known as “loss leader”) as part of your marketing expenses.

Freeing up your store from old inventory and putting them on sale is also a good way to beat the competition. Make sure they’re still in good condition, though, to avoid hurting your reputation.

Maximize Customer Engagement: Online and Offline Sales

Small businesses don’t usually end up having “blockbuster deals” like you see in big chain stores because they can’t beat them on price so don’t even try to compete with them. Instead, the more successful small businesses have their own signature product, speciality goods, or service not found at any other place.

You might have the perfect several items sitting on your store for some time. A Boxing Day sale is the perfect time to mark them down to attract sales volume.

Having an e-commerce site or a Facebook Page for your business can also help maximize customer engagement if done correctly. Alternatively, you can set an email autoresponder to notify your customers a day ahead when they subscribe to your newsletter. Small Business Dream suite of tools can vastly improve shopping experience by engaging with customers on multiple channels such as phone, SMS, social media, email, landing page, sales funnel, and so on, whichever method they prefer.

Follow up on Your New Customers on Boxing Day

Aside from being a great way to maintain customer loyalty, one of the great things about the holiday season is the amount of information you’ll get from new customers. You’ll need a tool such as CRM to collect customer information (online or in-store visits and purchases), manage your customer database, and maintain customers’ interest through customer communication (email autoresponders and newsletters subscriptions) long after the shopping frenzy is over.

Shoppers are in the holiday spirit so they are more likely to sign up for newsletters to be notified for the latest deals to make sure they never miss out on anything. They want to know which products will be on sale and when. CRM makes this all possible for you, at little or no expense to your business.

You should also collect new customer information even before Boxing Day starts by using CRM to conduct customer surveys or newsletter subscriptions via social media. Small Business Dream puts all the information from your Survey Page or Sales Funnel straight to your customer database, segment your customers right off the bat and send them on to your email autoresponders.

You can do it the old way and let Small Business Dream take it from there. Have your in-store customers fill up a short survey or ask for their business card and quickly add them to your database using Small Business Dream’s Card Scan feature, or you can do it yourself on your spare time.

Conclusion

Take this opportunity to grow your business and get noticed this holiday season. Use technology and your creative flair to your advantage, but most importantly to bring joy and satisfaction to your valued customers. So go ahead and make this Boxing Day an unforgettable shopping experience!

Learn more on how you can successfully build your small business through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

What Small Business Can Do In a Depressed Market

The Economy is extremely volatile at the moment and if it becomes a bear market, it can have severe consequences for a lot of small businesses. For some, it meant cutting back on expenses, downsizing, or even bankruptcy. However, during these times businesses can give real value to their customers and stand out from their competition. Your ability to adapt, shift priorities, and look for opportunities during a downturn can help you stay afloat and gain a decisive edge above the competition.

We’ll be focusing on three main areas considered to be the most vital during this phase.

Customers

Customers tend to be more price-sensitive during tough times. Buying habits change, as well as their priorities. But despite all that, you need to keep a steady flow of income for your company. Getting enough customers to keep the ball rolling should be high on the list of your priorities. There are at least 3 ways you can achieve this:

Cross-sell/up-sell
Be more competitive
Focus on Customer Service

Although it seems counterintuitive, cross-selling or up-selling when most people are trying to stay on budget actually works. In retail business, this could mean offering bundled items, a discount, or selling them in bulk. Services like salons may offer one or more complementary services at a slightly lower price than if customers were to avail of them on separate occasions. Customers will take every opportunity to get the most out of their dollar whether it’s through discounts or storing up for the rainy days.

Staying in touch with your customers is a lot easier these days because of sales and marketing automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Small Business Dream helps business owners acquire new customers and maintain customer loyalty through email autoresponders, survey forms, inside sales tools for salespeople (Action List, phone script, notes, etc.), landing page templates, and sales funnel.

Cash Flow

Maintaining a positive cash flow can be tough for businesses during recessions. People tend to be more conservative with their finances, and businesses might have a hard time finding more capital to run their businesses. This often results in drastic measures like downsizing and outsourcing certain tasks, while others may try reducing their workload through automation. Check your cash flow and see if your business spending gives the best possible output.

Identify important areas in your business. If you are to strip down your business to its core, which ones would likely stay and keep you in business all throughout? Is there any task that hasn’t been automated, and is taking up too much time to accomplish? How effective is your marketing, and does it justify the cost? In many cases, business owners find themselves spending too much on things that don’t have significant impact on their bottom line. You could be hiring more people when you could have just spent a fraction of the cost using sales and marketing automation. We want our business to be as lean as possible and still be able to maximize our gains.

Reallocate your resources as needed. Technology has come a long way towards improving our efficiency from customer acquisition to maintaining good customer relationship. In fact, some businesses are already moving towards inside sales using CRM because it allows them to save up on gas, meetups, business trips, and other related expenses doing outside sales. This strategy greatly reduces business costs and helps them stay cash flow-positive when most businesses are barely making it.

Opportunities

When the economy is bad, most people turn to cash. Savvy investors and business owners use this opportunity to acquire more assets and properties as many of these will go on sale during recession. This is where businesses with enough cash stored away can benefit the most. If you are able to stay cash flow-positive, this can be your chance to grow your business significantly.

Foreclosures and auctions are pretty common during economic downturns. Take some time looking for opportunities to buy assets properties on the cheap which include real estate, office equipment, vehicles, goods, and raw materials. Some of these normally cost a fortune, but you might be able to acquire them for your business at significantly reduced prices. Market downturns allow you to grow your own business by picking up the pieces from what is left of other people’s businesses.

Final thoughts

You can succeed with any small business regardless of the present economic conditions so long as you have the mindset, skills, and the right tools to get the job done. You can always achieve more by working smarter, not harder. Use technology to speed up and automate your tasks, and be prepared to step up your business when opportunities present themselves.

Customer Relationship Management Tools for Insurance Agents

While the insurance business is generally a traditional industry driven by referrals, more Millennials are investing their money and are demanding a technology-driven approach. As such, the insurance industry is adapting online trends like sales and marketing automation and Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) to get a leg up on their competition and to better serve their clients.

Adopting an online approach to growing your insurance business opens a world of possibilities for your company. We’ll explore some ways you can accomplish the task using Small Business Dream.

First, here’s why you should consider using Small Business Dream as your companion in the insurance business.

Ease of use. Small Business Dream focuses on crucial areas in business such as customer acquisition, customer communication, customer feedback, and customer education. It offers a simple, user-friendly interface and avoids unnecessary clutter.
Small Business Dream enables you to devise your own strategies with as many combinations and customizations as your creativity would allow. It offers a wide selection of themes, landing page templates and email autoresponders which can be customized to fit any kind of business.
Cost-effectiveness. Small Business Dream increases your profit margins by minimizing the overhead cost of acquiring new clients with cutting-edge technology in sales and marketing automation.

Online Customer Acquisition

Our long-held notion of a typical old-fashioned insurance agent is quickly being replaced by tech-savvy mobile users capable of reaching hundreds of potential clients from any place around the world with a mobile app like CRM. It’s not surprising why so many traditional insurance companies are also scrambling to learn CRM just to keep up with the competition.

With Small Business Dream’s Sales Funnel Setup, you can easily set up your first landing page about your insurance company for just an hour or two, or customize our generic sales funnel pages with your chosen theme and start creating traffic through social media, customer referrals, or sales funnel card. The system works whether you have a company owned website or want to have a micro-site right off the bat.

Opt-in Survey Form

Segmenting your leads and contacts from the outset can save you a lot of time sifting out your ideal prospects. Typically, insurance agents will have to qualify their leads based on the following information:

Personal information (name, sex, date of birth, email address)
Health information (height, weight, lifestyle habits, pre-existing condition)
Employment status (type of work, employer, length of service)
Financial information (income, net worth)

However, for our CRM, you might have to skip some of those during the initial opt-in survey and get to them later on after showing more interest. Instead, we’ll be focusing only on the basic information such as name, email address, sex, age, and the type of insurance they’re interested in. This might slightly be different from one type of insurance to another.

If your insurance company offers life insurance, your opt-in survey form may ask for additional information about the specific type of life insurance they’re interested in (term, universal, or whole life), and have them subscribed to a specific email series based on which option they’ve checked off. This method can be used in other types of insurances as well.

The idea is to have your prospects spend as little time as possible on your opt-in survey form and get just the right amount of information for your email autoresponder to work with. Eventually, you’ll be able to get to them via phone, sms, or email after showing up on your Action List. You’ll have a much better experience qualifying your leads using this method than having it done manually by yourself.

Upselling to Your Existing Clients

Insurance upgrades can help increase your income by as much as 30% or higher depending on the number of clients who opted for a policy upgrade. You need a follow-up tool like a CRM to update their knowledge about additional coverage offered by the insurance company through policy upgrades.

Again, Small Business Dream’s survey builder will come in handy. Depending on user response, you can switch them over to an email series about the advantages of increasing their coverage and specific situations where they are considered vital, as is usually the case with health insurance and long-term disability.

You can also upsell to your qualified prospects prior to the sale by showing some of the benefits of whole life over term insurance, or you may follow up on them from time to time for policy upgrades after showing some interest on it.

Offer Solutions through Customer Education

You can help your future clients save money on their monthly premiums by sharing some useful information such as avoiding risky behavior or by maintaining a good level of fitness prior to the insurance exam. You can also educate your prospects and existing clients about the pros and cons of choosing one type of insurance over the other and why people need to have coverage. One way of doing it is through your email autoresponder or through your company website or blog.

Conclusion

There are plenty of ways CRM can increase your productivity as an insurance agent. You’ll be able to come with more creative ways and develop new techniques as you gain more experience in the insurance business and with Small Business Dream CRM, or you can reach them on how you can use the system for your industry better.

Learn more on how you can successfully build your business through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

Customer Relationship Management Strategies for Financial Planners

Creating wealth and being financially secure later in life should be on top of everyone’s priority. However, most people know very little about the ins and outs of financial planning and probably need professional advice to help them with their short-term and long-term goals.

Financial planners are the go-to persons for people hoping to maintain the kind of lifestyle they want beyond their productive years. In the busy age of social media, technology, and shrinking attention spans financial planner need a way to educate and communicate with current and potential clients about the necessity of financial planning in these uncertain times. The best way to stay in touch is to automate using Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Why Financial Planners Need CRM

Financial planners usually start small, often with very few results during the first few months. You’ll have to gain traction and build your name over time.

People who want to learn more about financial planning will come to you for answers. Most of the time, they can be dealt with in one or two articles (if you have your own blog or website), on your FAQ, landing page, or having an automated email response for each set of questions and related topics.

Autoresponders works perfectly in these situations, allowing you to stay in touch with your current and potential clients with less work. CRMs makes it easier to create your own pages, set up an email series or sales funnel, and have the system do the rest of the job screening out and acquiring new clients for you.

Strategies You can Implement Using Small Business Dream CRM

Let’s take a look at how CRM can be used to grow and succeed in this particular business.

Share your Expertise on Financial Literacy.

Most people shy away from financial literacy because it seems too complicated. You should start with an email series based on which plans your prospects would be interested in, say an email series about 401k’s, mutual funds, annuities, etc. Or you can have them sorted out based on a particular age bracket, net worth, long term/short term plans, and special cases such as illnesses and disabilities, and so on.

With Small Business Dream, you only have to do them every once in a while and have the system do the rest like switching from one email series to the next based on user response, or how often they’ll receive updates on their newsletter subscription.

Use Networking to Build Reputation and Trust.

Financial planners should work on building trust and establishing good reputation in the community. People want someone they can count on with their life’s savings, esp. one who is qualified to manage people’s funds. They want to know you really care about them and that you’re not just doing it for personal gain.

Networking events are a perfect opportunity to tell others how they can benefit from you. Whenever possible, make some preparations ahead of time building your own landing page and sales funnel, so you can present your business at a moment’s notice. Small Business Dream incorporates these features in the CRM and made it easier for the averager use to make one.

Follow up on your clients about their plans and recent changes in the market.

Inflation, market fluctuations, tax laws, etc. canimpact on your client’s portfolio. You need to be able to notify all of your clients as quickly as possible.

This can be done using Small Business Dream’s email blast feature, targeting specific segments in your email list that belong to a particular category of clients. This feature not only simplifies tasks for you, but it also helps build trust and confidence with your clients.

Conclusion

These are just but a few examples of how Small Business Dream can help financial planners succeed using CRM as their marketing and follow up tool to achieve phenomenal growth in the financial planning industry.