If you're using your CRM for email management, you might think you've got it covered, but it's time to think again. For most businesses we speak to, key quotes, customer contracts and correspondence all go into their CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce. However, for almost every business, employees' inboxes still have thousands of emails in them.
Although your CRM does capture some of this important project or client correspondence, could you rely on this in court should a dispute arise? Unfortunately, searching for an email in CRM is difficult. Even more so than manually scrolling through your Outlook for a particular email. This means important emails are largely unfindable across the business.
Don't forget, CRM platforms weren't developed to solve email management problems. They're for accommodating better customer and prospect relationships. So, how can you find harmony in a CRM tool and an email management solution like Mail Manager?
CRM and Information Management
CRM or Customer Relationship Management does just that - manages the relationships you're building with your customers and prospects. CRM platforms are used to measure your success through various points of the sales cycle and allow you to continually grow and monitor successes.
Information management, on the other hand, is the collection, storage, and archiving of important business documents, images, contracts, drawings, emails and other sources of information. For project and client-based businesses, information management means you always know the status of a project and can search for contracts or correspondence all in one place. Effective information management enables businesses to use their time, resources and expertise effectively to make well-informed decisions, and save time searching for the information they need.
Mail Manager working alongside your CRM
At Mail Manager, all of our clients use a CRM solution, where a low volume of information is stored for business development purposes. Mail Manager helps companies where they send and receive high volumes of information, and want to remove the gaps they have between emails and documents.
Even for our own company, we use our CRM alongside our email management solution to more effectively manage correspondence, touchpoints and relationships. Our CRM captures our interactions with customers and prospects, while Mail Manager ensures all of our important emails are filed safely to our centralised location and are searchable within seconds.
Most of the time, people are sending emails from Outlook, even though they have a CRM. But, even if they aren't, you can't really search for specifics in emails on a CRM as you can in Mail Manager. That's one of the main differences between the two - CRM systems weren't designed for the filing and finding of important email information.
Your CRM is more like a database for contacts and companies rather than an intuitive and fast searching tool, such as Mail Manager. Its main use is for email selling and communication. Plus, it doesn't have the machine learning habits built-in, so correspondence isn't filled centrally to the correct project or client folder. Instead, it's stuck in your CRM amongst masses of data.
How can your business tools work in harmony?
By implementing an information management system like Mail Manager alongside your CRM, you can experience massive benefits for your business. Some of these include:
-
Significant time saved from advanced search functionality, by email content, sender and attachment
-
Standardised email filing across the business, meaning no email will ever go missing and all employees will be able to tame their inbox and achieve 'Inbox Zero'
-
No restrictions to the amount of information you can have, unlike your CRM, and no need to use shared mailboxes or email tagging
-
Create a Single Source of Truth by bringing email into your email information management. Email is often the missing link and thousands upon thousands of emails are left in personal inboxes, many of which have important information contained in them that might be needed in the future
To see how Mail Manager would work in your business alongside your CRM, book a consultation with our team today!
