The 6 key ingredients of an efficient client acquisition process

By Félix Robitaille, President

To achieve continuous growth, a company must constantly acquire new clients and contracts. Since you certainly do not want your success to rely solely on your employees, these goals must be achieved beyond the talent of your sales agents. It is essential for you to develop an efficient client acquisition process. Good news, a CRM that is integrated with other automated marketing platforms, will allow you to easily operationalize the acquisition of clients. Here are the 6 key ingredients for such a process:

1. Have the right conversation with the right person at the right time.

Your acquisition channel will be fragmented into different steps that are coordinated with your CRM’s stages of acquisition. Your channel however, must be flexible. It is crucial to take full advantage of the information that is stored in your CRM. This will enable you to identify the best moment to contact your prospect. To maximise the impact of your follow ups on your client’s purchase process, it is imperative that you speak with the right person. Be aware that your point of contact could change as you step forward in your relationships, the process can change. Lastly, it is important for your message to be pertinent and for your client to see it’s true value from the moment you send it. For this reason, you must avoid sending automated email messages as the message could end up reaching a person that is not involved in the purchasing your products or services. The new products and services you want to inform your client of would reach this uninvolved person right as the director is getting ready to send in the order. This could cause an avoidable delay in the purchasing process.

2. Adapting yourself to each client

Your client’s purchasing process is not necessarily the same as your sales process. It is crucial to adapt yourself to each client, ensuring that your actions remain pertinent to your clients. Adapting yourself to each client will allow you to support them in their decision making and will make you more compatible with the company culture.

3. Automation of the acquisition process combined with personalised communications

Before sending a message to your prospects, the workflows marketing of your CRM should have a validation on your part as well as a minimum of human touch, showing to your client that you understand their reality and giving you, a head start against your competition. To personalise certain parts of your messages, make sure all the sent communication is pertinent to your client, you should link messaging templates to your CRM workflow rather than creating automated email.

4. Harmonize your internal processes with your acquisition workflows.

For matter of efficiency, it is essential for your company to advance in one single leap. Your marketing, sales, service and customer service management process, must all be aligned with your acquisition channel. This will keep your new clients confident in their decision of transition between being your company’s prospect to becoming a client. Harmonizing these different functions will be much easier when operating in a single CRM solution which will help build and maintain an efficient and unified management structure.

5. Choosing the right communication tools for each message

Choosing the right communication channel to send your message combined with sending it at the right time and adapting it to your client’s need will give each message you send a greater impact. Companies such as Sprint for instance, have seen a 31% increase in messages sent to them by their clients only 3 months after having integrated Facebook Messenger to their customer service. Integrating social media to your CRM marketing workflows is an efficient way for you and your prospects to increase your relationship.

6. Respect the uniqueness of each client

Along with the automation of your marketing, the integration of your acquisition channel with the rest of your company’s functions, adapting yourself to each of your clients’ unique situation will remain essential. You must give each of your employees the freedom of using their knowledge for each prospect… All the while recording their interactions! As you can see, marketing automation will create processes that are more evolved than the former pile of business cards we used in the past. Using the workflows and marketing functions of your CRM, will facilitate the task and increase your results ensuring your company’s continuous growth.