How to Keep Track of Clients for Optimized Business Operations
Key points
- Keeping track of client information is crucial for successful client management, and using a CRM system can be a powerful tool to help organize and manage client data.
- In addition to using a CRM system, creating a client dashboard that consolidates key information about each client, such as contact information, project status, and billing information, can help to simplify client management.
- Regularly reviewing and updating client information, such as contact details, project timelines, and feedback, can help to ensure that clients feel valued and that projects run smoothly.
Many businesses don’t keep track of clients, past interactions with them, or their files in a way that’s easy to access. As a company owner, your ability to get an overview of your clients is important in order to service them well.
When it comes to client relationship management, there’s a lot of data to keep track of. Keeping everything organized shouldn’t be that hard. This article will help you build the perfect digital client tracking system that integrates processes and technology, paving the way for long-lasting client relationships.
The importance of keeping track of clients
You should keep track of your clients for various reasons, but the most important one is that it can help you serve them better. Details like call logs, contact information, tasks completed and tasks in progress, or project feedback must be tracked to better satisfy your client’s expectations and requirements that they’ve submitted via a project intake form.
As an agency founder, your goal is to deliver your clients as much value as possible and ensure customer satisfaction. Sounds pretty obvious, yet many businesses get it wrong. It isn’t only about hooking in new clients every month, but also improving your client retention with upsells and repeat transactions.
Software to keep track of clients
Now that you have what you need to track from your clients, let’s take a look at a few tools that make it easy for business owners.
SPP client portal for transactions & projects
A client portal is one of the best ways to keep track of clients as everything is in one place: invoices, orders, messages, and files.
From the perspective of a business owner, this makes it very easy to streamline your operations as you don’t have to check five different tools.
That being said, a client portal might not be enough for every company. While they allow you to track your clients, they are most powerful when combined with other tools, such as a dedicated CRM and email marketing tool.
Microsoft Excel for saving client details
Excel is one of the most commonly used tools by small businesses to manage their business workflow and track client data. It doesn’t take much to get started with spreadsheets. Once you’ve labeled the columns and rows for the project’s name, the task, the person in charge, and progress, entering data into Excel is a breeze.
Although never a complete replacement for dedicated CRM software, you can cover the basics and use Excel as a management tool until your needs for a dedicated software system grow.
ActiveCampaign for end-to-end client management
Using a CRM is a solid way to track clients. As I mentioned above, this type of software comes in handy in customer tracking: it provides a central place where every client question, service request, contact details, and many more are instantly available. Some of the leading CRM solutions are HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, and ActiveCampaign.
Modern CRM solutions allow importing data via CSV files.
Before you do, take a few precautions:
Clean up the data and make sure it doesn’t contain missing or incomplete information
Remove duplicate records from your existing data
Delete useless data (some CRMs have tiered pricing models, so you pay more as you add contacts)
Organize data properly for quick and easy access
If you wish to get a 360-degree view of all client interactions in a top-level view, consider migrating all your data to a CRM system.
Zapier to streamline your data automations
To make the entire client management process and dealing with client information easier, you can use no-code automations tools such as Zapier.
The possibilities are almost endless, but here are a few ideas to automation updating client details with Zapier, webhooks, and our API:
segment your clients or add custom data with the use of CRM fields
add checkboxes for each service you offer
when an invoice is paid, use the invoice.paid webhook with our API to update the checkbox CRM field
The above automation helps you know exactly which services your clients have bought, allowing you to target them based on that information. Someone who’s purchased service A, B, C and D could be offered service E via an email marketing automation.
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MailChimp to track email marketing
Email marketing automation should play nicely with your sales, CRM and client portal software. If all of them are connected, you can set up sophisticated funnels that target your clients and leads at the right time.
For instance, if you allow leads to sign up to your SPP client portal, they become a lead. The moment they sign up, you could add them to MailChimp, and add tag them as “lead.” As soon as they make a purchase, you tag them as a client.
For leads, you can set up a campaign that introduces them to your company, informs them about your services, and slowly nurtures them until they make a purchase. A different funnel should target clients, trying to upsell them on your recurring billing service.
To keep your deliverability high, make sure that you ask clients to opt into email marketing.
Hubspot for sales pipeline tracking
Most productized services don’t have a sales team but they do have a sales automation in place (for outreach) that generates inbound opportunities. Tools such as Hubspot can help your team track sales opportunities of individual contacts every step of the way without the use of spreadsheets.
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Ideally, the tool allows you to create a deal pipeline where you add every opportunity the sales automation generated. Once a lead becomes very interested in your service, you could create a Lead account in SPP via our API.
This will help your team visualize the sales pipeline because they’ll see exactly at which point the lead became a client (after purchasing a service). With the data at hand, it’s easier to measure the success of your sales campaigns.
Brand24 for social listening
Most companies track their clients as long as the interactions with them are direct, for instance they make a purchase, or open a marketing email. But not all interactions are direct, and that’s when social listening comes in.
Software such as Brand24 allows you to keep track of clients across all social media channels. This could be a review they post, a podcast interview where they mention you, or a simple shout-out on Twitter.
Modern tools such as Brand24 allow you to analyze sentiment, allowing you to segment positive, neutral, and negative sentiments from each other. If sentiments are negative, your team can reach out to the client to solve their frustration.
Keep track of clients FAQ
What is the best way to keep track of clients?
A CRM is the best way to keep track of clients. It centralizes everything you know about them in a single place, from contact information to communication preferences and purchases.
How do you keep track of multiple clients?
Small companies could keep track of multiple clients in a simple spreadsheet. But at some point, it becomes difficult to manage the sheer amount of data. Using a CRM from the beginning allows companies to scale once they amass a lot of data.
Which type of software should be used to keep track of clients?
A customer relationship management (CRM) tool is the best software to manage ever-changing data about clients. You’ll know exactly when you last talked to them, what they’ve purchased, and if they’ve read your marketing emails.
Summary
In this article, I showed you how to keep track of clients to ensure the highest quality in terms of deliverables and customer satisfaction. If you don’t know where your client’s information is or where to find it, you may struggle to achieve a productive workday and complete your client projects. Using client management software will help you achieve improved productivity and maximize the value of the relationship for the client’s benefit. Plus, the data at hand helps you with client reporting, so they stay in the loop when it comes to your services and your performance.
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