There are many situations where your company should pursue on specific customers proactively. If you don’t follow up on these customers, you potentially miss out on extra revenue, or, in the worst case, you can lose a customer for good.
Here are a few scenarios where you should follow up on your customers:
- The customer hasn’t bought from you for a long time
- You have not been in contact with the customer for too long
- The customer has registered many requests in a short period of time
- You have projects without future activities and run the risk of missing important milestones
- Your colleagues don’t know you are working on a big sale with specific customers when they need to know
- You don't have an overview of the quotes that are up for approval
In every situation, you want to change your work process to improve your current situation. But how do you know who these customers are?
Monitor your database using your SAINT selection
The easiest way to figure out which customers need to be followed up on is to create a SAINT selection.
The SAINT selection will give you an overview of all the customers that match your specified search criteria, and therefore need to be followed up on. Every customer’s company card will get a “watermark” (a picture you choose when you set it up) to indicate their status. This watermark will warn users that they need to do something to help the customer.
The point of SAINT is to monitor information in your database. However, what’s unique about SAINT selections is that you can search for information that is not present – for example, activities which haven’t happened.
A quick example: Let’s say you want an overview of all the customers that your company has not been in contact with for six months. You can create a SAINT selection of all the customers with no activities registered on their customer card for the last six months. Your SAINT selection is a dynamic selection. This means that every customer that matches the selection criteria will automatically be added to your selection and your selection is always up to date.
Once you have created your SAINT selection, you can use it to follow up on your customers in different ways:
- as a calling list for your sales or support team
- as a target list to send a mailing or a newsletter
- create follow-up activities for the person responsible for the customer
The watermark will warn you
Your SAINT selection will also assist you to help customers off-the-cuff. Whenever you open a customer card for a customer that matches your SAINT criteria, you will see the watermark image. This watermark works as a warning which indicates that a specific action needs to be taken. The beauty here is that every user in your company will see the watermark and they will know how to take care of this customer.
Depending on the type of SAINT practice you have set up, you can choose different images to use as a watermark to draw the user’s attention. It can be as simple as an image saying attention or warning. You can also set up SAINT to propose a follow-up activity so that you will know exactly what to do to help the customer.
The end result of using SAINT
When you have followed up on all customers in a SAINT selection you will see that there are no customers in your selection and the watermark on the company card disappears.
You can pat yourself on the back and rest assured that all inactive customers have received a courtesy call from your sales team, and all your projects have a future activity registered so you won’t miss your milestones.
However, an empty SAINT selection doesn’t mean that your job is done. Following up on customers is a never-ending routine. Even if your SAINT selection is empty today, it may not be next week. So, after a while you can refresh your selection to get a new list of companies that need to be followed up.
With SuperOffice SAINT you will stay on top of your customers, sales, and projects to fulfill your CRM strategy.
Get started
The first step in getting started with SAINT is to figure out what you want to achieve using it. So, we suggest that you start mapping out the processes you wish to change with SuperOffice SAINT.
Perhaps you want to:
- See all customers that haven’t bought from you in the last 9 months
- See all your projects without a future activity
- See all customers that have been in contact with your support department to often in the last 2 weeks
Once you have a clear overview of how you can help these customers, you can log into SuperOffice and set up your SAINT selections to help your company improve today.
How to set up SAINT selections
If you would like to discuss scenarios to see if SuperOffice SAINT is the solution for you, just contact us and we will get back to you right away.
SuperOffice SAINT is included for SuperOffice CRM Online and Onsite subscription customers. If you are a Buy customer and do not have access to SAINT, you need to buy a license for SAINT to be available.