A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is a tool or software designed to help businesses manage and improve their interactions with customers and potential customers. It provides a centralized platform to store customer information, track communications, and streamline workflows related to sales, marketing, and customer service.

Key Features of a CRM:

  1. Contact Management
    Store and organize customer details like names, contact information, and history of interactions.
  2. Sales Pipeline Management
    Track leads, opportunities, and deals as they move through the sales process.
  3. Marketing Automation
    Automate email campaigns, lead nurturing, and marketing efforts to target specific customer segments.
  4. Customer Support
    Manage support tickets, customer inquiries, and service issues efficiently.
  5. Analytics and Reporting
    Generate reports to understand customer behavior, sales performance, and marketing ROI.
  6. Integration
    Connect with other tools like email, calendars, e-commerce platforms, or accounting software.

Benefits of a CRM:

  • Improved Customer Experience
    Helps deliver personalized and timely service.
  • Streamlined Workflows
    Automates repetitive tasks, saving time and resources.
  • Better Sales Tracking
    Provides clear visibility into the sales funnel and team performance.
  • Enhanced Collaboration
    Teams across sales, marketing, and support can share information seamlessly.

Who Uses a CRM?

  • Sales Teams to manage leads and close deals.
  • Marketing Teams to run campaigns and track customer engagement.
  • Customer Support Teams to handle inquiries and improve satisfaction.
  • Business Owners and Managers to gain insights into overall customer relationships.

Have you ever wished there was a product that new exactly how you wanted your data organised?

The “data” in for the sake of this article could be sales data, like quotes or proposals. Or it could be something very specific like student enrolment data.
What’s that? You have already done a google and you found some expensive cloud based services, which may or may not work?
Well then.. Have you thought about building your own intranet or custom dashboards to manage your data?

Did you know WordPress is easily customisable and you can build custom CRM’s with it?

Talk to any decent WordPress developer about managing custom data content management systems and they will tell you simple.

  1. ACF (advanced custom fields),
  2. CPT (custom post types) and
  3. A little programming is all you need.

What is a custom post type?

A custom post types (cpt) is organised content like “projects”, “products” or “poems”. They are just another way for developers and website site owners to manage content in WordPress. You can create a custom post type for any type of content. For instance, you could create a custom post type to manage all your testimonial posts. Custom post types also give site owners and developers the ability to have an archive page template for the post type, which is a collection of all the posts within the custom post type. Furthermore the cpt also has a singular post template which will display all the content for the individual post.

Think of a custom post type like a blog that stores non blog or page content but rather specialised content that requires a different type of content and data.

Isn’t WordPress a blog?

The answer is only if you use it for blogging.
That WordPress standard text editor can easily be replaced by completely custom data fields using “Advanced custom fields”… and instead of using “Posts” and “Pages” to enter your content we can create a custom post type called “proposals” and populate the proposals post type with a tonne of custom fields such as but not limited to:

  • Client name – who is the proposal for
  • Date created
  • Proposal Status – won, lost, draft (this data can be fed into a custom dashboard for reporting)
  • Proposal type – this could make use of custom proposal templates based on which “proposal type” is selected
  • Proposal details and stages

Say you had another CPT called “clients” which stored all your clients details.
This is where relational databases (MySql) is used to “join” proposals to clients.

This is something that WordPress does easily.

This system of CPT and ACF will allow you to create custom proposals for your clients.

Data can be accessed via a url.

You could send your client a proposal link via email when your proposal is ready to viewed. Not such a bad delivery system. No expensive cloud based solution required.

Want to view some stats on who has viewed the proposal and how many times for how long.
You can install https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-analytify/ Pro-verison to get realtime reporting stats and notifications.

Some other easy wins from a custom CRM.

  • All team members have access to searcable database of all existing proposals along with the proposals current status.
  • You have the ability to clone any of the existing proposals
  • Using an external cron service such as easy cron. Send an email to team members listing all the proposals with status “open”. With links to each open proposal
  • Export csv proposal data for a year on year analysis.

Now what if we had a CPT called “team” which listed all the members of the internal sales team.
We could gamify the whole system by displaying individual performance of team members which displayed a pie chart of:

  • proposals won
  • proposals lost
  • proposals pending
  • proposals draft

WordPress does a good job at managing content through the use of CPT and ACF.
Use WordPress as a system for automating your internal processors.
It is a low cost venture compared to other off the shelf cloud services.

By wpm •

Leave it to the experts
Let us know some basic details and we can begin.