The Super CRM, Part 1: Marketing

Welcome to the 10th Edition of ProAdvisorSuite News!

Matt and I talk a lot about business, and marketing, and technology, and occasionally about what people want.

Not a bad framework for designing your go-to-market strategies:

The Super CRM: Marketing

• Let's start with the letters:

• Importing Contacts:

  • Already able to do:

• Contacting Contacts:

  • Then make it multi-channel, with workflows and aut …

• Contacts, Contacting Contacts, What to say?

• The Marketing Strategy

  • Reporting:

  • Scheduling & Data-Gathering:

• Summing it up:

Inspired by Louis Retief's conversations with ChatGPT, I started thinking about what I would want to see from a CRM of the future.

• Seamlessly integrated

• Effortless task-switching

• Has everything you need and nothing you don't ~Sam Ovens

• Significantly reduce the number of systems you have to log into

• A delight to use

• Onboarding new employees is super easy

In the future, anything is possible. I'll try to stay somewhat grounded to tech and ideas that already exist, but also do some imagining. Let's see how it goes.

Let's start with the letters:

C - contacts or customers

R - relationships

M - management

Or just "managing relationships", a 2nd brain.

Importing Contacts:

A CRM starts with contacts, so we need to get contact information into the CRM (and not by manually typing it in). Also, once entered, we shouldn't really ever have to enter it again - it should be able to flow everywhere we might need it:

• Import via .csv, imported immediately, live, smart-matching fields

• Import from email, text, phone contacts, the super CRM would need a floating "extension" or app of some sort to interact with from everywhere

• Import from socials like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, pasting a link or search parameters, or an event

• Import via OCR - take a screenshot of a profile, list of names, etc. and import that way

• Import from lead sources like Apollo.io, ZoomInfo, UpLead, and cross-reference them too

And import with very limited manual clean-up before hand. Like if you have a list of full names in columns, it should be able to split them out into first and last name fields on its own.

I want to go into a bit more detail on some of these because some have been solved:

Already able to do:

Most CRMs have the ability for an end user to import a .csv of contacts (except Redtail Technology :), I think what's needed here is the ability to manipulate data to match the receiving format.

Most CRMs also have the ability to import from your Gmail, Outlook contacts, but its a very messy dump, you'd need the ability to filter and sort and organize the list masterfully before importing.

NetHunt CRM makes importing from LinkedIn very easy, you click the little person icon next to the name, the box pops up to the right where you can edit details, and its in your CRM including photo, LinkedIn URL, etc. Can this functionality be added to all the other socials?

HeyReach and Closely make importing bulk lists from LinkedIn super easy with options like this:

Importing contacts from OCR is probably already available or about to be. Companies like YourStake, Holistiplan, and LEA are doing great work with pulling information from prospect or client-provided documents.

So now zooming out a bit, this Super CRM should take some of the load off humans to think about where our niche might be. Maybe you type in explaining your micro-niche and exactly what you do for them and it provides resources on where you'll be able to find them including online directories, forums, reddits, various social groups, events, etc.

Ok, so now we have a list of say 3,000 of our ideal prospects in the CRM. Now its time to contact our contacts.