This is the million dollar question for many real estate agents and most small businesses. The overall idea of a CRM is wonderful: it lets you store all of the people that your business interacts with in one place, and makes them easy to lookup.
Recent trends have made this even better - some CRM's like InfusionSoft or Ontraport incorporate marketing funnels that let you create & automate email, SMS and even voice-message followups. Once you add the new person to your database, the system takes care of the rest, based on a marketing flow you've already constructed.
Other CRMs are more focused on sales: Pipedrive is one of a newer breed of CRM's that drill-down on the sales process, and easily let you identify where a person is. The advantage of a sales-focused CRM is that it's built around the sales stage for each of your leads, which is great for both high-producing teams because it lets them easily identify where each lead is at.
For the rest of us, using a variety of other CRMs ranging from Salesforce to Excel Spreadsheets, how do you keep track? What you need to do is implement a feedback control mechanism to automatically tag contacts who are in various stages of your sales & marketing pipeline, and then deliver your campaigns only to the correct stages they are intended for.
It’s entirely up to you to determine how to remove the users from your marketing messages. If you’re using a dedicated email marketing tool, you may have to use the API or even manually suppress customers from future sends.
On the other hand, in a CRM like InfusionSoft, a simple tag suppression works - make sure all your customers have a unique tag, and then using campaign routing to ensure that none of them get your marketing messages. Why stop there, however? You can break down your list into segments by which stage of the pipeline they’re in, and custom tailor unique content to help them through the sales process.
The goal of this blog is NOT to provide you a concrete, step-by-step process for separating leads from customers in your database. You could write a book about that and still barely scratch the surface.
However, if you have a growing business, it's VERY important to decide how you want to identify people by their sales stage, and then find a consistent, reliable way to not only identify them initially, but ALSO update their sales stage as they move through the process.
Ultimately, in my career that's been the largest challenge I've seen clients face. Adding leads to your CRM is easy, but as they become customers, or cancel subscriptions and once again become leads, the problem is accurately keeping track of it all.
Spend a bit of time researching how it's done for your specific niche, and put some rules in place for yourself now to avoid a lot of pain later. There's nothing worse than sending customer emails to leads or vice-versa, because it tells them you're not organized, which undermines trust in your abilities and may ultimately send them to your competitor.
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