When you specialize in language learning textbooks for students across the world, customer service and a healthy sales funnel are key to maintaining a thriving business. James from Breaking the Barrier, Inc. experienced first hand the need for an Education CRM while trying to manage a business with software that didn’t play nice. Keep reading for this week’s small business success story.
You see, initially Breaking the Barrier adopted sales and marketing software InfusionSoft, but it fell short for them as a business using QuickBooks. Like many small businesses, James felt the pain of trying to manage business applications that didn’t communicate, which inevitably meant inefficient manual work.
Sloppy Customer Service
“It didn’t integrate well with Quickbooks. It was time consuming to manually export data and upload it to InfusionSoft.”
To provide world-class service and continually grow their sales, James’ front-line team needed a way to identify the type of contact they were speaking to when answering the phone. They also needed a better process than looking up an email address in QuickBooks to see if the caller had an existing account.
Difficulty Managing a Long Sales Cycle
Adopting a new textbook for a school is a long sales cycle, often taking months or even years. With such long sales cycles James’ team needed a CRM that would help keep leads in the funnel with timely follow-ups.
“It is critical we’re able to accurately track all our customer interactions and easily create activities and opportunities to follow-up. A teacher may ask for a sample in September in hopes their school eventually chooses to buy Breaking the Barrier for their students the following year!”
A long sales cycle also makes it critical for Breaking the Barrier to stay in contact with leads and customers throughout the year — they needed a tool that would help segment contacts and create email campaigns.
“InfusionSoft’s email campaign interface wasn’t giving us the capabilities of Mailchimp.”
The Solution: Method CRM
Discovering that Method has the #1 rated QuickBooks integration and an integration with Mailchimp, Breaking the Barriers adopted the CRM for their education company and never looked back.
James’ team now operates in a CRM that syncs with QuickBooks in real-time, which means that after an initial import of their company’s history, any new customer or transaction created in Method gets mirrored in QuickBooks and vice-versa.
“Enter Method CRM — a life-saver. With some great help from Method’s support team, we seamlessly uploaded literally decades of data.”
World-Class Customer Service
Now, with Method CRM in their arsenal, everyone on the Breaking the Barrier team has up-to-date customer data allowing them to serve customers quickly without going into QuickBooks. What’s more, the Breaking the Barrier team doesn’t even need to log into the CRM to access customer and transaction data with Method’s Gmail Gadget — a free tool that brings all Method CRM data right into your inbox.
“Method’s Gmail Gadget has allowed our admins to rapidly see the order history of a customer and quickly assist with their needs without ever leaving Gmail. Before, we’d copy and paste an email address into QuickBooks to see if there was a customer history. Significant time burn!”
Long Sales Cycles Made Easy
Managing a long sales cycle is no longer a point of stress for the Breaking the Barrier team. Method CRM allows the team to maintain a healthy sales funnel through Opportunities and Activities. And, through the seamless integration with Mailchimp, the Breaking the Barrier team keeps in touch with current and potential customers through the year.
“Method has allowed us to put reminders on our schedules months down the road to check-in with key decision makers. Further, the integration with Mailchimp has allowed us to segment our customer list and export certain groups over to Mailchimp for timely email campaigns.”
Business Benefits
“Method is a great CRM tool out of the box but that is just the beginning of what you can do with your Method. With the no-code platform that allows users to customize the system to meet their business needs, there is no limitation to what you can do. The Method team are the best vendors I have worked with in my career. If you need a CRM system with limitless possibility that fully integrates with QuickBooks, Method is the perfect software.”