Businesses have numerous ways of handling this relationship, but project management is not always the first process that comes to mind. Managing and executing projects can be difficult for businesses, but when properly executed, project management can aid in building clients’ trust in a company. Here are different thoughts and tactics to help project managers and their teams in creating and developing better customer and client connection and finally to build better customer relationships.

Communication is key

Whether it’s a phone call, email, or in-person meeting, speaking to a client is the first step in building a relationship. However, it’s not always easy to keep calm when deadlines are looming or a project’s goals change drastically. Managers and team members who keep the following in mind can create opportunities for clear and concise communication:

• Maintain a positive attitude – Even if you feel stressed and overwhelmed, don’t let your clients know. Transmitting these issues to them doesn’t build a client’s confidence in your team. Take a minute before sending off an email or making a phone call to think of one good thing that’s happening.
• Acknowledge the client as an individual – Building a relationship with a client means seeing them as a unique person. Your point of contact is a business representative in your working relationship. Taking the time to ask personalized questions lets that individual know you’re interested in them. Constructing trust makes your points of contact feel comfortable about being open and honest, which helps both them and your team.
• Be clear and concise when transferring knowledge – Sending off a project for approval or review is the pinnacle of a team’s hard work. Nothing brings it down faster when there isn’t a clear hand-off to a client. Prior to delivering a project, put together a complete overview to accompany it, and have other team members review it.

As you scale, your traditional phone system may make communication a difficult task. Adopt a virtual phone system to benefit from auto-attendants, interactive voice response systems, call forwarding, and call transfer. These features ensure your customers are speaking to the right person right away, even if your employees are out of the office.

When sharing information with a client, decide if it will exist on the web or inside a cloud app. Have other individuals test access to these applications. Trying out your systems before clients log in aids in reducing frustration or miscommunication when projects are ready for review.

Build rapport

Once a well-established channel of communication is created, project team members should set out to support it. Any of the tactics on this list can help you in constructing additional client trust and forging a solid relationship.

• Exceed expectations – Teams should work to deliver more than expected. Sending off more work than initially discussed can build goodwill between the client and your company. Project managers and team members can achieve this goal by having a clear plan when assigning tasks to team members.
• Be transparent with clients when possible – Explaining or showing a client how the project developed or happened helps them see the full picture. Discuss how your teams solved problems to give your client a chance to understand why the project had its particular outcome. Pulling this information together for a client is easier when the project team reports all their actions to the manager.
• Show results – Brag a little about a successful project or campaign. Share analytical results to showcase the value of your team and what they do for your client. Utilizing digital tools to collect this information makes it quicker to get together.

Work with Your Team

Outside of customer communication, establishing a good team helps give clients what they need and helps you meet project deadlines. Managers need to keep lines of communication open with their point of contact, and they need to do so with their team members as well.

• Explain the goals – Discuss and affirm how you’ll execute the project, and why it will happen that way, with everyone on the team. If everyone’s on the same page, it can reduce problems arising from misunderstanding. When team members need motivation, try to mix up the schedule if possible, or talk about new ways to meet deadlines.
• Compile all client information – Know where your data is, and who has access to it. This information can include logs from calls, emails, and discussions held with clients. That way, adding new team members in the middle of a project or assigning a client to another team won’t result in data loss.

Work with the sales team on information they collected from the onboarding process. Notes and emails gathered during these introductory discussions are useful when going forward on new projects and deliverables.

By organizing all this data in one place, and delegating access to the proper team members, businesses can reduce lost opportunities from misplaced information or data insecurity resulting from too many people having access to sensitive information. Cloud-based systems, like enterprise resource planning software, are technology solutions companies can use to streamline this process.

• Involve team members when possible – Help team members understand why they’re receiving a task or job by involving them in client conversations. They don’t need to sit in on every conversation but including them can benefit everyone by reducing the need to ask or answer questions about why something is happening. If this option isn’t available, create a process for logging client calls and share those logs with people on the team.

When teams incorporate any of the tactics discussed here, they can find building better customer relationships becomes a natural part of project management. Alleviating some of the stress and workload on your sales or customer management teams can produce outsize results. Businesses that continue to evolve their project team’s roles and responsibilities see a return on this investment with happier clients.

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Another problem – most of us do not associate the word ”creative” with ”selling”. As they say, “Creative people wear berets and read The Village Voice. Salespeople wear ties and read “The Wall Street Journal”. Unlike very popular stereotypes, sales people do create things like demand for products and services, they create customer satisfaction and increase wealth. The nature of sales process, is, in fact, very creative. Invisible but very big army of hard-working ants create demand where it does not exist. Just imagine that sales people create messages (sales pitch) using various media that influence on the audience (prospects) and it is all about exploration of new territories and fighting for new ways of thinking. On the other hand, a big amount of sales people are nothing more than harvesters of existing business – they take orders, fill our paperwork, collect their commissions and go home. And they never break the rules. You need to live in this world then, balancing on the sharp razor between formalities and looking for new ideas. Pretty challenging but a bit pathetic though.

Take a deep breath and look around – your business has already invested in customer relationship management tools and you want make the most of all these CRM best practices. This system, which is used to collect and organize customer data, can often integrate email campaigns, documents, jobs, faxes, scheduling, and sales funnels or profit spreadsheets. Everyone needs to use it in order to make it a successful and usable tool for your company. The first step is to see it a successful and usable tool for the company.

You should follow these 5 CRM – Sales best practices to make this happen.

1. Use all the features of the software instead of resorting to other ones. Yet, Excel,  Microsoft’s classic spreadsheet program, is a favorite of sales teams everywhere, but you’ve invested in the CRM tool, so you may as well use it. Encourage everyone to ditch the Excel documents and any others that are part of your own online software that you use and pay attention to highlight the ways your staff simply can relax more and unify all information easy for a quick report to be generated.

2. Process all new leads using the CRM system. Once you believe your staff knows how to use the CRM system effectively, insist on processing every new lead using these tools. The transition period from other office technology can be stressful, but it is the best to integrate the system immediately. Talk to the most active users to share their experience and use also other CRM vendors to analyze the statues of leads. This is where you find the creativity without losing the leads or just forgetting them.

3. Try online software that engages the customer directly.
Because CRM best practices focus on the client, consider direct engagement as you refine your usage. Find out things like if your customers like the updating their information with you or giving you more details in their profile. In this social media age, you will likely find that many customers respond to this level of engagement. When you know what your clients already like, run an email campaign or call them to renew or offer something new. With powerful set of tools, you feel free to create!

4. Collaborate inside before you make a sale. Do not feel isolated with lists of leads and contacts. There is no place for embracement anymore, if you discuss online with your team the current offers, issues, project and latest events, the latest do influence on decision making. Ask first what has been improved and what the similar leads en-counted. With this valuable feedback, you will discover what you need to make your sales process as ideal for your company as possible.

5. Cross-reference with different social media profiles.
Some CRM include features to upload your all media channels and you can easily track social media buzz about a company and/or its products. If this applies to you, your CRM best practices should include bringing clients and social media together at every juncture. As client relationships grow, collect details from their social media profiles to help foster long-term relationships.

By following these unified rules you will understand in a short period of time that you need to make your sales team more productive. By having a powerful online cloud software you will demonstrate a commitment to your business’s success. Even you run a business just on your own, you will have plenty of space to talk with your muse and never get worried about routines. Be sure, your effort is already rewarded when you just contemplate about a proper choice for the project management, collaboration and CRM tools.

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