Business Holy Grail: More Customers
Freelance voice actors should ALWAYS be prospecting; at least when they’re not busy servicing their regular customers.
For a good many modern marketing mavens, that means building email lists. Lists that you can use to reach out to people that might hire you. Lists that explain who the contact is, where you met them, when’s the last time you approached them, what happened in that encounter. What school they want to. How many kids they have. What kind of pizza they like. You know…important stuff.
Organizing all those contacts & info into something that is usable, makes sense, and is easy to keep track of can be a challenge.
That’s where CRMs came into being. The internet made it easy (kinda – see my caveat below). And there are a gazillion Customer Relationship Management tools and software packages. Some free, some quite costly.
I’ve tried a number myself, Batchbook, Cloze, Nimble, ZohoCRM to name a few. But these companies keep coming and going. New players enter the scene, and updates/upgrades can really change the product.
CAVEAT
Ultimately, I found myself spending too much time learning, configuring, and customizing the software itself, and never found it helped me manage my clients. I’ll admit to being a geek about this stuff. I always tell people I never play computer games, because to me, the computer IS the game.
Others tell me they do just fine with Excel as a tool to organize this information. The GMail extensions and add-ons you can find these days also offer a lot of CRM functionality. Check out Mixmax for one.
Like anything else online these days, ya gotta stay with the flow and find what works best for you.
In that spirit, let me suggest you click on the link below for a timely comparison of the best CRMs this year.
Also, here’s another (2017) comparison of free CRMs. Many of those listed have upgrade pricing, depending on your needs.
Just click “The 16 Best Free CRM Apps“ or on the logo to the left to see this resource.
CourVO
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