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FROM THE FOUNDER
Your CRM should be a major asset for your firm, but you have to make sure your people are using and updating it. Making your CRM work for your firm
I ’m sure practically every company in the AEC business has a CRM (client relationship management) system these days. It’s not a radical idea like it once was to have all the information on your clients and potential clients in one place where anyone in the firm can access it. It’s just smart. You don’t want people coming and going from the firm and losing all of the contacts they made while they worked there. You want to capture all of this so you can promote what you do directly to those you have done business with, those you are doing business with, and those you want to do business with – right?
Mark Zweig
Not to mention the value of all of this information on clients and potential clients. I can tell you the first time we sold the firm (Zweig White, today known as Zweig Group), we had a tremendous CRM. It was on everyone’s desk and every single purchase made from our clients since day one was in the system. It used to blow people away when they would call and we’d ask how they liked the seminar they went to in Tulsa on a certain date, or what they thought of a survey report they purchased a month earlier. When we sold our business to a private equity firm, they combined our business with two other companies they owned – a magazine group and a trade show group – and called it all Zweig White Information
Services. Our CRM was a big part of the reason they wanted to buy us. But just saying you want to do this (have a real working CRM and providing the software application for everyone so they can do so) is not the same thing as making sure everything goes in there and gets maintained once you have it. That’s often a very real challenge that many firms struggle with. Here are a few ideas to help you with this issue: 1. The principals must use the CRM if you want everyone else to. If your top people are not
See MARK ZWEIG, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER JANUARY 2, 2023, ISSUE 1470
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