In the last year “working from home” and “remote working” have become a universal reality. Even in our world of business attraction and promotion, the common thread which has allowed us to facilitate meetings with people in countries thousands of miles away, conduct virtual site visits, virtual trade missions, host and attend countless webinars, and more, has been technology.
Indeed, there’s no denying that the technology we use to conduct business has evolved rapidly over the last year, and yet, there still seems to be a collective pause when the acronym “CRM” or term “customer relationship management system” is spoken. What is it that causes even the most tech savvy and forward-thinking professionals to cringe at the thought of updating a contact record or logging a task in a CRM?
You’re working on a large economic development project and need multiple people to contribute details in one place (i.e., meeting notes, the original RFP response, and the ability to assign tasks to various team members). Even if you are a one- or two-member team, streamlining your process by having one place to track and mange leads will save you a significant amount of time.
It’s Friday afternoon and your Executive Director or a board member request a report for their Monday morning meeting, but it takes hours to compile the report because you have to reconcile multiple spreadsheets or follow up with team members one-by-one because no one actually keeps any of the spreadsheets up-to-date.
When someone leaves or retires from your organization you notice you’re missing key project information, even if the project manager left you with copious paper notes. Conversely, when a new person joins the team, there isn’t one place for them to view or analyze trends for past projects or identify key company contacts, which can be especially frustrating for an aftercare or business retention and expansion manager.
Finally, with most everyone still working from home, you’ve come to realize the importance of having your highly sensitive economic development project data hosted on a secure, cloud-based SaaS platform, instead of emailing a file back and forth to co-workers.
Do these signs sound all too familiar? Prior to the pandemic, when your team worked in the same office, you may have been able to track your economic development leads on a shared spreadsheet, or even share updates verbally in a meeting but thanks to an on-going global pandemic the way we do business is evolving at an unprecedented speed. In fact, I would argue there’s no better time to transition to and invest in a CRM.
Wavteq Amplify is the investor development solution designed by economic development experts.
Deanna started her economic development career a decade ago at the Greater Houston Partnership. Over the next few years at GHP and then at Entergy, she worked with her colleagues on business attraction and expansion projects across the U.S. Gulf Coast region. Her niche is implementing and managing CRM systems to track economic development leads, which fits nicely with her role at Wavteq. She's also a Certified Scrum Product Owner, which means she understands how to help clients capture essential product requirements and streamline the process of implementing a new CRM.
