+1-800-980-0729 Case Study: The TerZa Factor
Terza Ekholm owns and operates her own business, called the TerZa Factor, in Colorado Springs, CO. Terza is a visual artist, and the TerZa Factor is her platform through which to sell her artwork. She has also offered in-person creative art classes through her business, designed to provide a way for her clients to take a break from their busy lives and restore their creative senses.
- Based in: Colorado Springs, CO
- Industry: Art and Sales Coaching
- Managing contacts in spreadsheets
- Other CRM systems didn’t meet her needs
- Unable to devote enough time to clients
- Agile’s intuitive interface makes it easier to use
- Rapid implementation and activation
- Customer success team very helpful in getting her up and running
- Gearing up for her first drip marketing campaign
- Much more organized with easy data accessibility
- Segmenting customers with use of system tags
- Has all the tools she needs to grow her business
She recently added a new service to her repertoire—a B.A.N.K. sales training course. According to the B.A.N.K. website: “B.A.N.K.’s personality sales training helps you beat the odds and master the science of communication, negotiation, and closing more sales for increased revenue that will transform your life.” The idea is to tap into your personality type in order to focus more on your strengths when you sell.
As her business began to grow further, she realized that she needed a way to get more done in less time. She wanted to be able to devote as much energy as possible to her clients, but was spending too much time on the administrative aspects of her business
The Challenge
Terza is a busy woman with many irons in the fire. She eventually realized that she needed to automate and streamline the time-consuming, manual aspects of her business. She was managing her clients and their information in a series of spreadsheets, which she ultimately decided wasn’t sustainable for growth. She knew that it was necessary to have a customer relationship management (CRM) solution in place if she was going to grow her business in the way that she wanted. So, her search for the right system began.
Terza Ekholm - Owner, The TerZa Factor
The first CRM solution that she tried didn’t fulfil her needs. She implemented it, but after a few months, she was not fully satisfied. The system wasn’t intuitive to her, and the time involved in learning how to effectively leverage it was eating further into the time she wanted to be devoting to her clients.
Fortunately, a friend of Terza’s mentioned that they had recently implemented Agile CRM and were happy with the solution. Terza took a look, and upon seeing the intuitive interface and Agile’s drag and drop functionality, she decided to give it a shot.
The Solution
Her experience with Agile CRM was a positive one from the beginning. The customer success team provided her with the level of support she needed to quickly learn the basics and get up and running. That team’s job is to train new Agile CRM clients, and ensure that they are set up to be successful using the system.
She was particularly impressed at seeing the customer success team go the extra mile to make sure she had everything she needed. “The customer success team has been very helpful to me,” Terza says. “They have reached out to me at various times just to check in and see how things are going. They even send me unsolicited video tutorials on things that they believe will help me improve how I use the system.”
The Result
After a few months with Agile CRM in place, Terza is already seeing improvements in her ability to serve her clients with the level of attention they need. As she takes on new clients for her B.A.N.K. course, she has them complete a brief questionnaire to identify which kind of personality they have, so she can tailor her approach to them accordingly.
But, she no longer has to process her B.A.N.K clients manually in spreadsheets. “Once someone completes the questionnaire, I bring them into Agile CRM with a tag that lets me direct them into one of the customer segments that I have created in the system,” she says. “Then I can go back and look at which segment that person is in so I can adapt my conversation with them accordingly. And it’s all there on that person’s 360-degree contact page, so I don’t have to search through spreadsheets just to find that information.”
Terza Ekholm - Owner, The TerZa Factor
In the past, she had never really run any marketing campaigns to generate new leads. Now, with Agile CRM, she is gearing up for her first drip marketing campaign. All of the information she compiles on each prospective client is contained and easily accessible in that 360-degree contact view, so when she is ready to kick off her drip campaign, she can segment messages to her prospects based on that information.
“I particularly love being able to click on a prospect’s contact page, and see all of the social media profiles that I can tap into for that person,” she says. “I can track individual emails I send to my contacts. And I can make notes while I’m on a call with someone, and see all of that information automatically appear on that person’s contact record—you can’t do that with spreadsheets!”
Being able to devote more time to her clients is a big benefit for her, because she values each and every one of them. “Serving my clients well is the most important thing for me, because the value of my services is only as good as the satisfaction level of my clients.”
Terza feels that, with Agile CRM in place, she is now set up with the tools she needs to be successful and grow her business. But, because she runs her business entirely by herself, she only has limited time to devote to learning the system. Despite that, she feels like she’s on the right track and is eager to keep learning the system so she can continue to improve the quality of service she devotes to her clients. “I am enjoying Agile CRM; it is an extensive system with lots of features, and I feel like I’ve only begun to tap into its functionality,” she says. “Still, it’s so easy to use and I’m certainly benefiting from having it in place.”