Just because you’re not a “technical” person doesn’t mean that your business can’t benefit significantly from more sophisticated operating systems, as Send Handwritten’s CEO Greg Smith discovered with the help of the team at Relevate.
Receiving handwritten mail in the post is a rarity for most of us these days. If a letter arrives in your mailbox with a handwritten address and contents it will likely pique your curiosity and grab your attention in a powerful way that a generic typed page will not. This concept of utilizing personalised postal mail as an effective form of targeted marketing is at the heart of Send Handwritten, a company launched by CEO Greg Smith to “help clients get the attention of difficult-to-reach business decision makers.”
Send Handwritten operates internationally and designs and produces customized wax-sealed and client branded cards that are handwritten by real humans. In addition to this service, Send Handwritten offers lead generation and retention services, data curation, an integrated LinkedIn concierge service, and marketing strategy advice. Send Handwritten equips clients with a strategic, customized and unique way to access new customers. “It was a challenge to convince people that mail remains a powerful and effective way to get people’s attention. There was plenty of resistance—until we started to get amazing results by showing up differently.” Greg explained.
Send Handwritten was operating successfully but, as with many businesses, as it grew it eventually outgrew its basic CRM system. The company’s original spreadsheeting processes was limiting the number of clients that the business could service, so a more efficient system was needed to manage the increased network of customer relations and to allow for future growth. “We had spreadsheets for various categories and that was messy,” Greg said. Send Handwritten needed a system to store and manage client data more effectively, automate the sales pipeline, and a better communication system.
Greg is not someone who considers himself to be particularly adept with technology but, through a business networking event, he met Relevate director Avon Collis who was able to advise him about updating Send Handwritten’s CRM systems. “Avon had a vision for what we needed, and he did all the research. He suggested Zoho One as the best option from a technology point of view,” Greg said.
“Avon spent a lot of time with us in the early days to set it up and get us going,” Greg said, describing the hands-on service that the Relevate team offered him during the Zoho implementation process. The Relevate team helped Send Handwritten to set up Zoho CRM to streamline operating processes and create a user-friendly experience for its clients. “Now data management is a lot cleaner and more controlled. Send Handwritten can now handle hundreds of clients and growing,” said Avon of the update.
The updates and changes that Relevate was able to implement for Send Handwritten have improved efficiency, transformed customer experience, and facilitated more straight-forward data processing for employees. “The data team and the appointment setting team are in one space—they can see what each other is up to which is helpful. We’re much more efficient with Zoho CRM than we’d otherwise be,” Greg said.
“Zoho is helping us do more with less,” Greg said. Without the assistance of Relevate and Zoho One, “more stuff would get missed, data would get lost, progress of each project, and the history of what people have done with us—all that data would either be completely lost or not even collected.”
Among the next steps forward for Send Handwritten is to implement Zoho Inventory and integrate it with Zoho Projects to improve management of proposals, finance and payment tracking to offer an automated solution for accounting processes.
How well does your business manage and track customer data? An effective growth-focused CRM system that is specifically tailored to your business can dramatically improve productivity. The team at Relevate can assist you to implement customized software and strategies that will allow you to efficiently track client data, enabling you to deliver a seamless customer experience.
