CRM onboarding: Get started with Kommo

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It’s the process of building and maintaining business connections with potential and existing customers.

A CRM platform is software filled with tools for transforming leads (potential customers) into customers.

💡 Don’t deal with “leads” and “customers”, per se? CRM still works for nurturing any kind of relationship toward a goal.

• Manufacturers might use a CRM for distributor relationships
• Firms might use a CRM for client relationships
• Fitness studios might use a CRM for recruiting students
• Event managers might use a CRM for vendor relationships
• Start-ups might use a CRM for investor relationships
• Growing businesses might use a CRM for partner relationships
• Program managers might use a CRM for affiliate programs
• The list is endless!

Do you have that favorite restaurant that offers consistently great service, no matter which waiter you get or which time of day you drop by? With CRM software, you can achieve this too.

CRM helps businesses grow their revenue by increasing productivity and offering a better buying experience to all potential customers consistently. According to Forrester, 50% of sales teams that implemented a CRM reported significantly increased productivity. This resonates with our own experience too — we’ve seen small businesses achieve all kinds of goals as a direct result of using CRM software: increasing revenue, improving team dynamics, shortening the sales cycle, boosting response speed and a lot more.

📈 Here are a few of our favorite cases:

• CRM for wholesale | How a board game maker increased lead generation in 5 months
• CRM for manufacturers | How a custom furniture creator got sales process under control
• CRM for event planners | How a event organizer increased response speed by 50%
• CRM for property management | How a boutique hotel developer tripled sales (to $1m per month)
• CRM for financial consulting | How a consulting firm achieved 50% annual revenue growth

CRM helps teams gain and share knowledge about every single lead in order to nurture the relationship with ease. It does this by helping you:

• Organize everything, so you can easily juggle a large number of leads
• Give the whole team access to the info they need, which helps avoid misunderstandings and mistakes
• Assign responsibility, so you know that every lead is taken care of
• Improve the customer experience by responding faster and with personalized messaging
• Pinpoint workflows that are wasting time
• Define which approaches help you close more sales
• Analyze buyers to understand your ideal customer profile
• Create segmented advertising campaigns
• View team workload and performance

First of all, you might encounter synonyms such as CRM tools, CRM software, CRM solutions or CRM apps — don’t worry, they all mean the same thing.

☝️ However, some CRMs are specifically designed with features for certain industries (such as CRM for hospitals), teams (like CRM for support teams) or sales strategies (like CRM for inside sales).Choosing can be tricky because you need to find one that balances the features you need, your budget and also connects with the apps you use.

Kommo is totally customizable and can be used in almost any industry by any team. But since we’re a CRM for messengers, our future product roadmap is focused on enabling small businesses to use messenger-based sales.

While Kommo might not fit every company, it’s the perfect choice for businesses that want to connect with potential customers on a variety of communication channels. What sets Kommo apart is its unique to a messenger-based sales features that allow you to:

• Sync messenger apps, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram and more
• Capture conversations in a unified inbox
• Share WhatsApp access with the whole team
• Create template chat messages for faster response
• Set automatic actions that can eliminate routine tasks
• Build bots with no code so you can run 24/7

Ready to try messenger-based sales? Keep reading to see how to start from scratch

Today’s the day to start increasing your sales. 🎯

To build a workflow that significantly boosts your revenue, you need to take into account 3 main factors:

• The capacity of your team
• The tools you can give them
• The needs of your clients

Kommo offers features that will allow you to standardize your processes with these factors in mind. That way, you’re not just ordering your team around — you’re enabling them; and you’re not just answering leads — you’re matching your product or service to their needs.

Here’s how you can do it...

Like it or not, the public is increasingly demanding social networks, messengers and text messaging as a way to communicate with businesses.

☹️ But adding and maintaining these channels can be a huge challenge for small and medium businesses. You can run into all kinds of complications, like:

• How do you provide access to the team? In the case of WhatsApp, do you share a phone?
• Do you need a special person just for answering all messages?
• How do you increase response speed?
• What if you accidentally forget to reply?

Don’t worry. Kommo gets all your conversations with customers under control in a single app, giving you and your team visibility and putting all your important conversations one click away.

Kommo gives each lead and customer their own personal lead profile.

On the left, you can see a snapshot of whatever information is important to you: contact data, sales info, etc. The fields you put there are completely customizable.

On the right is an activity feed, where you can take notes, set tasks and see all interactions with the lead in chronological order.

No matter how they contact you, Kommo will capture all incoming leads automatically as long as you have connected the lead source. This means that when a new person writes to you on messengers like WhatsApp, sends you an email or calls you — the conversation will land in your pipeline in real time.

This ensures that you’re notified the instant that someone wants to talk to your brand and eliminates the need to switch from app to app.

And that translates to giving you more time and headspace to provide personalized and memorable service from the first moment. 😌

What do you do when a lead contacts you for the first time in WhatsApp? What about when you get an email or a phone call?

Do you have a single place to save the contact details of all the leads you’re dealing with and write the next steps? 🤔

If your team adds those leads to a spreadsheet, you’re already on the right track because you’re creating a database of all your leads.

But spreadsheets, sticky notes and to-do lists all have one thing in common — they require you to fill them in. 😩

Kommo is your ally for investing your time more efficiently, so that you can focus on less manual data entry and more on finding new ways to attract and convert leads

👉 One of the best ways to save time is to completely automate lead capture.

In less than 30 mins, you can set up Kommo to automatically grab the contact details of all the leads that contact you. Hours saved on manual data entry! 🙌

And Kommo does it in real-time: your team will be notified instantly, so you can follow-up fast.

Here are the lead sources which you can automatically capture in Kommo:

• Messaging and SMS:

• WhatsApp
• Facebook Messenger
• Instagram
• Telegram
• Viber

• Facebook lead gen forms (perfect for advertising!)
• Facebook comments
• Phone
• Webforms
• Business card scanner
• Email parsing
• Google sheets

Humans are visual creatures — it’s so much easier for us to understand something when we can see it mapped out in front of us. 🖼

In sales, the process from a lead’s first interaction with your brand until they buy (and sometimes beyond) is known as the sales pipeline or sales funnel. It visualizes buying as a journey, broken up into stages.

The main view of Kommo shows the stages of your sales process.

It’s filled with cards that represent all the leads you’re working with. Just click, and you’ll be taken straight to the lead profile.

You can drag and drop leads to progress them, or use automations (automatic actions) to move leads based on their behaviors. For example, you could create an automatic action that moves a lead to the “paid” stage when they submit a payment.

Because every business is totally unique, the pipeline is customizable: you can rename the stages and add as many (or as few) as you need.

Everyone knows that getting a lead in the CRM database is only step one. You’ll need to interact with your potential customers in order to get them to buy.

That’s why Kommo doesn’t just capture leads from messengers or send transcripts to the lead card, it actually allows you to chat with leads inside the CRM via your favorite messaging apps!

You can chat through WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram or Viber right inside the lead card.

This means when you’re chatting, you have all the lead’s data right in front of you, giving you the context you need to make informed decisions on the spot. And since it’s taking place in the lead card, you also have access to tools for taking notes, setting tasks and chatting internally with your colleagues.

As an entrepreneur, team leader or specialist, it can be difficult to remember everything you need to do: who to call, who to email, who to meet and when to do it all! 🤪

And if you’re connecting with leads on multiple channels, it’s impossible to always remember where to find key pieces of information. Does this sound familiar...

• What was her feedback again? Did she write it on WhatsApp or was it during our call?
• I sent the invoice, right? Hmm, I don’t see the email here…
• I need to find that proposal from last month.. Where did I send it?

Don’t worry. It happens to millions of professionals around the world. That’s why we created a tool totally integrated with your daily activities, so you can focus your brain power where it really counts!

When you try to sell something, trust is everything.☝️You have to show that you’re a responsible person working for a good company.

Make a good impression by following up when you promised, remembering appointments and giving leads the opportunity to get in touch and book meetings with you.

Kommo comes with built-in task management for each user that also syncs with your Google Calendar. 🗓

We also connect with Calendly, our favorite meeting scheduler. Whenever someone books a slot on your calendar, it automatically will create a new lead or attach the meeting to the lead’s profile and add it to your tasks.

Adding messenger-based sales to your strategy is great, but let’s be real — chatting can take a lot of time.

Kommo has some great features to make your messaging more efficient.

Templates are canned responses that you can push out, so you don’t have to type. These are perfect for answering frequently asked questions.

Salesbot is Kommo’s built-in helper. It can work as a chatbot to:

• Engage with leads on any of your connected messengers or SMS
• Collect contact information and fill in the lead card
• Send internal messages to the team
• Use AI to detect a lead’s intentions

And Salesbot isn’t just for chatting… we’ll revisit more amazing ways Salesbot can power up your sales process in the automation section below.

Just like messengers, it’s critical to get phone calls logged in the CRM. Kommo connects with many different phone providers, giving you the ability to make incoming and outgoing calls inside the CRM.

It connects with:

• Zoom
• Aircall
• RingCentral
• Twilio
• And more

Whenever you call a lead, the recording will be added to the lead’s profile, right alongside all your other communications.

Plus, Kommo gives you other tools to simplify calling, like our call list builder and call report, so you can see all the stats about calling for every user in the team.

💬 And if you love text messaging, Kommo integrates with Twilio SMS and RingCentral SMS, so you can optimize your text messaging workflow too.

We believe that every business should be able to mix and match the products that best suit their phase of growth.

That’s why we’re dedicated to adding more and more of your favorite apps to our marketplace. To further support your unique business needs, our partnership with custom app developers ensures you have access to specialized applications tailored specifically for your company's requirements.

Whether you’re looking for a payment gateway like Stripe, an email marketing app like ActiveCampaign or a video conferencing tool like Zoom, we’ve got loads of integrations to choose from.

You’ve probably heard of automations before, but did you know that they can be applied in countless ways in your daily life?

Automations are simply automatic actions. These usually take the form: if [this trigger] then [this action]. For example, if a lead submits a form, then send a “form received” email.

Kommo is filled with automations that help you to work more efficiently and concentrate on the work that matters most. In turn, this helps reduce errors, increase the time you have for customers and even lower your costs.

Although you can find automations everywhere in Kommo, the main place you’ll use them is in Digital Pipeline.

Digital Pipeline is the automation engine that runs underneath your sales pipeline. There, you can set up auto-actions in your pipeline. You can make them specific by adding conditions too. Here are a few examples:

• When a new lead is created from an Instagram DM, assign Amy as the responsible user.
• When a lead enters the “invoice paid” stage, wait 5 minutes and then send the “thank you” email.
• When a lead enters the “appointment requested” stage, send a chat message with a link to Calendly.
• When a lead enters the stage “meeting scheduled”, generate a Zoom link

The best place to start with automations is to identify which key moments have a milestone or action associated with them. You set ‘em up, automations knock ‘em down 🎳

For actions related to...

• Assigning responsibility or setting tasks for team members
• Moving the lead to another stage in the pipeline
• Editing the lead by filling in data or changing it’s tags
• Sending template emails or chat messages

You can probably automate it!

When you have a team, it is not always easy to understand if each of them is investing the same energy in the processes, or if their work is really unified and in sync with the goals and work of the group.

Likewise, if you’re a specialist, you want to know whether you’re meeting expectations — especially if a bonus or promotion could be on the horizon for excellent performance. 📈

And considering how many of us are working remotely, good management is more important than ever.

With Kommo, you not only get a tool to close sales or manage customers more efficiently, you also get a great solution for managing your team.

Kommo allows you to:

• Get transparency about every interaction with leads & customers
• Delegate tasks and responsibility easily
• Set sales goals
• Track performance in real time
• View the workload of each team member
• Manage user permission

Even if your business was created out of a passion or hobby, you still need a steady stream of income to keep the lights on, so to speak. For creative or product-oriented people, it’s easy to neglect this side of the business. Luckily, Kommo makes it easy to keep an eye on your revenue stream.

Kommo comes with a whole set of stats that allow you to gain a deeper understanding of what’s working and what’s not. Our real-time reports include:

Win-loss analysis

Get a snapshot of the number of leads flowing through your pipeline, and pinpoint at which stages you’re losing them

Consolidated report

See your inflow of leads across time and get a breakdown of user workload

Goal report

Set sales targets for each team member (or the whole team) to work toward

Call report

View a log of all calls that includes the call result and a recording of the call

… As well as a purchase report, activity report and activity log. Plus Kommo comes with a customizable dashboard, so you can put the metrics that matter most right in front of you.

Your data is valuable. That’s why Kommo gives you complete control when it comes to user rights and permissions. In the user management section, you can limit rights to export, edit or view at the user-level or team-level.

Need a client-facing page? We recently rolled out a feature that allows you to share a lead’s profile with them. You can choose which info to display/hide. You can also give the lead the ability to delete their personal information from your database — perfect for putting the lead’s privacy into their own hands.

Getting started with new software isn’t easy. Our team is happy to answer questions or make a CRM onboarding session for your whole team.

💬 Chat with us here on the website or within your account

🤓 Book a free demo session with the team

🏖 Find a partner to do it for you, so you can relax

✅Kommo is a pioneering Messenger Based Sales CRM software that helps businesses achieve more sales and create long-lasting relationships with their customers. It is a tool that enables companies to reach better results and increase their profits.