You see, initially Breaking the Barrier adopted sales and marketing software InfusionSoft, but it fell short for them as a business using QuickBooks. Like many small businesses, James felt the pain of trying to manage business applications that didn’t communicate, which inevitably meant inefficient manual work.

Sloppy Customer Service

“It didn’t integrate well with Quickbooks. It was time consuming to manually export data and upload it to InfusionSoft.”

To provide world-class service and continually grow their sales, James’ front-line team needed a way to identify the type of contact they were speaking to when answering the phone. They also needed a better process than looking up an email address in QuickBooks to see if the caller had an existing account.

Difficulty Managing a Long Sales Cycle

Adopting a new textbook for a school is a long sales cycle, often taking months or even years. With such long sales cycles James’ team needed a CRM that would help keep leads in the funnel with timely follow-ups.  

“It is critical we’re able to accurately track all our customer interactions and easily create activities and opportunities to follow-up. A teacher may ask for a sample in September in hopes their school eventually chooses to buy Breaking the Barrier for their students the following year!”

A long sales cycle also makes it critical for Breaking the Barrier to stay in contact with leads and customers throughout the year — they needed a tool that would help segment contacts and create email campaigns.

“InfusionSoft’s email campaign interface wasn’t giving us the capabilities of Mailchimp.”

The Solution: Method CRM

Discovering that Method has the #1 rated QuickBooks integration and an integration with Mailchimp, Breaking the Barriers adopted the CRM for their education company and never looked back.

James’ team now operates in a CRM that syncs with QuickBooks in real-time, which means that after an initial import of their company’s history, any new customer or transaction created in Method gets mirrored in QuickBooks and vice-versa.

“Enter Method CRM — a life-saver. With some great help from Method’s support team, we seamlessly uploaded literally decades of data.”

World-Class Customer Service

Now, with Method CRM in their arsenal, everyone on the Breaking the Barrier team has up-to-date customer data allowing them to serve customers quickly without going into QuickBooks. What’s more, the Breaking the Barrier team doesn’t even need to log into the CRM to access customer and transaction data with Method’s Gmail Gadget — a free tool that brings all Method CRM data right into your inbox.   

“Method’s Gmail Gadget has allowed our admins to rapidly see the order history of a customer and quickly assist with their needs without ever leaving Gmail. Before, we’d copy and paste an email address into QuickBooks to see if there was a customer history. Significant time burn!”

Long Sales Cycles Made Easy

Managing a long sales cycle is no longer a point of stress for the Breaking the Barrier team. Method CRM allows the team to maintain a healthy sales funnel through Opportunities and Activities. And, through the seamless integration with Mailchimp, the Breaking the Barrier team keeps in touch with current and potential customers through the year.  

“Method has allowed us to put reminders on our schedules months down the road to check-in with key decision makers. Further, the integration with Mailchimp has allowed us to segment our customer list and export certain groups over to Mailchimp for timely email campaigns.”

Business Benefits

“Method is a great CRM tool out of the box but that is just the beginning of what you can do with your Method. With the no-code platform that allows users to customize the system to meet their business needs, there is no limitation to what you can do. The Method team are the best vendors I have worked with in my career. If you need a CRM system with limitless possibility that fully integrates with QuickBooks, Method is the perfect software.”

The post How an Education CRM Helps ‘Breaking the Barrier’ Bring Language Learning Across the Globe appeared first on Method.

But the apps didn’t communicate, which meant redundant, time-consuming work for Bryan and the potential for inaccurate customer records. He knew he needed one system to act as a single source of truth. And, with a quick google search for a QuickBooks-integrated Construction CRM, Bryan found Method CRM.

During his free trial of Method, Bryan saw the value his team would experience centralizing customer Activities, creating Estimates from QuickBooks items, and converting Estimates into Invoices that get mirrored in QuickBooks in real-time.

But, it wasn’t until Bryan’s free customization session that he realized the possibilities for truly streamlining his day-to-day processes.

“The light really went on and Method’s value really sunk in during my free consulting session — Method could accommodate my ideas on how to simplify the process for my both me and my customer”. 

An Inefficient Contract & Estimate Process

Before his team can start work for a client, Bryan needs approval on their job estimate and signatures on a contract. But, the company’s estimate process had too many customer touch-points, involved double data entry, and created dependencies on the customer, which sometimes resulted in estimates getting lost along the way. The contract and estimate process took too long and slowed down the team.

Process Before:

1. Bryan created the contract/proposal in Microsoft Word.
2. Converted the word doc into a PDF.
3. Used Adobe to add signature fields to the PDF contract/proposal.
4. Sent the .pdf contract/proposal to the customer or lead via email.
5. Received the e-signatures from the client.
6. When the contract was accepted, Bryan created an invoice in Paypal and email it to the client.
7. The client would pay the invoice through PayPal.
8. Bryan would duplicate the invoice and payment to QuickBooks. 

A Streamlined Contract & Estimate Process

During his free customization session with a Business Solution Specialist, Bryan saw how he could have his ideal workflow by configuring his Method CRM account.

“The process of putting together a contract went from 45 minutes to less than 15 minutes. With everything together in one screen I just have to select what I need and email it out to the customer. It’s automated everything for me. It’s dummy proofed it for me”.

Process After Customizing Method:

1. Bryan builds an Estimate where pre-defined contract verbiage is added depending on the selected job type.
2. A unique link from Bryan’s email takes the customer to an online Method guest page where they review the Estimate and contract.
3. The customer approves the contract and Estimate by clicking the “Accept Estimate” button, which notifies Bryan by email and updates the “Accepted By” and “Accepted On” fields on the Estimate screen.

By customizing his Method account, Bryan has simplified the company’s contract and Estimate process into one CRM screen. 

“I can’t speak highly enough about Method and their team. The program is fantastic. It works out of the box and there is basically an unlimited number of customizations to do. And, my Business Solution Specialist, Farazeh, was amazing with the customization we did on the Estimate screen.”

About Method’s Customization Services

For small businesses, off the shelf technology rarely, if ever, actually works off the shelf. That’s where Method’s Business Solution Specialists stand apart. We’ll work closely with you to truly understand your business, and the barriers you’re facing, then develop a totally customized solution to solve your problems.

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