Hi. Welcome back and welcome to 7 Useful CRM Features For Voice Over Talent. In this video, we'll cover the best CRM features for voiceover. What is CRM and the best CRM software for voiceover? The essential features of a CRM, CRM basics, and most importantly, why CRM is so important for your voice over business and growing your voiceover business.

If I were to ask you, what's the most important asset you have as a voice actor, as an entrepreneur, what would you say?

Is it your voice? Is it your training? Is it your talent? Is it your money?

Your most important asset as a voice actor and as an entrepreneur is your time. Because whether you're a brand new voice actor who just cracked the mic for the first time, or whether you have 40 years of experience, you still only have 24 hours in a day.

And how you spend that time is your biggest ongoing decision minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, week to week, etc.

One of the most common complaints I hear from voice actors is, "But I don't have time to market my business." Really? Check your phone's screen time report. Check your Netflix history. Check your Fortnite ranking. If you've got time for Candy Crush and Game of Thrones, you've got time to market your business and build a career and a life and a business you can be proud of.

That said, you can't spend all your time marketing your business. Some of that time you've got to use to do the actual work of the business, not just the paid work, but all the work that supports that paid work, the accounting, the invoicing, the admin, all that stuff.

Now if you're doing voiceover part time as a side hustle, you have even less precious time at this point in your career. The beginning, when you need to create the biggest push to create the most forward momentum in your career, how you spend, or more importantly, how you scale your time is crucial to your success or failure as a voice actor.

And in order to scale your time, you need ample tools to help you do that.

Now, among the most powerful and useful tools to help you scale your time is called CRM: Customer Relationship Management software. A good CRM will help you organize and manage your contacts, database, track and organize your outreach and other communication, help you tag and segment your contacts.

Some CRM can help automate communications and other processes. It can help you generate and track invoices and a CRM can help you track deals and opportunities and even forecast revenue. By far, a CRM will be your most valuable and powerful business tool. It will be in no uncertain terms, the center of your business.

If you think you're one of those folks who can get by with an Excel spreadsheet, you are sadly and horribly mistaken.

You've got to manage contacts, communications, workflows and all the information around hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of contacts. An Excel spreadsheet just ain't going to cut it. That's why you need a good, powerful CRM, one that you can use and use. Well, here are seven top features of a CRM that I look for in voiceover.

Number One Third Party Integration

Connecting your CRM to other software tools that you use will save you a ton of time and money on most CRM integrate well with other third-party tools. The trick is to choose one that integrates well with the tools you use and is easy to implement. Here are a few things you can do with third-party integrations to your CRM that you might not have thought of.

• You can run your CRM right from Gmail or Outlook or whatever email client you use. That way, you're not caught switching back and forth between your CRM and your email.

• You can automatically build email lists and launch email sequences from your Gmail or the CRM, again so you don't have to switch back and forth.

• And you can back up and sync your CRM data with Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever cloud solution you use.

Now, depending on the CRM you're using and the other tools you're using, you may need a little help from an IT professional, but most of the time I find that I'm able to integrate my CRM with all my other tools if I'm just willing to explore and experiment a little bit.

Number Two: Lead Management.

A lead management tool will allow you to identify your leads and the actions that they've taken along the sales cycle.

Through the lead management process, you'll be able to score your leads and if you have to, you can filter off those leads to another sequence or approach to turn them into customers.

Number Three: Ease of Use

A CRM that's really hard to use and really hard to learn is not going to be the best solution for you. One that requires minimal training is best.

Look for something that feels intuitive to you, that makes sense to you. And in your brain, the way your brain works, one that allows you to easily access and interpret your data series are like dots, digital audio workstations. It's not so important which CRM you choose. It's important that you choose one that works well for you, that makes sense to you.

That's easy for you to use so that you will use it often and continuously. Most CRM have free trial periods or free versions that you can use and try out and sample around and experiment with. Take them for a test drive, take them for a spin, experiment with them, see which one works for you and choose wisely. Because this piece of software will be the core of your business.

Number Four: Customization

A good CRM is going to be customizable so that you can adapt it and change it for your needs. Being able to modify things like contact fields or opportunity fields is really crucial to adapting a CRM for the way you work best. You might want to, for instance, customize the stages or the status of pending jobs. And many CRMs are business category agnostic, meaning it really doesn't matter what business you're in.

They're built to adapt to a wide range of business types, but some are specific to voiceover, like VoiceoverView for example. Try them out. Pick one that works best for you and go.

Number Five: Automation

Automating simple, repetitive tasks frees you and your precious time up to do that precious on-mic paid work, you should be looking for automation features for data entry, customer outreach and follow up and information field updating.

Smart, prudent automation is one of the best ways, most powerful ways to scale your time and is a force multiplier for productivity.

Number Six: Vendor Customer Support

Look, most of us aren't IT pros. We need trusted people that we can call on to support us and our learning curve. When we're using new software, we need to know we can get our questions answered and our issues taken care of quickly and easily.

And when you're investigating a CRM, find out if there's support options. Include phone, email, chat, a help database, maybe all four of those. Is there an extra fee for tech support? Do you need to buy in to the CRM at a certain level to get certain tech support features? And how do the different levels of the CRM affect the support you have access to?

And finally, Number Seven: Affordable Pricing

As a voice actor and an entrepreneur, you're a solopreneur, you're wearing all the hats. You don't have any other hands on deck. So you have to make sure that every dollar counts. Look, I get it. You're on a budget and you're watching every penny, and you should be. But if you're on the fence about the usefulness of CRM, don't be.

It is absolutely essential to your business. But a great way to check out CRMs is to use the free version of the CRM or the trial version to make sure that the CRM makes sense for you and is intuitive for you. Finding a CRM that works for you and makes sense to you and one that you will use is essential to your business.

No, an Excel spreadsheet is not sufficient. And no, a paper system is an either. This is the 21st century and you are in business. You need the proper tools to do the job. We cover CRM much more in-depth in our VO Freedom Master Plan, which is our signature program to take voice actors from working part-time, relying on the pay to plays, not having a plan and a system, to having a system to grow relationships at scale that lead to consistent booking, revenue, and income.

For more information on the VO Freedom Master Plan, click on the link in the description, and to subscribe to my Move, Touch, Inspire Newsletter for voice actors that comes out every Thursday, click that link in the description as well. If you learned something from this video, help us spread the word to other voice actors with a like, subscribe, and ring that notification

bell so you'll be the first to know when we publish a brand new video every Thursday. Thanks so much for watching. I'm deeply grateful for your support. We'll see you back here soon.