We continuing clueing you into CRM with a conversation about Tags. There’s a lot you can do to get the most out of the data you input to your CRM and Tags play a big role in that. If you want to be able to sort your data in many different ways, tags are going to be your friend.

00:22 Andy Shore: Welcome back everybody. Thanks for tuning in once again. We hope you’re a little bit less clueless if you’ve been listening to all these episodes so far, and we’re gonna continue talking about the different types of data and your CRM, and we alluded to this in the structured data episode, but we’re really gonna take a little bit deeper dive into it, and its tags and what tags allow you to do within the CRM.

00:46 Paul Rijnders: Yeah, so tags are a really cool feature because you can instantly put something on to a record that may be a temporary attribute. When I say temporary, I don’t mean that the tag fades after like 90 days or something. What I mean is, as opposed to structured data where maybe you have someone’s first name or last name, that’s not gonna change too often. The last name maybe, right?

01:11 AS: Yeah.

01:11 PR: But the first name probably doesn’t change too often. Their address might change, but again, it takes someone physically moving. Your phone number could change, but that’s all structured information. But a tag might be something that you might wanna identify a customer as. For instance, you talk to somebody and you say, “Oh, wow! There are VIPs.” So you just really quickly type in the tag field, just type in VIP, and hit Enter, right? Or maybe that person calls up and they’re the angry customer, right? And you’re like, “Oh, wow, the next person that gets this, they should know this person’s angry.” And you know what, you’re not trying to say, “Hey, that person’s forever angry,” you just know that someone else is gonna pick up this ticket or whatever it is, in a couple of minutes, a couple of hours, and you just want them to see that.

01:53 AS: Put in a note.

01:53 PR: Could you put in a note? Of course, you could. But if you just tag something, it’s there. The nice thing about tags, too, is that how you start typing in tags in your own account, the account has got a memory of the tags that are already used. So let’s say I have a tag called supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, I’m only gonna have to type that once, because the next time I start typing S-U-P-E-R, the system is gonna auto-suggest and say, “Oh, do you mean Superman? Do you mean Supergirl? Do you mean Superboy? Do you mean Superwoman? Or do you mean supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?” Whatever has come up with those starting letters and you can instantly click that on. And the nice thing is, the next person that picks it up might say, “Oh, yeah, you know what? Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious doesn’t really describe this contact anymore. Let me just click the X and make that come off.

02:41 PR: But tags are searchable. So someone at a management level might wanna see all the contacts that are tagged VIP or supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or angry customer, or they might wanna see all the people that are not angry customers, and they can instantly pull up a view which is basically a filter and just see those people. So, I would define tags as information that can be temporarily attributed to the record and removed just as quickly.

03:10 AS: Yeah.

03:11 PR: Or not. [laughter]

03:11 AS: No, I’m just laughing at the fact that you started with such a simple, easy to say, easy to understand example of VIPs.

03:20 PR: Yeah.

03:21 AS: And then, made it up the ante and deciding to say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious a dozen times in your follow-up example.

03:31 PR: Yeah.

03:32 AS: That was amusing to me. But to bring it more into some real-life applications, say you’re at a nightclub and you got those VIP guests, but you can take it even a step further and be like, “These are my vodka drinkers, these are my tequila drinkers, these are my scotch drinkers.” And when you get the brands coming in, they’re doing promotions at your nightclub that night, and you’re gonna have the shot girls and specialty drinks and those sorts of things. You can queue up all those VIPs who prefer their CIROC vodka or whatever it might be, and let them know that this special night is happening because you know you’re gonna bring those big fish in when you’re having a deal for them.

04:12 PR: Yeah, that’s a perfect example. And it’s easy to do, right?

04:16 AS: Mm-hmm.

04:16 PR: It’s easy to just type in that information. The nice thing about tags is unlike the structured data where the field already has exist, meaning that, unless you have specifically a field that says favorite drink, and you get to multiply select all those drinks, and they’re all options already in there. Or you have to type it in every single time to this favorite field that exist, that makes it tough because maybe there’s some new identifier that comes up like, “Oh, wow, you know what? We really should start tracking what kind of appetizers these people like. Oh, wow, you know what? It doesn’t exist in our system. The CRM doesn’t give us a space to put in favorite appetizer.” But you don’t have to worry about that with tags because you don’t need an admin to predict what’s gonna be important to you. The nice thing about tags is tags lets the user determine what’s important and they can put that on there, whatever phrase they wanna put on there, the system’s gonna accept, and now that’s part of the record. So, I would say that tags are like the opposite of the structured information in that anything goes.

05:17 AS: Yeah, that all makes sense to me and we’ll put a pin in that and continue next time. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you next episode. Bye, guys.