Almost any experience you want to create for a client or a prospect—you can create with the Journeys CRM.

Journeys are easy to set up, and you can customize every step to meet your agency’s needs and processes.

Best of all, manually moving contacts from column to column is entirely optional with Journeys. Most journeys can be automated, saving you time and helping your team make sure they don’t miss an important step.

So, what are journeys, exactly? In this blog post, we’ll show you how they work. Ready?

Let’s create a journey

Start with a goal

First decide what you want to accomplish. Do you want to win a new customer? Cross-sell a policy? Help clients avoid cancellations for non-payment? Every journey needs a goal.

For this example, we’ll work on creating a journey that takes incoming website leads and walks them through the necessary steps to turn them into customers. So, our goal is for an incoming prospect to purchase a policy.

Make a contact list

Say you have a form on your website that you use to collect requests for a quote. Prospects fill it out and provide some basic information like their name, email and phone number along with some details on what policy they are shopping for.

For this journey, you will create a new contact list in ClientCircle, and we’ll help you make sure the information from your form automatically goes into this list. Let’s call this list “Website quote submissions.”

Set journey parameters

Now that you have a list, you can start building your journey. Name the journey, add a description and give it a criterion for when to start.

As new contacts fill out the form on your website and are added to the “Website quote submissions” list, they will begin the journey automatically (or manually, if that’s what you prefer).

Remember the goal we had in mind? We’ll add it here. We want the journey to end when a prospect is added to a “Customer” list, which means they purchased a policy.

Add stages

You have many options to pick from on what kind of actions you want your journey to perform next.

We’ll break this journey into three stages that will display horizontally:

You can have as many stages and as many steps under each stage as you’d like. And you can create them in a way that makes sense for your agency and your processes—there are no rules here.

Here’s how each stage will work in this journey:

• In the “Form received” stage, we will focus on reviewing the request, reaching out to the customer to let them know we’re on it and creating the quote.
• In the “Quote follow-up stage”, we will work on following up with the prospect to make sure they received the quote and to let them know we’re happy to answer questions.
• And in the last stage, we will alert the staff that manual follow-up may be needed in cases where a prospect is not responding to the quote.

Then add steps

Now it’s time to add steps under each of the stages.

Below is an example of a step. Let’s say that as soon as a prospect fills out a website form, you want to send them an email or a text (or both) confirming you received their request.

Every step takes just a few clicks to add and is intuitive to set up. You can auto-approve each step in a journey or require a manual review—it’s all up to you.

Let’s keep going and add an email and a few employee steps to alert your team to a new quote submission. We’ll then add a few emails, a text and an employee notification in the follow-up stage, too. Finally, we will add an employee notice to the last stage in case a prospect is not responding.

Once you add all your steps, here’s what the journey will look like.

Remember, you can customize these actions as much as you’d like based on your agency’s processes.

Turn it on

When you turn the journey on, and prospects start going through the journey, you will see which contact is in which stage in real time. You’ll know which communications they received and what action you need to take (if any).

Each contact will continue to move through steps and stages until they purchase a policy or until the journey ends.

You can move the contact to a different step or stage manually at any time if you’d like or where the step requires it.

What kind of journeys can you build?

Your imagination is the limit. Prospecting, onboarding, cross-selling, win-backs, non-pay cancellations, renewals, check-ins and many others.

Stay tuned for more features—we’re working on several things to make the Journeys CRM even better.

Check out our most recent webinar

Want to see Journeys in action? Watch our webinar replay below.