A lot of content advice for solo professionals isn’t really for them. They’re more for companies with sales teams, and as such, they don’t fit or work for folks going it alone.
Which is where Erica Holthausen comes in.
As an Authority Development Strategist, Erica teaches consultants and coaches how to build a few strong articles and actually use them, instead of churning out tons of content that serve little to no purpose to their business.
Like most of her clients’, Erica’s is a solo business. To grow that business, she has to build and manage relationships with a slow stream of prospects, some of whom take years to become clients.
Naturally, she needed some kind of system to stay on top of all these prospects and nurture them. So, she went looking for a tool that would help her do just that.
The cost of no system
For years, Erica kept track of her relationships and conversations using memory and paper.
I didn’t have a system. It was basically whatever I could remember, or scattered notes on my desk.
Erica HolthausenAuthority Development StrategistEvery once in a while, she’d look into tools she could use, find one, and give it a try for a few weeks. But in the end, she’d always drift back to doing things the way she used to. And that worked well enough for a while.
But deep down, she could tell she was starting to forget people and miss chances to build those relationships.
The only CRM that stuck
To stop things from continuing to slip through the cracks, Erica kept on looking for the right tool.
She tried plenty of CRMs, but a lot of them were more for sales teams, instead of solo professionals like she was.
I didn’t need to take over a small country, and they could do way too much.
She’d already wrestled with Salesforce at an old job, and HubSpot came packed with content marketing and inbound tools she had no use for.
In between these big platforms, she fell back on a Google Sheet for a long stretch, then Notion, then another spreadsheet app. And none of them stuck.
Then, one day, Erica heard about OnePageCRM. The 21-day free trial gave her room to properly test it, and it turned out to be the first CRM that let her see only what she needed and hide everything else.
I know there’s a bunch of other stuff that it can do. But I don’t need to know it, and I don’t see it.
It’s the one she’s stayed with since.
Making sales enjoyable and consistent
Like many business owners with non-sales backgrounds, Erica was often putting off sales until tomorrow. And as she herself noticed, that usually meant doing nothing.
Funny thing about tomorrow. Tomorrow never actually shows up.
All that changed when she joined a community that gets together every week to do sales. And with OnePageCRM open in front of her each time, doing the work started to feel normal.
In the CRM, each of her contacts carries one small task that tells her what to do next, like sending a prospect her “Worth Exploring” email that Monday, or checking back just before their September start date.
That’s the Next Action, and working through those tasks week after week made sales a regular part of Erica’s routine, one she’d even started to enjoy.
I actually kind of enjoy sales now, which shocks the hell out of me.
From scattered notes to a real pipeline
There are several other things Erica appreciates about OnePageCRM.
She likes how it connects to her Gmail and automatically pulls in all her past conversations with prospects.
She also likes that she can use the Waiting For feature to see who she’s waiting on, and decide whether it’s time to stop waiting and start nudging.
But perhaps the biggest one is how OnePageCRM allowed her to not only track conversations, but also have a full overview of her sales.
I have a pipeline. I never had a pipeline before!
Now, she knows exactly who her hot prospects are and when to reach them. When someone does go quiet, she sends a short closing-the-loop email, moves them to inactive, and turns to the next name. And there’s always a next name.