Every company to a greater or lesser extent, has the same problem. Dispersed information relating to one or more parts of their business. It is the need to become more effective in creating and using this information that drives the investigation into how a CRM system can help speed up a particular process or help the business get visibility of its sales pipeline or  current customer issues. 

Of course just creating information doesn’t help a business to become more competitive, it is only when businesses use the CRM system to improve processes, channel information to increase personal and team performances. We often start with business drivers and work backwards from there.

 How can CRM help my business?

Customer Relationship Management activities are vital to ensuring existing customers are retained and new prospects are converted to customers. The CRM system has been developed to enable businesses to plan and keep track of all these various types of activity from Marketing to Sales through to Customer Service and Support.  Experience shows that companies buy a CRM system when they have a specific need or driver, it is this driver that initiates the CRM project and allows all the other benefits that a CRM system brings to be taken into consideration and applied to the business.

Common examples of initial drivers are listed below;

 Marketing

Send an email to all my customers communicating a new product launch.

Write a letter to all dormant customers requesting a meeting. 

Create more leads through targeted prospect mailings.

Have a database of companies for telemarketing, record results of phone calls and schedule meetings for sales people. 

Record the cost of marketing activities and understand the revenue return from each type of marketing campaign. 

Sales

Increase the number of active leads each sales person can manage. 

Increase the speed and reduce complexity of sales forecasting and pipeline management. Prioritise sales people’s time and effort in winning critical deals. 

Lack of consistent approach to selling key products. 

Reduce the amount of administration time for sales people. 

Customer Service

Increase the visibility of customer service issues throughout the business. 

Resolve customer issues faster by searching for frequent questions and resolutions.

Record customer service level agreements.

Identify the most profitable support customers. 

Allow customers to record their customer service issues on your website.

Prioritise customer support issues depending on issue type. 

 Sales Managers CRM

Basic

Calendar Activities

Where your account managers are, what they are doing and who with. This is the most basic advantage of using a CRM system for the Sales Manager. Useful to see when they are available to talk to but does not really provide a major breakthrough above many systems currently used in business today. Where this information comes into its own is when you start looking at trends based on the number of meetings held and the account managers, are the best performing account managers having more meetings that the others or actually less? If so can you uncover any key things that they do differently to win the business over the others and therefore help you to improve the performance of the sales team as a whole unit?

Intermediate

Sales forecast and pipeline management

If all the individual account managers are progressing their pipeline opportunities or targets in a CRM system then the need for any type of spreadsheet based forecasting is removed. The sales manager can immediately see who is working on what business, what the value is and when it is expected to drop. To increase the level of objectivity in a sales forecast then consider using a Sales Process.

Account Managers CRM:

Basic

Do you have consistent top performers in your sales team? Would you like to develop a standard sales process for the whole team based on how they manage their customer relationships? The CRM system is able to guide each account manager along a standard sales process relating to the company, product set of even based on the value of the order. This ensures that all activities in the sales process are clearly defined leading to a reduced level of uncertainty as to what the sales process should involve.

Almost all of our customers use this functionality of CRM and it proves to be very useful account manager guide and sales manager tool. By using sales processes we would predict between a five to 15 percent increase in the sales revenue of a department.    he most basic level of Customer Relationship Management has all the features that you would expect from a Contact Management system and for many users this is the starting point for using a CRM product.

Daily Activity list

The basic features of a CRM system include the ability to schedule various types of activities, in the case of the account manager these would predominantly be to progress and close business.  By using a single application to store all future activities such as phone calls and meetings next to customer contacts the account manager can clearly see what they have scheduled to do on each day. This simply saves time allowing the account manager to become more effective by being able to make more calls or visits as administrative down time is reduced

Account and Contact lists

The CRM database is a single source for all account and contact information, this allows the account manager to get an immediate view of all the contacts in any particular customer or prospect.

Opportunities

The real advantage of CRM comes when an account manager can identify the tangible opportunity or deal that they are working on.  A single opportunity in this context is a piece of business to win, the account manager’s pipeline is the group of opportunities being managed by each account manager. Each opportunity can be given a value, an estimated win date and a probability of closing.  By identifying these three basic elements of each opportunity an account manager can prioritise their time and activity where most appropriate.

Intermediate

Sales Processes

Your business may follow a defined sales process for particular products or services.  In many cases we have helped companies to identify their own best sales practices and have built these into the CRM system as a Sales Process.  A defined sales gives the account managers a defined set of activities that need completing to progress a sales through to closure.  These type of processes enable an account manager to quickly see what has to be done next and are shown to reduce the length of the sales cycle for some of our clients.

Reference Documentation

Keeping up to date product documentation and presentations in one central store is often difficult to administer.

The CRM system’s document library provides the most logical place to store and maintain a single document source which can easily be accessed by all account managers for use with their prospects and customers.

Mail Merge

CRM systems allow frequently used documents such as meeting confirmation letters or more complex proposals to be quickly merged with contact and opportunity information. This allows the account manager to spend a minimum of time recreating commonly used documents further reducing the administration aspect of the role and providing what many prospects view as a fast efficient level of service.

Advanced

Build groups of contacts

By having all the customer data in one place account managers can get an immediate view on all their active customers, the contacts that work for those customers and the outstanding opportunities that are yet to close. With this ability to create a group of all these contacts the account manager could use the mail merge function to send a short term offer or indeed a warning of a pending cost increase to pull in business. This communication could automatically schedule a follow up phone call for either the account manager of another user of the CRM system to try to close the business.

Ownership and Management of Accounts

In the majority of CRM systems each company and contact within the database has an account manager assigned to it. This allows all users to easily see who is managing which customer and prospect relationships. In some cases it may be necessary to do an account handover, reassigning certain or all accounts from one account manager to another. With a CRM system this process can literally be done with the click of a button allowing the new account manager to get an immediate view of the information stored with their new accounts.

Financial Information

CRM systems can link to a businesses Finance system. This link can either be a two way flow of information or just one way flow. Useful data such as sales order history or a customer’s credit rating can then be displayed to account managers who may not have access to the finance system. This creates a more total view of the customer and allows more relevant conversations with existing customers based on what has been bought in the past.

Integrated view of whole account

When the CRM system is used to record and resolve Customer support issues these are immediately visible to account managers who can therefore help the customer service team by raising the progress made and outlining the next steps to resolve the issue when they speak with the appropriate contact. 

CRM  for Managing Directors:

Basic

From our experience company heads are primarily interested in how a CRM system beneficially impacts the performance of their business.

Business Process Improvement

A CRM system helps members of staff in the sales and customer services departments more effectively close business and resolve customer issues with existing and future customers. If you would like to learn how exactly a CRM system does this then you really need to take you through a standard product demonstration to cover the main areas of potential business process improvement.

Intermediate

Business Measurement

The CRM system can provide a very top level view on Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for a business at a glance. Some CRM systems have a screen that is commonly called a ‘Dashboard’ which shows the necessary KPI for your business. Examples of the kind of information shown could be the number of sales meetings in the last week, the number of unresolved support issues, the number of won opportunities in a week; in short anything that is recorded into the database can be displayed on this screen.

Advanced

CRM development work

A CRM system is very rarely a static solution. As your business changes your CRM system needs to be able to adapt too. You also need a business partner with the necessary skills to turn your requirements into product functionality. In short you need your CRM system to grow with your business, not one which remains static.

Marketing Managers CRM:

Basic

Segmentation of customers and prospects

Customer and prospect segmentation is extremely difficult as data is dispersed around an organisation. Vital contact data is often held in email systems and remains invisible and unavailable to a marketing function. A CRM system provides one single source of customer data allowing segmentation and therefore targeted marketing to groups of customers. Without this single data source any marketing efforts remain unconnected and difficult to follow up and track.

Direct mail activities

CRM systems have differing degrees of marketing support. The most common functions that they can support are email marketing, direct marketing and telemarketing. As these activities are all recorded next to specific contacts it becomes simple to track what communications have been sent to which customers and targets.

Intermediate

Closing the Marketing - Sales loop

Recording feedback and return on marketing programmes becomes achievable using a CRM system. An often laborious task of manually identifying new business from marketing activities is automatically managed in many CRM systems. By creating a link between a marketing lead and the value of a new sale, it becomes simple to calculate the marketing return on investment of each programme.

Advanced

Capture leads direct from your website

Many CRM systems have the ability to capture leads directly from your website. Contact and enquiry forms completed on your website can the automatically fed into the CRM system which can create qualification calls or any appropriate action to be carried out by a defined user. This increases the level of responsiveness to new business enquiries and captures all leads in the CRM system. 

Customer Service Managers CRM

Basic

The advantage of using a CRM system to log all customer’s issues is that these issues then become visible to all system users. Frequently companies run specific support desk systems which have separate contact databases, contacts that are extremely valuable to sales and marketing as well as the support function.

By identifying each customer issue and recording these against support contracts the system can provide information on the most frequent type of requests made which may highlight delivery or product issues that can be addressed.

Intermediate

Issues can be automatically allocated to specific users by simple categorisation of the customer service issue. This enables responses to be made quickly minimising the time taken to identify the appropriate resolution.

Advanced

Creating a Knowledge base

By storing common resolutions in a searchable database lower skilled customer service staff can use the system to learn and communicate the resolution to common issues to the customer. The reduces the time it takes to get new customer service staff trained and effective in a customer facing role.

Customer Service Portal

Customers can log their issues via your website outside normal support hours using a direct link into the CRM system, these issue will be automatically allocated to the most appropriate resource for resolution at the start of the support period.