WHAT IS CRM?
CRM – Customer Relationship Management – is as much a business strategy as it is a software system. CRM systems are designed to help businesses deliver a consistent customer experience from the first marketing communication, through sales and customer service. An effective CRM system will capture key customer data and enable an organization to use that data effectively at each stage of the customer relationship. As a business strategy, CRM means being customer-centric: focusing employees on building and maintaining valuable relationships with prospects and customers.
WHAT CAN CRM DO FOR ME?
Whether your business has one hundred customers or one million, there are two challenges that a CRM system can help solve: How does your organization effectively treat each customer as an individual with unique needs and expectations; and, How do you make sense of hundreds of individual customer interactions between salespeople and customer service representatives to ensure that your business’s strategy is being well executed?
To answer these questions, let’s take a look at some of the functional areas that are common to many businesses:
MARKETING
How effective is your marketing? A good CRM strategy might be able to help you identify the right customers or prospects to target for your next marketing campaign. It might even help you plan and execute the marketing effort efficiently. But what happens after that? Your strategy also needs the support of a CRM system that ensures that the people who respond to your marketing efforts are connected with an effective sales experience.
SALES
What does your business’s “best practices” sales process look like? In many organizations, the sales process is as varied as the number of salespeople – as a company the sales process is “hit or miss” and depends largely on the skill of the salesperson. In other organizations, a rigid sales process means that every prospect is treated the same, which means that these companies are probably losing sales with prospects whose expectations don’t fit the mold.
An effective CRM strategy will translate your best salespeople’s skills into institutional knowledge, and your CRM system should automate as much of the knowledge capture and sharing process as possible while supporting a flexible selling model to respond to the outliers amongst your prospects.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
If we think of a business’s initial marketing and sales efforts as the beginning of a customer relationship, then customer service is the nature of that relationship as it grows and matures. Businesses require a strategy for effectively handling customer inquiries from the first request to the actual delivery of a service months or even years after a sale. Your CRM system should give your customer service personnel the tools they need to effectively deliver on your customers’ service expectations, and, in the connected world of today’s business, even provide your customers with the opportunity to access self-service via the web.
MANAGEMENT
With all of the right strategies and tools in place to initiate and nurture customer relationships, one truism of business remains: relationships are fluid and always changing. An effective CRM strategy will anticipate the need for individual employees and managers to measure their effectiveness and quickly adapt to changing circumstances, whether in marketing communications, selling processes, or customer service. A CRM system designed to support this strategy will provide easy access to reports and analytics, and the flexibility to change the way data is viewed and processes are automated.
WHAT IS CRM?
CRM – Customer Relationship Management – is as much a business strategy as it is a software system. CRM systems are designed to help businesses deliver a consistent customer experience from the first marketing communication, through sales and customer service. An effective CRM system will capture key customer data and enable an organization to use that data effectively at each stage of the customer relationship. As a business strategy, CRM means being customer-centric: focusing employees on building and maintaining valuable relationships with prospects and customers.
WHAT CAN CRM DO FOR ME?
Whether your business has one hundred customers or one million, there are two challenges that a CRM system can help solve: How does your organization effectively treat each customer as an individual with unique needs and expectations; and, How do you make sense of hundreds of individual customer interactions between salespeople and customer service representatives to ensure that your business’s strategy is being well executed?
To answer these questions, let’s take a look at some of the functional areas that are common to many businesses:
MARKETING
How effective is your marketing? A good CRM strategy might be able to help you identify the right customers or prospects to target for your next marketing campaign. It might even help you plan and execute the marketing effort efficiently. But what happens after that? Your strategy also needs the support of a CRM system that ensures that the people who respond to your marketing efforts are connected with an effective sales experience.
SALES
What does your business’s “best practices” sales process look like? In many organizations, the sales process is as varied as the number of salespeople – as a company the sales process is “hit or miss” and depends largely on the skill of the salesperson. In other organizations, a rigid sales process means that every prospect is treated the same, which means that these companies are probably losing sales with prospects whose expectations don’t fit the mold.
An effective CRM strategy will translate your best salespeople’s skills into institutional knowledge, and your CRM system should automate as much of the knowledge capture and sharing process as possible while supporting a flexible selling model to respond to the outliers amongst your prospects.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
If we think of a business’s initial marketing and sales efforts as the beginning of a customer relationship, then customer service is the nature of that relationship as it grows and matures. Businesses require a strategy for effectively handling customer inquiries from the first request to the actual delivery of a service months or even years after a sale. Your CRM system should give your customer service personnel the tools they need to effectively deliver on your customers’ service expectations, and, in the connected world of today’s business, even provide your customers with the opportunity to access self-service via the web.
MANAGEMENT
With all of the right strategies and tools in place to initiate and nurture customer relationships, one truism of business remains: relationships are fluid and always changing. An effective CRM strategy will anticipate the need for individual employees and managers to measure their effectiveness and quickly adapt to changing circumstances, whether in marketing communications, selling processes, or customer service. A CRM system designed to support this strategy will provide easy access to reports and analytics, and the flexibility to change the way data is viewed and processes are automated.