CRM 1080

Small Business Owners: In search of business growth

  

CRM Software exists to help you retain your existing clients and acquire new ones. Because of the efficiencies you will realize, your team will be more productive resulting in higher earnings which can be used to grow your business. 

 Increase Customer Satisfaction. You may have to spend between 3 and 13 times to acquire a new customer compared to selling to an existing one. So, it’s pretty simple. Keeping your existing customer happy will allow you to grow by continuing to sell more to your existing customers while using precious funds to acquire new ones. The Customer Service module of a CRM software will allow you to identify any potential issues prior to it escalating to unmanageable circumstances. 

Let Sales Team Concentrate on Selling. Every minute your sales person works on paperwork is less time selling your product and services. By providing them with tools, templates and automation, they will concentrate on what they do best – Sell! And with CRM software, your sales team can be reminded to follow best practices that will help them increase their closing ratios and better forecast trends.  

Identify your Most Profitable Customers and Keep Them Happy. With CRM software you will be able to identify and provide a higher level of service – whether this is done through automation or simply an indicator on the Contact Screen that informs all your employees to provide “platinum” level service when speaking to valued customers. 

Focus Marketing Efforts on the Best ROI. Because your marketing dollars provide you a bigger return, there will be less wastage and more funds available through campaigns that work. With CRM, you will be able to identify growth opportunities within your business. 

Reduce Disorganization. Since meetings, routine tasks, events, reminders and more can be automated, your employees will be better organized to make the most out of their work day. This will also allow you and your managers better insights as to all your resources and how they are utilized. From a personal perspective, disorganization also increases stress which reduces productivity for the individual and all around him/her. 

Bring New Employees Up to Speed Fast. When there is a change of staff or a new team member that supports your customer, your CRM software can provide accurate and detail historic information to ensure the highest level of transition. And since your business process and process workflow may be used to guide an employee through each step, you will spend less time training your new employees. 

Do More with Less. CRM systems provide a host of automation that can be incorporated into your core front office operations – Sales, Marketing & Customer Service. By incorporating automation, your small business will be able to “respond” like your larger competitor and lend more credibility to your current and future customers and vendors. 

Improve Team Morale. In a small business environment, every employee may wear more than one hat. Because of this, it is extremely important to provide your staff with the tools and technology they need to get their jobs done and feel good about it. The higher the team morale, the higher the productivity, and the better your company will do.

Before you embark on any opportunity, you must be sure of the potential sales volume and the reasonable probability of securing the sale. The first thing an Account Manager must do is to qualify the opportunity.   

Answering the following questions early in the sales process will eliminate unnecessary risks before embarking on an expensive sales project with little or no return.   

             •          Do you understand the customer’s needs?   

             •          Does your solution match the requirements?   

             •          Is there sufficient funding available to finance the project?   

             •          Are you going to be able to deliver in the time- frame requested?   

             •          Is this project a high priority for the customer?   

             •          Do you know your competition for the opportunity?   

             •          Do you have a strong value proposition?   

             •          Do you have the necessary know-how and resources to execute?   

             •          Do you know the customer’s decision criteria?   

             •          Do you know who the decision makers are?   

Eliminate Unnecessary Risks -- CRM1080

When a sales opportunity presents itself, it is important to be able to build an intimate profile of the opportunity, including complete visibility of sales history, milestones, probability and account manager(s) responsible for the successful closing. Once this has been done, sales opportunities can be reviewed in powerful ways:   

             •          Quickly forecast opportunities through pipeline visibility by sales stages.   

             •          Review opportunities by Account Manager, Sales Groups, Product Lines, Time Periods, Probability and other custom fields.   

             •          Analyze trends, cycle timelines and win/loss ratios.   

             •          Management can review and compare performances by Account Managers and Sales Teams.   

             •          Account Managers and Management can review quotas.   

             •          Provide efficient collaboration between team members by providing a clear and consistent approach to sales methodologies and customer information tracking.   

Go Capture the Opportunities!!!

Today more than ever, companies are seeking to ensure that they will realize a valuable return on investment from their CRM system. To best achieve this, companies must first have a clear understanding of what information they want to gather and how the CRM system will be used to capture and analyze data to make further improvements in customer service.  

 Most companies understand at some level that CRM is not really about “managing” customers but rather about putting the customer at the center of the organization. And in providing additional value to customers, customer loyalty increases and business benefits accrue in many tangible ways, from increased sales to customer longevity. 

Choosing a Business Solution - CRM1080

Companies should seek a comprehensive overview of how CRM can benefit the corporation, including how it interrelates with other initiatives. The planning and installation processes of a CRM system are of critical importance. All customer touch points and their supporting business processes should be incorporated into the system. This involves not only linking with the call center but also integrating with other applications, such as e-business and back office applications including financials, production, shipping, logistics, and corporate databases. Integrating with other applications provides the opportunity to leverage existing technology investments while promoting a true 360-degree view of customer interactions across the entire organization. 

In selecting a solution, serious consideration should be given to how quickly, easily, and seamlessly integration with other applications can be achieved. Some CRM systems provide an easy means of integrating third-party back-office applications through an integration module. By using the module, integration time can be reduced by as much as 80 percent. 

A module also allows system administrators to not only view information from third-party or custom applications, but also to create and modify records from these databases directly into the CRM system. A few simple steps are required – links are created by logging on to a database, choosing the unique fields (such as account numbers) that will be the same in both systems, and selecting the fields that users will see in custom folder tabs. Data can then be viewed and manipulated in real time, avoiding the need for cumbersome import and export routines or other costly and time consuming custom solutions. 

By enabling the seamless linkage between applications and the CRM system, employees can click a folder tab to access information from integrated back-office applications such as order management, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, financials, logistics, or other verticals. In addition, automated data set updates to back-office applications greatly reduce unnecessary duplicate data entry and facilitate data consistency with disparate applications throughout the enterprise. 

The tight integration and real-time access to information has many benefits, from reducing data redundancy, user account management, and end-user training on multiple applications to increasing data integrity and improving efficiency, including decreased usage licensing costs for integrated applications. 

Whether your customer service and support representatives are courteous, responsive, and accurate will influence not only your customers’ decision of whether to buy from you in the future but also the feedback and recommendations they provide to their friends and business associates. Every customer interaction is important and impacts customer attitudes toward your company and resulting buying decisions, so it is important to enable your employees to be knowledge-workers, providing the best customer service possible. 

In order to be embraced by employees, the CRM system must make operational sense, fitting in with sales and customer care staff tasks and processes rather than requiring meaningless external predetermined business processes. However, CRM initiatives provide an excellent opportunity to step back and evaluate business goals, objectives, and the business processes that support them and to implement important changes to better meet your company’s changing needs. 

Selecting a CRM vendor requires a clear vision and key metrics of what needs to be accomplished through a CRM initiative. Although not the only approach, an integrated CRM suite provided by one vendor will definitely help reduce the chaos of implementing multiple vendors with disparate solutions. Regardless of which approach is taken, an implementation comprised of well-integrated CRM components will best achieve the promises of a customer relationship management initiative.