We are presented with an abundance of choices every single day of our lives. A multitude of companies compete for our business through a vast array of methods designed to attract our attention and convince us to purchase their goods and service.

 As a manager or owner of a small business you have probably often wondered what should you do to attract more business;

• What kind of sales should you try?
• What kind of advertisement?

These are the questions that keep business managers and owners awake at night. While asking these questions is an important first step the chief question is, how will I know I have succeeded and is it profitable? 

The ability to experiment with your business is important, but the ability to monitor and measure the results of your experiment is vital to you existence.

So where does a small business turn to for results?

CRM. You should have the ability to create and manipulate a wide variety of marketing channels to your customers in your CRM. Additionally, your CRM should include two basic tools that facilitates your ability to monitor and measure the success (or failure) of your marketing efforts. After all, you want to focus on the processes that bring in more revenue to your business. What are the two very important items that should be included in your CRM? Analytics and a dashboard.

Analytics gives you a high level view of the performance of your marketing efforts, what is working and what is not. Your CRM is already collecting a wealth of information on your customer’s habits, purchases, as well as your interactions with customers. That wealth of information can be used to drive your efforts to increase your sales. CRM analytics should track and report the total amount spent for each marketing campaign as well as the ability to associate sales opportunities with marketing campaigns to reveal vital key information for your business, like ROI or responsiveness to your marketing campaign.

What about a dashboard? A CRM dashboard should have the ability to enable you to see the ‘big picture’ of your business. Information from your marketing efforts displayed in a executive dashboard and in real-time will allow you to adjust your marketing efforts to maximize your business and focus your attention onto areas that you need to examine more closely. Additionally, the CRM dashboard should also give you the ability to forecast results. These forecasts will enable you to anticipate changes in staffing, inventory, hours of operation, and other important business operations to better meet the demands of your customers while controlling your costs. 

These essential tools in CRM will help your business to understand the best (most profitable) way to sell and market your goods and services. Furthermore, with the wealth of information already located within your CRM, you can leverage your information by running multiple analysis and reports on your marketing efforts to heighten your understanding customer as well as anticipate their purchasing habits.

Bottom line, you want to increase your revenue. You have numerous decisions every day that impact your profitability and cash flow. CRM is an invaluable tool that can provide you with greater insight and information that can improve your business. Using your CRM dashboard and analytics is an important part. Your competitors are taking advantage of your customers purchasing decisions, are you?

As a Small Business owner, you know all about Accounting. You understand that Accounting knowledge and using accounting software is the most basic requirement of your business to manage dollars and cents and ultimately make a profit.

Successful business owners also understand that in order to continue to make a profit, you must not only find a customer but also make sure that they keep coming back for more of your products and services. Simple! Right? Sure it is simple; if you only have a hand full of customers. You, the business owner, can easily keep track of your customers’ names, their likings, their favorite color, etc. etc., heck you may even know their pet’s name. But we all know that in today’s competitive world, you need more than 10 customers to survive. To be successful, you need 100′s of customers doing business with you every single day!  And trust me, you don’t want to get names or pet’s names mixed up when communicating with your customers!

So, forget those sticky notes; note pads, the memory games, and no not even eating almonds (as mom said it would help your memory) is going to make any difference!   

Just like you don’t do all your accounting in your head to make a profit it is impossible to provide the best service, retain your best customers, to constantly communicate and inform customers of your specials, offers, discounts, giveaways, bundles or just interesting facts about products and services that provide that additional value by using your head!  Nope, you need help! That is why a Customer Relationship Management or CRM Software solution is a must just like your accounting software is for your business to be successful.  

A CRM Software will help you manage all your marketing communications, your sales and customer service activities in an automated electronic (inexpensive) fashion so that you can start using your memory for more importing things.  Let the CRM software help you communicate to your customers how and when they should keep coming back for more of what you sell!

Sound interesting?  It better! Your competition is using it, why are you left behind?  Perhaps it’s time you learned more about CRM and how it can help you and your business grow. The most importing thing is you will have happy customers who will keep coming back for more.  

So, start using the power of the internet to help your business grow and don’t just Tweet, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google!  Start using CRM just like Surado CRM Online! 

CRM  DEFINED…

CRM is first and foremost a strategy and corporate philosophy that puts the customer at the center of business operations so as to increase profits by improving customer acquisition and retention.

It involves identifying high-value customers and automating processes so that sales, marketing, and service efforts will be more efficient and effective.

In its complete form, CRM provides a 360-degree view of the customer and integrates all necessary information about the customer at every touch point – be it traditional voice, Internet-based, or wireless.

A CRM software solution is the vehicle that enables the 360-degree view. The major integrated system components that make up a CRM system include account and contact management, sales automation, marketing automation, customer care (service and support), and integration with back-office applications.

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.

CEO’s Best Practices

1. Business executives must “own” CRM projects, from identifying goals and objectives to defining supporting business processes and metrics to ensuring adequate funding for implementation  

and support. Upper management buy-in and leadership is critical to the success of any CRM initiative.    

2. CRM projects need governance – not command and control. Recognize the dynamic and interdepartmental nature of marketing campaigns, sales interactions, and service calls, and manage CRM deployments accordingly – by a representative team or governing body. Get input from all major areas that make up a CRM initiative, including sales, marketing, and customer care, early in the process.   

3. Establish a customer-focused culture throughout the entire organization.    

 4. Ensure seamless integration with your back-office applications so critical elements of other third-party applications help provide a true 360-degree view of the customer.    

 5. Get expert advice from technologists who have mastered the art of successful CRM implementations.    

6. Design and implement employee buy-in programs that help your team understand the value of CRM.    

7. Review, update, and implement automated business rules throughout the organization and report on the efficiencies and effectiveness of their use.    

8. Implement a system that is highly open, robust, and scalable as the amount of information you gather and manage will grow with the organization and increase over time. Make sure your corporate IT is responsible for the integration strategy, maintenance of master data, and adherence to technology standards in connecting these new applications.    

9. Identify your most profitable customers and provide products, services, and promotions that keep them as happy, loyal, customers.    

10. Identify tangible and measurable links to business performance before implementing a CRM project. First identify the processes that require change, the current level of performance achieved, and ongoing improvements.    

CEO

Better Manage Your Business -CRM 1080

Have you ever been frustrated because you can’t find your agreements?       Or don’t know which of your employees last spoke to a client?    Or which one of your sales brochure is the latest version?         

Or why don’t your employees realize that “Bob” is your high valued customer that requires special attention?      

 If this sounds familiar, you are in dire need of CRM. When implemented successfully, a CRM initiative will transform your muddled, messy, mis-managed and disorganized business into a lean, mean, tech-savvy machine!         

Although there are many ways how CRM Software can help you better manage your business, I have limited our discussions to some of the popular ones below:         

1. No More Messy Desk – Track & Manage Information in One Place. Stop buying post-it notes for reminders. All your contact information and reminders will be available in your CRM System.         

2. No More Lost Documents, Contracts, Images, Music, etc. CRM Software will allow you to attach documents, images, etc. to each contact. So, to review a document, simply bring up the contact and look at the document attachments.         

3. Don’t Waste Time Looking for Past E-Mails. Because e-mails are synchronized automatically, your history folder will always be repository of past e-mails sent/received to a particular individual. No more having to search through tons of e-mail for a particular attachment.         

4. Leverage Individual Expertise through Knowledge Management. Every organization has a few individuals who know a lot about the business. CRM software allows you to track various information, documents, brochures, etc. in a knowledge management area. Because this is a searchable knowledge base, anyone in your business will be able to search and access policies, brochures, industry information, business documents, HR documents and more.         

5. Automate Business Processes to Set Action into Play. So, you want to make sure that when your sales reps complete an introductory call, they get a reminder to send a thank you e-mail. Or how about sending a “friendly reminder” to your contacts one day prior to your appointment to make sure that all parties show up for the meeting. Automated business rules, when done right will save you time, money and lots of frustration.          

6. Know Which Marketing Campaign is Bringing in Results. You spend hard earned dollars to advertise in the Yellow Pages, local Newspaper, Direct Mail, Internet, etc, but do you have a clue as to which campaign is really working? CRM will change all this. You will be able to focus your marketing dollars on campaigns that clearly provide the results you are looking for – sales!         

7. Improve, Automate and Be on Top of Sales. Standardize your sales process with automated reminders, to-do’s, follow-ups, best practices that you know work. Review and be on top of activity logs, top opportunities, forecasting, quota and much more. CRM’s sales force automation features will help your sales team excel to new heights.         

8. Track & Provide High Levels of Customer ServiceGood service is no longer memorable. Great service makes all the difference. With CRM, you will be able to track each and every customer service call and the steps taken to resolve them in a timely fashion. With Automation, Knowledge Base and standard processes, your customers will be rewarded with Great service which will result in return visits and referrals.           

9. Use Dashboards to gauge Key Performance Indicators. So, you have 5 minutes before you dash off. But how is your business doing? Meetings? Sales? Marketing? Customer Service? With CRM, you can create customized Dashboards that will give you a quick graphical overview of all the things that are important to you and your business. Dashboards can also be extended for all your employees so that they can better focus in their area of specialty.         

10. Consolidated all your various database silos into your CRM solution. Most small business have several different databases – all have name, address and telephone numbers of your customers, vendors, prospects, etc. Over time, frustration begins to set in as you realize that one database telephone number was updated and the rest were not. Before too long, people are calling the wrong number and accounting is sending invoices to the wrong addresses and you know the rest. The point here is that you can consolidate all disparate databases into your CRM software.       

Most people confuse CRM Software with a contact organizer – If you are one of them, don’t feel too bad. Because of the tremendous success of CRM software, most contact management or contact organizers advertise themselves as “CRM” in one form or another just because they may have part of what a complete CRM software delivers.   

There is a vast difference between Contact Organizer or Contact Manager Software and a CRM Software. Contact Managers are geared towards individuals with features limited to the needs of a single professional.   

 For small and growing businesses, Contact Organizers will not be able to handle the needs of a team – workgroup features, speed, security, storage, limited features for sales automation, workflow, marketing automation, customer services, integration to other products and the list goes on and on. Some Contact Managers are available for small groups of users. However, why go with Contact Manager Software when you can achieve so much more with CRM Software at a price you can afford.   

The key message here is, if you use Microsoft Outlook or other e-mail systems to do e-mail and track information about your contacts and schedules, that is NOT CRM. Yes, you are better off than not having any kind of an electronic system to track your customers but you are way behind in what you can do with CRM in place.   

A true CRM Software solution provides complete front office automation for Account and Contact Management, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service and Back-Office Integration.   

Contact Organizer Software versus CRM Software-CRM1080

Contact Organizers are great for Single Professionals   

With Limited Needs While   

CRM Software provides a Full-Featured   

Team Solution for Growing Companies   

Recognizing Strengths and Weaknesses  

With Competitor Intelligence, identifying competitors is simplified.  

Track  

• Competitor strengths,
• Weaknesses,
• Ratings and
• Past performance while monitoring win/loss statistics to better position you and your team in the future.

Competitors??? CRM1080

Whether an opportunity is won or lost, standardized reason codes and descriptions can be established to track the results.  

Knowing your competitors, including strengths, strategies and solutions proposed for specific projects can be critical in helping you develop a winning proposal.  

It is not enough to have a good product and a fancy presentation–you must be able to address how your solution is a better fit to the customer compared to that of your competition.  

Reports monitoring won/lost opportunities help ensure optimum on-going results.  

Go outperform your competitors!

For Your Business - CRM1080

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Typically, as a Small Business owner or manager, you don’t normally associate purchasing software to reduce costs. However, CRM software specifically has some cost reduction advantages that are discussed below:

1. No More Looking for Documents. According to research by Delphi Group, a Boston consultancy group, 30% of all employee time is spent trying to find “lost” documents. Do the math and you will be shocked at how much wastage is going on in your company!

2. No More Spending on Advertisements that Don’t Bring in Revenue. With marketing automation, you will know exactly which advertisements bring in the revenue so that you can toss out the other ads.

3. No More Wondering What Activities took place When & Where. Since all communication is tracked in CRM software, all your employees will always have insights as to a customer or vendors history with your business.

4. Reduce Customer Service costs up to 70%. By using web self-service (a way for your customers to receive Client Specific information from your web site), you will be able to reduce customer service calls and staffing.

5. Reduce printing costs. Why print when you can distribute your brochures online. With CRM, you can automate distribution of brochures and other documents through email and web self-service access.

6. Consolidate Custom Databases. Because you can create custom screens, consolidating other databases in your CRM Software will reduce licensing and maintenance costs.

7. Layoff the “extra” Help. With CRM, each of your employees will be able to accomplish a lot more. So, it will allow you to review your staffing needs for all the “extra” help that you have from time to time. For example, new leads can come in through your web-site automatically into your CRM system and assigned to the appropriate sales rep – all through automation. You will be able to import leads from other sources as well – no more manual data entry!

Now, Go Save Money with CRM!

What is Web Self-Service? CRM1080

These days, since businesses are expected to provide personal service and form relationships with thousands of customers, self-service tools are a blessing.

No matter how great your customer care is, if you’re not offering support on the Web, your customers are left wondering why. Many experts agree that having self-service is one of the cornerstones of establishing an e-business presence.

The Self-Service model is founded on the principal of enabling customers, partners and employees to obtain information or conduct transactions directly over the Internet, avoiding time-consuming and costly traditional processes involving multiple verbal or written interactions.

Self-service provides control, performance, convenience and efficiency. This is because customers can perform tasks themselves when they want to through a secure, customized self-service web site. This 24×7 coverage provides convenience to customers while reducing customer service costs to businesses.

Although it has been known for some time that a good self-service program can increase financial returns and maximize customer satisfaction, some businesses have even discovered self-service can have a positive impact on their businesses in areas beyond customer care, in particular marketing, product management and customer information access.

Self-Service clearly has become the norm these days for businesses to remain competitive. Companies that don’t provide consistently high quality service in all channels will find their customers returning to the faithful and expensive telephone or defecting to the competition. Interestingly, although a phone call can be as much as 22 times more expensive than a self-service transaction, an even bigger long-term issue is the lost revenue opportunity from customers that never return at all.

Benefits of Web Self - Service/ CRM 1080