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

To ensure the success of a CRM initiative, upper management must have a clear vision and establish a customer-focused culture.

Organizational issues are just as important, if not more important, than the technology behind a CRM implementation. It is well-known that people resist change. The introduction of a new system may be perceived to challenge the balance of how things are done, who wins, and why, and can have dramatic operational implications. Because of this, it is critical that new-system implementation has organizational buy-in up, down, and across, with strong leadership from senior management. The fundamental changes involved may be perceived to have far-reaching impact for your representatives, as well as the business processes and technology that support them. Forethought, coordination, and skill are required for a successful CRM implementation.

For a CRM project to succeed, it is critical that senior management understand that CRM is a business strategy to which they are fully committed, and that they are realistically cognizant of CRM’s many facets and ramifications. At the head of the charge is the CEO, the one person the organization looks toward for company direction and philosophy. It is the responsibility of the CEO to win the support of key groups within an organization – from the board of directors to financial analysts to direct reports – all the way down to the customer.

The CEO must realize that CRM is an initiative for major organizational change and, to this end, must have a clear vision of what he is trying to accomplish. The CRM project requires commitment and leadership and should include organizational objectives that are measurable by specific success metrics and criteria.

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.       

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!

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. 

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!

 The Secret Life of Your Customer 

Economic and management theory teaches us to examine options with relative scientific objectivity to determine the most efficient and profitable processes to increase revenue. Simply put, we look for the quickest and most effective way to make a profit. 

The Art of Profit - CRM1080

What does economic and management theory teach us about CRM?

In 1959 Frederick Herzberg, a psychologist, found that job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction acted independently of each other. The theory states that there are certain factors in the workplace that causes job satisfaction, while a separate set of factors cause dissatisfaction. The factors that cause job satisfaction are called motivating factors while the factors that cause dissatisfaction are called hygienic factors. Basically put, motivational factors tend to increase job satisfaction. Hygienic factors are necessary to prevent dissatisfaction, but only serve to de-motivate job satisfaction if these factors are not present. 

If we relate this theory to CRM we can safely state that hygienic factors are those things that the customer expects whenever they purchase your goods or services; the phone is answered in a timely fashion, the bathrooms are clean, orders are fulfilled correctly, and the many things customers simply expect from your company every time they interact with you. Motivational factors can further be defined (in relation to CRM) as those factors that increase your sales; lowering your price, customer loyalty rewards, holiday specials, and so fourth. 

In economic theory, the law of demand states that, in general, price and quantity demanded in a given market are inversely related. In other words, the higher the price of a product, the less of it people would be able and willing to buy of it (other things unchanged). As the price of a commodity rises, overall purchasing power decreases (the income effect) and consumers move toward relatively less expensive goods (the substitution effect). Other factors can also affect demand; for example an increase in income will shift the demand curve outward relative to the origin (increased demand leads to increased prices and vice versa). 

Determine the Best Methods to Make More Money- CRM1080

So we can say that customers have a certain level of expectations (hygienic factors) and are enticed to purchase our goods and services through sales, marketing, and other factors (motivational and economic factors). 

In other words, the customer is very complex. It is rarely only about price (unless you have a homogeneous product/service with an abundance of substitutes and a perfectly inelastic supply curve). Customers expect a certain level of service to accompany their purchasing experience. The key item here is what kind of experience, how much service, and what and how often they purchase. 

So how can CRM provide us with the insight into our customer to determine the best methods to make more money? 

It’s all about history. The ability to track your customer and review what they have done in the past can give you insight into their new buying behaviors. 

 Why is this important? The ability to review and analyze past behaviors and purchases allow you the ability to do two very important things: 

1. Ensure you have resources (product and labor) at the right place and the right time in anticipation of demand for your goods and services.
2. Analyzing and trending information to predict future buying patterns.

CRM allows you to track a multitude of information about your customer, including personal information that allows you to build upon your existing relationship. It also ensures that your customer receives a level of service commiserate with their purchasing power by everyone who accesses your CRM. Most importantly, CRM is an essential tool, more so in a sluggish economy, that enables you to do what you do best – offer your goods and services at a price the market will bear. 

 Dr. Thomas M. Fryer