Blog | CRM-Toolkit.com

Avoiding CRM Failure

If you’re evaluating a CRM suite in particular, you may have heard a lot of horror stories about CRM investments going to waste. Rest assured, it’s not the technology; cases of outright technology failure are rare in e-business, and their heyday was years ago, when a lot of applications were in their early generations.

Much more often, CRM failure has to do with the old saying, much beloved of coaches, that goes, Fail to plan, plan to fail. This is the point emphasized by Mike Murphy, executive director of Siebel Global Services. Addressing his company’s CRM audience some months ago, Murphy remarked, “If you focus on technology as the only aspect of a customer-facing solution, you’re going to have a fairly high-risk project.”

This truism of CRM has been out there for years, but it seems not all adopters have paid attention. “People frequently do not take into account the lessons of those that have gone before them,” Murphy tells Line56. “They will ignore some of the warnings.”

It’s part of a larger pattern in which CRM adopters haven’t conducted due diligence about the state of their own company, or of customers. Take the case of Cisco, which bought hosted CRM from Salesforce.com but subsequently came to realize that user behavior rejected the tool in favor of existing applications. That’s something that the company should have known from the CRM get-go, either causing it to pass up Salesforce.com altogether or else paying increased attention to the change management needed to embed Salesforce.com.

That’s a case of not knowing how CRM users behave, but Murphy knows of plenty of other cases in which a customer strategy has been missing. “When we do a post-mortem on these projects, we see that a customer strategy is lacking, or isn’t linked to a corporate strategy.”

For example, a manufacturer might be tasked to use CRM to do order management in order to improve cross-sell numbers, but might not have segmented the customer base properly. The customers might be craving cross-divisional solutions, not the discrete products currently offered by the manufacturer. But you’d never learn this by implementing order management.

Murphy offers a simple, three-step guide to avoiding CRM failure: 1. Align IT and business about what CRM-addressable problems are, and what to do about them; 2. Articulate a customer strategy, and how it links to corporate goals as well as to the proposed CRM system; and 3. Define goals in a measurable way so you can track your progress.

That’s what you should have on your mind when you think about a CRM suite, or even a component tool. Otherwise, as Murphy says, you might end up with “the technology piece working, but no results.”

David Cowgill is a Senior CRM Marketing Manager in San Francisco.

Article Source: http://www.crmblogger.com/crm/2005/09/avoiding_crm_fa.html

For further information contact: David Cowgill CRM Blog Founder http://www.crmblogger.com

###

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Cowgill

CRM Software Selection – The Basics

Any business who sells products or services would do well to use a Customer Relationship Manager, or CRM, especially for a business that sells remotely. Additionally, a CRM is an important efficiency enhancing solution for any organization that uses a call center. The purpose of a Customer Relationship Manager is to organize and track all of the processes and data associated with each lead and client.

A CRM automatically fulfills many of the responsibilities a sales agent would have to perform. The many software solutions designed to compliment the data and task management of a CRM increases the versatility of it dynamically. With supporting computer telephony integration software, a Customer Relationship Manager can instantly capture leads from web forms filled out and submitted by interested contacts via the company’s website. Coupled with a telephone auto dialer, a CRM will upload its list of leads and route those calls through to the best available sales rep for each call. A CRM can even quickly send templated email messages or leave prerecorded voice messages to the lead that the sales rep is contacting with only a single mouse click by the agent.

By acquiring the services of an outside company, Customer Relationship Managers can be provided for remote sales operations without the capital investment into software design or hardware purchase. Instead, all of the necessary components of the CRM are hosted by the providing company. These Customer Relationship Managers are referred to as hosted CRMs or online CRMs.

These hosted Customer Relationship Management tools often provide a very high level of customization within their programs, in addition to having an outside firm that can specifically develop software solutions for a particular business’ or organization’s needs. This includes options such as “drag and drop” functionality. This is a common software function, when applied to CRMs, allows CRM users to individually customize their CRM to their specific business model. The users can add new layouts and fields, customize size, color, and placement of fields, and do so at either the company or sales rep level. Data can be dragged and dropped in whatever position the sales agents want on the screen.

A hosted CRM provides remote sales businesses the tools needed to effectively use all prime business time by reducing wasted time and making the tasks associated with sales easier to accomplish. It is a worthwhile investment even for very small operations, and scales to be productive for much large businesses as well.

David Harlow is an SEO consultant for InsideSales.com
As a firm believer that people should know the facts, Harlow’s blog Inside Sales Adventures
seeks to inform new comers to the industry about important terminology in insides sales, as well as to give tips on what to look for when shopping for industry software.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Harlow

The power and versatility of telephony software allows inside sales companies to increase their calls, contacts, impressions, faxes, emails, and callbacks. All of this serves to increase conversions and revenue. Telephony software solutions are available to complete the myriad of tasks that call centers or remote sales organizations need to accomplish. The software that manages all of the processes that need to occur for a remote sales professional to meet the needs of their clients and their employer is Customer Relationship Management software.

Customer Relationship Management software, or CRM, serves as a database for the storage of an organization’s information. A CRM calendars private and company events and tasks. It automatically captures information on new leads and incoming calls, and a CRM manages customer accounts through the entire sales process.

CRMs can be integrated with other computer telephony integration (CTI) software solutions. Perhaps the most important piece of software to use alongside Customer Relationship Management would be a telephone dialer.

Dialers automatically call through a list of leads, or a similar list of phone numbers pulled from the CRM. A dialer then patches that call through to a live sales agent. Several different dialers exist, from the speedy but sometimes unreliable ratio dialer to the effective and methodical power dialer. No matter what dialer is being used, they all become more effective when they are allowed to pull info from, and up load data too, the CRM.

CRM can also integrate other telephony business solutions with their own database and the dialers they empower. Voice messaging software allows sales reps to leave prerecorded, relevant voice messages on the voicemail of leads they attempt to contact. The CRM will automatically leave the message while the sales rep may move on to take another call. Alternatively these messages can be broadcasted by the CRM. The dialer will call through the list of contacts and automatically play the prerecorded message, freeing the sales rep to receive inbound calls or dial through a separate list. Generally, at any time the contact listening to the message may choose to speak to a live agent.

Email messaging is another example of a CTI solution. Pre-composed email templates may be selected and sent by the CRM during a conversation by a sales agent. These messages can automatically pull information to be included within the email, such as the contacts name or business. Instantly the lead can receive additional information promised to them by the sales agent.

Customer Relationship Management is the backbone of remote sales, and the industry has responded by producing plenty of business solutions to amplify it.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Harlow

CRM web based solution is an easy and cost effective way to maintain a healthy relationship with your customer on the Internet. It is the latest trend in modern business organizations. With the wide use of the Internet, business organizations have become more reliant on web based CRM services.

Customer relationship management, abbreviated CRM, is a comprehensive business strategy planned to maximize profitability, revenue, retention, and customer satisfaction. However, CRM business strategies mainly focus on customer satisfaction only. With the coming of CRM web based solutions, the entrepreneurs are able to offer support to the customer through the Internet, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Depending on the needs, CRM web based solutions can be availed by any type of businesses. For example, specialized CRM web based solutions are available for client profiles, frequently ordered items, automatic replenishment systems, one-click ordering, and market basket analysis. Mostly, CRM web based solutions are built after systematically understanding the needs and demands.

In a CRM web based solution, the Web is used as the platform. The software is generally installed on a single server. Hence, a user from any remote location can access the facilities of the CRM web based solutions through the Internet. Any slight change in the software of the main server will be reflected throughout the system. CRM web based solutions are cost effective and easy to maintain. Apart from these, CRM web based solutions also provide accessibility through wireless devices such as PDAs and WAP-enabled mobile phones. Thus, CRM web based solutions overrun all the downsides of their counterpart, client-server CRM solutions.

In the past, CRM Web-based solutions were used mainly by medium sized business organizations. But in recent year, almost all small and big business organizations have started using the facilities of CRM Web-based solutions.

CRM Solutions
provides detailed information on CRM Solutions, CRM Business Solutions, CRM Call Center Solutions, CRM Software Solutions and more. CRM Solutions is affiliated with Live Customer Support
.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jennifer_Bailey

Installing a good CRM software package is the cornerstone of any customer relationship management program. Without good software, gathering and storing the multitude of details gained about a customer from each interaction would be very difficult.

Small business CRM systems has gone ahead in leaps bounds in recent years, with several top quality packages now available to choose from. Prior to beginning the search for good CRM software technology however, there are a few basic features you should seek in a potential CRM package:

CRM Web Based Solutions

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Harlow

Customer Relationship Management is the backbone of remote sales, and the industry has responded by producing plenty of business solutions to amplify it.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Harlow

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jennifer_Bailey

Have You Considered Personal CRM?

At first glance Personal CRM seems an oxymoron, or at least terms put together by somebody who doesn’t really understand their meaning. After all, there’s nothing personal about ways companies implement Customer Relationship Management. The systems are intended to enforce control by accountants over sales and service functions.

But distill the concept of CRM to it’s fundamental elements – Relationships, Plans and Schedules – “Who” we know, “What” we want to do them, “When” we plan to do it – the potential for Personal CRM starts to emerge.

Firstly, we really should be keeping our own records of our business contacts, but in a “relationship” as opposed to “transaction” context. The fact that John Jones is CFO of Acme Inc and we have an appointment to discuss his renewal on the 28th is related to a transaction. Facts like he’s a member of Pine Valley Golf Club, enjoys classical music, his wife works for a children’s charity and daughter is studying medicine are related to our relationship.

These are different dimensions of the same contact. We need to be on time with a competitive offer if we’re to win the renewal. At the same time we need to know which of our contacts enjoys concerts when we have tickets for the symphony. If we can commit to knowing more of John’s personal interests we can deepen the relationship, opening up other opportunities. Maintaining that relationship will always be helpful when the going gets tough.

Secondly, we probably don’t need a reminder of our daughter’s birthday, but a reminder to find a gift a few days before might be helpful, as will a list of her close friends so we can invite them to the party.

Thirdly, in the natural course of things we meet people who aren’t, and may never be, clients, and also aren’t family or friends. They can be helpful to us in our business, and we can reciprocate. We need to know what their value add is so we can introduce opportunities to them, and build similar relationships to those with our customers.

We’ve just looked at three different types of relationship, but of course there’s only one of us. Having three different systems to record this information, and know how and when to use it, sounds like it might create more problems than it solves.

Maybe our own Personal CRM system isn’t an oxymoron. Maybe it’s an absolute requirement as the focus of business turns from transactions to relationships

Steve Reeves is Founder and CEO of Front Office Box, the Business 2.0 solution for helping smaller businesses manage plans, tasks, schedules and relationships. His passion is helping them exploit the Internet to increase opportunities and enhance capabilities.

Steve is a 30 year veteran of sales and sales management roles in the B2B space, primarily software, consulting and outsourcing.

Visit Steve’s blog at http://frontofficebox.ning.com

and visit Front Office Box at http://www.frontofficebox.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Steven_S_Reeves

An Online CRM Will Earn Money For an Inside Sales Company

A company is performing inside sales if it a company that sales its services or products from a remote location, meaning they interact with clients using the telephone and internet instead of face-to-face. These companies often cut costs associated with travel and store front upkeep while having access to a more reliable stream of potential clients. If a company’s own marketing efforts are not enough to bring in the desired amount of leads, they can be purchased from lead generation sources and divided up among sales representatives.

Like any type of sales, inside sales requires several steps from start to finish. From lead generation all the way through closing the sale, many different sales agents may interact with any particular lead or client. In order to track all of the interactions that a contact has with the company, and to plan what needs to be accomplished with that lead next, CRMs were developed. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and these systems are the brains behind inside sales. Particularly, an online CRM saves an inside sales organization time and increases their sales volume.

The difference between an online CRM and other kinds is how convenient it is for the companies that use it. Instead of having to purchase and download software on each computer used, the CRM is hosted completely online. This is especially helpful for companies where employees work from home and also a time saver for companies who use a call center. The information within the online CRM can be accessed anywhere the internet is available.

All CRMs benefit from the integration of other telephony tools. This integration creates the most powerful and convenient package of software solutions for the sales agents. Power dialers are a very important telephony tool that should be fully integrated with the CRM. Dialers double or triple the amount of calls sales agents can make in one business day. The prerecording of voice messages, as well as the function to automatically leave them on answering machines, is a time saving integration that also increases the quality of the messages and impressions sales agents leave. Automatic enrollment of new contacts into a campaign, a predetermined series of tasks that the online CRM will automatically schedule to be completed at specified intervals, is another software solution that greatly increases the productivity of sales professionals.

Venturing into inside sales offers many benefits to any sales organizations. Researching, purchasing, and using a trusted online CRM can help increase contact volume and sales closure in those companies.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Harlow

Use Voice Messaging With CRM

Voice messaging software provides many options to sales agents. These software solutions are an example of CTI, or Computer Telephony Integration. They provide telephone automation for sales, customer support, and marketing programs within an organization’s Customer Relationship Management, or CRM.

Customer Relationship Management captures, contains, and retrieves the important information on leads, contacts, and clients. A CRM may be implemented with a major investment by the company to purchase or design software and hardware to support the processes of managing all the jobs associated with inside sales, or a host company may provide the software and hardware for the organization to use. The companies that provide the hosted CRM sometimes offer voice messaging solutions through their same company.

The voice messaging software creates voice broadcast initiatives from the contact lists within the CRM. Voice broadcasting is where a series of calls are made from a selected list and a prerecorded message is automatically played. Those listening to these messages generally have the option to press a button to be removed from the list or to speak to a live agent. Good voice messaging systems will allow these messages to be any length and allow these messages to be recorded from anywhere.

Different messages may be played if the call goes to voicemail versus whether or not the lead is contacted. Both of these messages can be prerecorded in the sales agents own voice and catered to whether it is a voicemail or a live-call scenario. Additionally multiple numbers may be called simultaneously for one contact. Whatever number answers first is where the voice message will be broadcasted to.

The time that these voice messages will be broadcasted is also customizable. This allows a sales team to ensure voice messages will be sent out at the best times of day to contact their leads. The CRM voice message pairing can identify the time zones different contacts live in and call numbers from the same contact list at different times based on their geographic location.

Voice messaging software also enhances inbound calling. These features start with the option for listeners of broadcasted messages to press a number to talk to a live agent. Similarly automatic messages can be set up as the default answer to toll free numbers, such as help lines. Answers to the most common questions can be recorded and the option to contact a live agent is presented also.

If an inbound call is not able to be answered by a sales agent voice message software provides a solution for that caller. He or she may then choose to leave a voice mail his or her self, which will be transferred to the first available agent for them to listen and respond to.

Voice messaging enhances many of the primary functions of Customer Relationship Management. It allows sales reps and contacts to get in contact with each other quickly and efficiently.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Harlow

Get More Out of Your CRM by Using a Power Dialer

A power dialer is one piece of software that will instantly increase the productivity of your current CRM. CRMs (customer relationship management) track all of the processes associated with sales and store all the data about your clients. A power dialer enhances the outbound calling functions of the CRM.

A power dialer can be integrated into all major brands of CRM. It works together with the CRm like this: The CRM stores a list of contacts and their relevant information. That contact list is then uploaded into the power dialer. The power dialer then calls through each contact on that list automatically one at a time. These calls are then patched through to one of your sales agents.

The dialer provides several benefits. Leads and contacts can be called on average of four times faster when using a power dialer as compared to manually dialing, which cuts down the amount of wasted time between calls. Because of this three to four times as many calls can be placed in a typical work day. Both of these benefits allow your sales agents to spend more of their time selling. Not only does this increase the number of sales closed it also boosts employee moral – sales agents want to be selling, not dialing!

These are not the only benefits such a tool can give you when integrated with a CRM. It automatically makes the CRM a more powerful tool for your business, which also makes the CRM a more valuable investment. With both of these software solutions, it becomes easy to measure results with real time metrics and clear analytics.

Power dialers
that have been designed to be added to a CRM can be installed in minutes. Training to use a dialer is minimal. There is no additional, costly hardware to purchase when acquiring a power dialer. Instead a power dialer uses your existing phone lines.

Other telephony tools built into a CRM work perfectly with a dialer. Automated voice messaging is a perfect example. Voice messaging works by having your sales agents record messages to be left for clients which are then stored within the CRM. Normally these messages can be left while the sales agent stays on the line with a voice mail system. With a power telephone dialer, that recorded voice message is left without the sales agent having to stay on the line. The sales agent can move onto a new call, saving even more time and giving him the chance to make even more sales.

David Harlow is an SEO consultant for InsideSales.com As a firm believer that people should know the facts, Harlow’s blog Inside Sales Adventures
seeks to inform new comers to the industry about important terminology in insides sales, as well as to give tips on what to look for when shopping for industry software.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Harlow

CRM and How it Intersects With Social Media

No one seems to be talking about it, but surely it is the next step. The intersection between social media and CRM tools. How do we leverage the conversation we are now having with the customer and the use of our customer relationship management engine?

CRM + [SOMETHING THAT INTERACTS WITH/MANAGES SOCIAL INTERACTION] = CRM 2.0. Paul Green’s Blog does have a great article on how CRM and how it has evolved from CRM 1.0 basically a tactical software platform to manage customer data or transactions to the era of CRM2.0 a customer engagement strategy. Vendors like SAP CRM 7 and Oracle Social CRM have been proclaiming CRM 2.0 for a while now, but according to Paul they still have a while to mature.

Jeremiah Owyang an analyst from Forrester Research is a web strategist and in his latest blog talks about in his article When Social Media Marries CRM Systems

“brands will be able to track, manage, and monitor who enters the community, determine if they are a prospect, customer, partner, or even inactive. Secondly, brands will be able to develop intelligence on how effective communities are for bringing customers closer such as integrating existing social networks like LinkedIn to the corporate intranet. In a theoretical sense, brands could determine which customers have the best reputation, and how to keep and reward them. But perhaps, most importantly, customer experience will improve as companies now have a better understanding of them throughout their life cycle -and beyond.”

I think there are some definite leverage points that today small business and others can take advantage of.

1. As Jeremiah suggests using the interaction that our customers have now with us through social media and building a better understanding of them and their life cycle as a customer will allow us to further customising our offerings to our customers needs. How you inter-grate all the channels of communication to do this, I don’t know but I am sure there is some agitator tool out there. The future CRM without new Internet technologies such as Web 2.0 does not work anymore. There are lots of new opportunities to collect information on customers in this new social interactive environment. Recruitment firms are already leveraging this by using Linkedin.

2. As customers start to collaborate the use of CRM tools can be more influential further up the lifecycle as we test the ideas for new products and services and build them together. Using CRM platforms as a feedback mechanism would be an ideal scenario particularly if we have the customer details like email, twitter id, or facebook name. As Jeremiah explains SalesForce is a CRM example where collaboration is starting to happen as Salesforce offers community insight tools. It offers IdeaExchange, which powers Dell Ideastorm and My StarbucksIdeas. As Paul Green explains “it extends the company’s value chain to the customer and incorporates the customer into the pores of that value chain in addition to allowing them to tap the unstructured information that is out there for the picking on the web.” There is a great opportunity to actually engaging the customer in the interactions and not many companies are using their CRM to do this yet.

3. Information on competitors, feedback on companies, customer reviews are all fare game now with the customer controlling the conversation. This information can provide a great deal of insight and an opportunity if collected and trends identified to intersect the conversation with key pieces of valuable information either to protect a brand that might be the victim of some unfair blogging or to capitalise on the groundswell of a viral campaign. As the CRM tools become more sophiscated at digesting this information companies will be able to leverage this to proactively meet the needs of their customers and protect their brand reputation.

4. Customer escalation. Hilary from Lithium makes a great comment on a blog about how CRM and community forums can assist call centre agents. Customers can search once and get combined results from forum posts and the company’s knowledge base. And customers are more likely to get their questions answered if questions posted on forums are escalated to customer support when not answered in a set time frame. For customer support agents, they get a (closer to) 360-degree view of the customer if forum activity is integrated into their CRM desktop. Hilary explains Lithium is doing this today. Helpstream is another example.

5. Adam Needle makes some interesting comments on his blog that current CRM vendors that largely cater for ” demand generation (Eloqua, Market2Lead, Marketo, Silverpop, etc.), marketing automation/EMM (Aprimo, Neolane, Unica, etc.) and advanced CRM (today prob Oracle, Salesforce, etc.) — collectively, what I refer to as integrated marketing management — are building on (and integrating with) existing CRM and are positioning both to be able to broker and to measure/nurture and find ROI in customer dialogue.” Adam states that these vendors aren’t in the best position to understand the customer dialogue because they operate in a data rich database environment but they are coming around. He believes that they are coming around and will begin to integrate social media and other such ‘unstructured’ data/communication capabilities into their platforms. So as marketers and small business the landscape will change with regards to the tools we have and how they intersect to have conversations with our customers and manage that data as part of a marketing intelligence.

SMALL BUSINESS TAKE AWAY:

So as a small business you might be just starting to collect names in a database and that is a great start but perhaps start to monitor the conversations your customers are having with you on your blog or about you on social forums or product reviews to see if you can join the conversation or identify trends where you can improve your service and your competitive advantage. A good way of starting to do this is follow google alerts and maybe some competitors just for fun or have a look at Marketingvox for some good tips.

Relevant Books:

The art of strategic Listening by Robert Berkman

The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today’s Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture by Denise Shiffman

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li Josh Bernoff

Danielle MacInnis
Marketing consultant
MacInnis Marketing
website: http://www.macinnismarketing.com.au

blog:http:// http://www.macinnismarketing.wordpress.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Danielle_MacInnis

CRM-Toolkit.com

CRM, Customer Service

Avoiding CRM Failure

An Online CRM Will Earn Money For an Inside Sales Company

About Us

Tags

Recent Posts