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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

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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

Increase Referrals by Using Contact Management Home Care CRM

Using a CRM system you can view and protect all of the up-to-date activities of all sales representatives, gain insight into their standings with referral sources, track sales data, and analyze territory progress. Proper information management is critical to building relationships with customers, and relationship building is critical to home care success. In the past it was hard for home care agencies to keep track of up-to-date activities of their sales representatives, gain insight into their standing with referral sources, track sales data, and analyze territory progress.

Agency owners pay sales representatives to go into the community, nurture contacts, input data, track information, and bring in referrals. This is important for agencies because it allows them to get as many clients as possible with a minimal amount of resources. In most cases, when a sales professional leaves, they take all of that valuable information with them at a significant cost to the agency. Historically, it takes upwards of a year for an agency to effectively manage the territory again, not to mention lost revenue and the investment of filling the spot of the sales representative and effectively training them.

Having the right CRM in place mitigates most of those losses, enabling the agency to pick up where the sales representative left off, allow for an easy transition, and offset some of the consequences of staff turnover. The password protection and data encryption ensures that a home care agencies, intellectual property will be safeguarded by putting these systems in place.

The agency is able to maintain account relationships and get the new sales representative on solid footing quickly. After all, a new representative will immediately know all of the pertinent information related to the account, such as what the A, B, and C accounts are, who makes the referrals, what discharge planner to deal with, referral sources, favorite foods, favorite sports teams, special interests, office hours, best time to call, if they were dissatisfied in the past and what made them dissatisfied, and whatever other information prior sales representatives have input into the account. All of which can be managed using a customer relationship management system.

With the growing sophistication yet easy-to-use functionality of customer relationship management tools, home care executives are realizing increased efficiencies, better time management, improved customer service to referral sources and an easy method of maintaining client information after a sales representative leaves another can pick up right where they left off, ultimately leading to stronger and lasting account relationships and more referrals.

Adam Bishop, Founder of PlayMaker CRM. At Last! A customer relationship management (CRM) tool that is specific to home care. http://www.playmakercrm.com/free-trial

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

The World’s Most Popular CRM System

Without question, the worlds most popular approach to managing relations with customers will be paper based – files, folders, journal books, “stickie” notes.

But when it comes to using computers for CRM, the spreadsheet stands head and shoulders above all the others added together.

Excel, Numbers or Google Spreadsheets are not CRM systems. That doesn’t stop people using them for CRM applications, particularly lists. Lists of customers, targets, suspects, prospects. Lists of deals, sales, values, totals.The same applies to Plans.

There’s no sense to this, given the number of CRM systems around, some of which are free. Why would anybody use technology designed for calculating numbers, and with no integration or process, to manage the multiple dimensions of CRM e.g. Companies, People, Plans, Actions, Schedules, Assignments?

The answer is it’s simple to organize Outlook as a contact and task management system – (not great but can be made to work by somebody with too much time on their hands). This at least sits on the same computer so the spreadsheet lists and contact details are similar places. And of course most people are familiar with the tool set.

The other answer is it’s infinitely flexible. Any user can keep his, or her, information in ways that make sense to them. The tools become genuine enablers, helping, rather than hindering, users to do their jobs better.

Contrast this with typical CRM systems where there are lots of options to choose from, and lots of data to input, for somebody else’s benefit.

One approach is infinitely flexible, although time consuming and sub-optimally efficient. The other is rigid and mostly driven by what other people want.

Ask yourself whether you’d rather spend time finding and winning new business, or fighting somebody else’s idea of what your CRM should work like?

As VP of Sales and Marketing for the UK office of a US based server manufacturer, I ran a team of 50 sales and support people. The guys in Silicon Valley had a “CRM” system they used to collate prospect and forecast information from around the world.

To keep them quiet I had to put my data in their system, but for my own records I used spreadsheets.

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

Visit Front Office Box at http://www.frontofficebox.com

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

Link CRM to SCM

For any business to extract maximum benefit from its CRM deployment, it is important that it be linked to the back processes. Supply chain management, when connected via business intelligence tools with CRM, can throw light on many hitherto unknown aspects of a company’s business processes.

The insight offered by CRM into customer behavior and demand patterns can be made use of to streamline manufacturing and distribution of products as managed by the supply chain function. An important feature to understand when deploying CRM is that it can only provide information that has to be used both at the front end and back end to improve processes. Customer segmentation information can be used to structure the purchase of raw materials, scheduling manufacturing, managing inventory, and overall running the supply chain. A business can obtain major cost savings by acting upon information from CRM systems.

A streamlined supply chain is key to reaching out to the right consumer at the right time and CRM offers inputs on providing the customers with the right product mix and targeting them with appropriate marketing. A backward integration of processes taking into account the information obtained from CRM can help a business better allocate its resources be they in manufacturing, processing, marketing, or sales. Apportioning of raw materials to machines and machines to a given product can be done more accurately if market demands are known; it also leads to a reduction of inventory stocks, JIT production, and a lean supply chain that responds to demands quickly. All this not only helps cut costs but also acquire a competitive advantage for a business that can take the lead in offering a better buying experience and service level that competitors may not be able to offer.

An efficient and responsive supply chain can have a huge positive impact on store product segmentation and effective customer targeting. Integration between CRM and SCM improves communication between the store and the manufacturing. For retail businesses such integration can imply a lot of benefits such as better distribution to retail outlets over various geographic locations; feedback to suppliers, distributors, transporters, etc. The use of BI for predicting performance at individual stores that can be aggregated to obtain a holistic picture of the supply chain is relevant to the entire exercise. Businesses can ensure the availability of quick-moving items and reduce the likelihood of losing customers.

A wider view of the happenings at the retail level can also help to take ad hoc decisions when pressed for time. Marketing and sales can coordinate more fruitfully with the supply chain to move or divert goods to given locations during peak seasons or for promotional purposes. Viewing data pulled from marketing, sales, supply chain, finance etc on a single dashboard can enable management as well as store managers to take profitable decisions on cross-selling and up-selling across different channels.

Sherman Hsieh is founder and CEO of Gate58 Marketing. Prior to founding Gate58 Marketing, Sherman was a marketing executive with Siebel Systems. Sherman is also founder and CEO of VendorDemo
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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sherman_Hsieh

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Avoiding CRM Failure

Increase Referrals by Using Contact Management Home Care CRM

The World’s Most Popular CRM System

Link CRM to SCM

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