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

Lead Management – Turning Google’s Gmail Into CRM

Today’s internet is clear that Google plays a major role in developing some of the top software around. Google continues to distinguished itself as an innovator in software. If you are looking to accomplish a personal productivity task chances are Google has or is working on a solution. The growth of email over the years has brought out the good and the bad of features we like to see when using our e-mail. Google’ GMail is prime example of leading the way and being a top choice of many users today. Google’ GMail has taken a very mature technology in our email and made us look at how we process, manage, and retrieve our electronic communications.

Taking a closer look at a key feature that GMail has potentially touched on is it’s versatility in creating custom management strategies or processing ques. This flexibility is what makes GMail an ideal platform to use as a personal contact management system or as a simple CRM.

GMail as a Contact Management?

Contact management is fundamentally a system that helps a sales person quickly identify new prospects, make contact, and manage follow-up.

Inherently you get the communications tool, email. Leveraging the power of Google’s search, labeling, and filters you get the management of those communications. There is a good chance that you are using a CRM , such as ACT! or Goldmine you are using a lot of email-like features, but are still required to leave that application to use email also.

Time is money so you don’t want to be wasting time bouncing between multiple applications. So, why not stay in your email application.

Importing and Managing Contacts

One of the fundamental roles of your CRM is to capture and manage your contacts. Your sales system needs to easily get your prospects and clients into the system, reference them quickly, and efficiently manage updates.

GMail does each of these tasks exceptionally well. Whether you are exporting contacts from Outlook, Apple Mail, or loading a spreadsheet of contacts GMail makes it easy. If you already have your contacts in a Web-based mail or social network system like Yahoo! Mail or LinkedIn it is even easier just login and click.

Creating a Sales Prospecting System

Now that you have all your contacts in GMail, Google’s search becomes a powerful prospecting tool. Are you looking for a person in a particular company? Do you need all the SVP or higher marketing executives? Do you need everyone that is in the health care sector? All of these types of prospecting questions are easily answered and your database segmented using GMail.

What is most important, using GMail as a contact management system puts all of these prospects at your fingertips and ready to contact.

Managing Real-time Internet Lead Generation

GMail also has great features for managing real-time Internet lead generation. Combining the power of filters, labels, and actions you can immediately prioritize and queue leads as you see fit.

Filters allow you to create complex rule sets for specific types of emails. This can allow you to:

* Highlight (i.e., star) emails coming from lead sources
* Label different lead sources
* Filter them into specific groups for follow-up

You can take this contact management and prioritization system one step further by using GMail’s latest multi-inboxes to create sales pipelines and queues.

Prioritizing with GMail’s New Task List

Of course, no sales management system would be complete without a task list. GMail has a simple, but elegant task list. You can not only build your schedule of TODOs and you can turn emails and correspondence into task and follow-up reminders.

Also, don’t forget to use the Google calendar to schedule and track appointments.

Integrating Social Media Tools

Finally, sales is about engagement with people. Few technology concepts have helped sales to so directly engage customers as social media.

Using Google’s robust GoogleTalk, embedded in GMail you can bring in all of your social media streams as well as your email conversations. Again, turning all of this communication into a searchable prospecting database.

There is no question that what GMail features to use as users is far more than an email application. GMail can be your personal Google contact management or CRM software.

Increase your Conversion Rates on sales leads with Lead Management
Software. Learn the keys to managing sales leads with Google Gmail
.

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

Aspects of CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Customer relationship management – managing the relationship of the customer with the company. Isn’t that a relatively simple concept? Then why the entire hullabaloo surrounding it? Because, this seemingly simple concept has changed the way the world does business with its customers. It has taken the most important aspect of a business, the customer and brought it to the spotlight.

If a business has a good relationship with its customers then chances are that it is already mauling its competitors in the face or is on the way to doing it soon. A customer may perceive the entire business as one single entity. But there are different employees in different roles and departments who work synergistically to enhance each customer experience.

Customer relationship management or CRM takes it one step ahead and gives access to a vast amount of customer information to the organization.

Aspects of CRM

There are several aspects of customer relationship management which are related to each other and play a key role in the outcome of the entire process.

B2B relationships: Business to business relationships which includes relationships with partners, suppliers and distributors or retail channels. This is a completely external network that works as a support system for internal networks.

Data Analysis: Undoubtedly, the backbone of the entire CRM system. Customer data to be analyzed is added constantly and is combined with predictive analytics to plan out and strategize targeted marketing campaigns, newer product models, conceive new strategies and lastly to analyze the very success of the CRM model.

Customer interaction channels: Customer interaction channels are a direct indicator of the success or failure of a CRM model and needs to be constantly monitored. A better business has fewer calls/emails, lesser escalations and a high customer satisfaction to dissatisfaction ratio.

There are several types and variations of CRM available in the market today. You can choose one that best suits your needs and requirements.

For more info visit : CRM

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

Twitter & Microsoft CRM – Boosting Sales Together

Twitter is taking over. Well, it may not be that dramatic, but gradually Twitter has grown, and continues to grow in popularity. Celebrities use it, business people use it, college kids use it, practically everyone knows someone who uses it and that’s why your business needs to start taking notice of it.

Customers are what business is basically all about. Plenty of happy customers will lead to a successful business, it’s that simple. Keeping plenty of customers happy is a challenge though, dealing with their individual needs, catering for special requirements whilst keeping other customers content can be a constant balancing act.

Micorosoft’s Customer Relationship Management System can take a lot of the strain and administration out of keeping customers happy, informed and up to date. Microsoft CRM will automate tasks, allow you to plan for the future and give all of your employees access to customer information at the push of a button.

Now it has taken the management of customers one step further. Joining forces with Twitter through way of an accelerator module it now offers an insight into what your customers really think about your company and products. Tracking online conversations concerning specific businesses and their offering is allowing businesses to get real-time data and feedback from customers in their own environment. True feedback that hasn’t been prompted or incentivised.

Microsoft CRM can store conversations in customer profiles which can be added to over time. Customer data can be stored that includes phone numbers, email addresses and now Twitter usernames.

Businesses are now realising the power of social media and integration with existing systems will only boost its prominence further as it becomes an ever increasing important part of customer relations.

Pythagoras are Microsoft CRM
specialists and have implemented software solutions to over 650 organisations worldwide.

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

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Avoiding CRM Failure

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