The importance of information gathered during a customer call cannot be exaggerated. This means that calls to customers should be carefully planned and the results recorded in way which allows later analysis of the information gained.
Good sales persons will know how often they should visit their customers and have a good knowledge of customers attitudes and requirements. However even the best sales person will sometimes forget a call and information not stored online is not available for analysis. A well designed CRM system will provide means for suggesting calls to be made on the basis of the date of the last visit and the potential of the customer. Going into more detail, a CRM-System can support sales people by offering a customer-specific check-list of important points and will make the job of entering call data simple.
This is basically a very simple process and is often, exactly for this reason, overlooked during application design. Some of the most succesful companies guide the frequency and content of customer visits very closely – CRM in practice!
Tags: call scheduling, crm
The World Cup is here again, cars and houses are once more flagged and the streets are empty during games. The key word here is loyalty. Why are people loyal to the team they support? At a time when companies are looking for ways to promote loyalty, people are turning to sports and social media. There is a lesson to be learned from this. People can only be loyal where emotions are involved, and emotions are built around people. There is a strong need to identify with a group of people with similar attitudes and opinions.
Companies which attempt to reach customers by offering the lowest prices or the newest technology may have success so long as they are the cheapest or the best, but they will not keep their customers when conditions changed. This may be one recipe for success, but companies able to generate an identity to which people can relate will do better. Evidently, creating and maintaining the identity is a case for the entire staff of a company, but a good CRM concept should provide the organizational basis by supplying the right information at the right time.
Loyalty is more important than the promotion of special offers and technical gimmicks.
Tags: crm, Loyalität, World Cup
After all the hype on the use of social media, the time has come to think about what has happened (or not happened). One thing is certain – using and keeping track of social media is a time consuming activity. Following LinkedIn, Twitter, XING or Facebook, can fill your day and often produce no useful results. So time consuming that there is a definite danger, that real life contacts and opportunities may be overseen.
While social media to produce sales relevant information, the task of separating the relevant from the mass of irrelevant data requires considerable effort and this should not be the task of sales persons. Further, the mass of information must be processed before any of the the data is entered into your CRM system. Further, it is important to decide how the information is to be used before starting down this road. is it your aim to create new contacts for your sales organization or to keep track of the activities of current customers?
Talking to a group of sales people recently, the general view was, that personal contacts are becoming more rather than less important than before. Certainly in B2B business, prospective customers are becoming increasingly resistant to E-Mail and Call Center contacts.
Unternehmen geben viel Geld aus um festzustellen, was Kunden wollen. Erfolgreiche Unternehmen nutzen die Erkenntnisse um eine Strategie für Kundengewinnung und -entwicklung entwickeln zu können. Politiker scheinen dagegen nur die Interessen Ihrer Parteien in Betracht zu ziehen. Herr Gauck hat recht, unsere Politiker haben sich von der Kundschaft, vom Volk, abgekoppelt. Kein Wunder, dass die Kundschaft abwandert und nach Alternativen sucht.
In diesem Fall, ist für die Regierung ein Problem Herrn Gauck in Betracht zu ziehen, weil der Vorschlag von der “falschen” Seite kommt, obwohl die Einstellung der Wähler erstaunlich klar ist. Meint die Regierung alles besser zu wissen, oder ist die Parteilinie wichtiger als das Wohl des Volks?
Tags: Bundespräsident, crm, Gauck
Selecting ten vendors out of the 140+ vendors in the (German) market is not a task for beginners. The tendency is to go for the big names, but this does not necessarily get you the best solution for your requirements. Many of the lesser known suppliers have excellent products and may match your needs better than a product purchased on the basis “the product has so much functionality, we will find what we need in their somewhere” (this is a quote from a recent prospect). Firstly, this may not be the case and secondly, disposing of unwanted functionality can be an expensive business.
These are the steps you need to take:
- Define your infrastructure requirements
- Name the required interfaces to groupware, ERP or other essential software
- Decide if you wish to be a small customer of a large vendor or an important customer of a smaller vendor or if this is a factor at all
- Name the major modules you require such as sales, marketing and support and the most important processes required
- Work with an experienced consultant or use online services to make a list of 20 vendors
- Reduce the number to 10 and off goes your RFP
Use the responses to the RFP to form your opinion about the product and the quality of the reaction to your request. Qualified vendors or partners will suggest that they need to know more about your application before sending you a reply. This is in fact correct and a sign of competence, but you cannot spend time with up to 20 suppliers. The RFP, as explained in a previous post, must allow suppliers to show their strengths and not just be a list of check boxes.
On the basis of the reactions you may want to invite around 5 suppliers to a presentation. It is better to have these people demonstrate one or two processed in detail than to give a general tour of their product. Any skilled sales person can make a good impression if he just shows the chocolate side of his product. Invite users to attend the presentations.
This process will enable you to select a maximum of 3 suppliers to run a preliminary workshop with you, the aim of which is to give you deeper knowledge of the product and the implementation partner and for the partner to be able to estimate the project costs and effort.
Tags: crm, CRM Investment, CRM Software
Looking down the empty aisles during the CRM exhibition in Mainz, it seems that CRM is no longer a theme which attracts visitors. This gave me time to go and visit other vendors and hear what they had to say. Not much to my surprise, I heard the same story many times over, only the product name changed. The various CRM products have become so similar to each other, that there really is no need to visit a fair. The products do differ under the surface, but trade fairs are not the place to get under the surface.
The major products are becoming toolkits for the development of individual CRM applications, so companies need to look more at their potential project partner than at the software manufacturer. Smaller products such as cobra CRM PLUS are there for those looking for an out-of-the-box solution. instead of adding more and more unnecessary functions to the products, companies such as cobra should be expanding the technology base to allow customers to install distributed applications.
Tags: cobra, crm, crm plus, CRM Software
Knowing what you need is the key to making the best selection, but how do you go about defining your requirements? Frequently an unhappy employee is charged with checking the functions of the products on the market in order to come up with a set of ideas. This is just not the way to go and will lead to a choice of a product with the most functions but not necessarily the best fit.
Start with the business case and clear business aims which may be anything from reducing sales and marketing costs to increasing customer satisfaction. Évidently, this is a management task, so management must be involved.With these aims in mind, look for the processes which may be installed or improved in relation to your goals. In a few days I will add a document to this blog with ideas on how to find the processes and listing a selection of the most important items. There is too much information for a post.
Sometimes this process will show that no complex solutions are required, a solution based on address and contact management may be adequate. Alternatively you may find that your requirements are not available in any standard products, meaning that customizing becomes a major issue. Whichever way it goes, it should be possible to relate each process to the business aims and subsequently to select the most suitable solution.
It can offer help to look at your company from the customer point of view. Even if the business aims are limited to increasing increasing sales efficiency customers should register an improvenmt in sales service.
Watch for downloads from this site!
Tags: CRM Applications
In the past few weeks, I have been concerned with a number of companies starting a new CRM project. In a surprising number of cases the process has been something like this:
- Check the internet for possible suppliers
- Download product descriptions and request informations from suppliers
- Watch online demonstrations
- Attempt to read the mass of information gathered
- Give up, prepare a list of requirements and start over
This is evidently not the right way to go about it. Not only is it time consuming and unproductive but it can also lead to false results. It is absolutely essential to determine requirements before looking at any products at all. Products are around to improve and optimize business processes, not to define them.
The process could look like this:
- Define the requirements
- Build a business case
- Prepare a document describing the required processes (NOT functions)
- Select a number of potential suppliers on the basis of product reputation and market positioning
- Ask these suppliers to show how the processes could be implemented with their products
If you have no resources for defining the requirements, then go to a qualified consultant (preferably not a potential supplier). This may be appear costly, but time saved will more than compensate this. Even reading this blog may help!
Tags: crm, RFP, Sales, Vertrieb
The process of selecting CRM software has been discussed and described many times and in great detail. My recent experience has been however, that there are some basic and simple guidelines which are often ignored. Projects do not necessarily fail as a result of this, but many projects are much more costly than they need be and user satisfaction is often not as good as it might be. My next posts will handle these topics.
- The business case: Can my company benefit from a first or replacement CRM system?
- The project brief: What must the project achieve?
- Project organization: Who should be involved in the project?
- Researching the market
- Preparing a RFP, defining the requirements
- Working with consultants
- Creating a short list
- The final choice
- Design and Programming Specification
Keep watching!
Tags: CRM Software
The importance of a modern, functional internet presence cannot be exaggerated. Which functions are essential for the furthering of customer relations? Try these:
- Personalized information on products and services for customers and prospects
- Customer forum for product features – present and future
- Technical support and advice
- eCommerce (where applicable)
Most company internet sites talk at readers rather than with readers and allow little or no dialog opportunities apart from a simple contact form or telephone number. This puts the barrier much too high for customers who may have something valuable to say but do not want to reach for the phone or wait for an answer. A customer forum in some form presents an ideal opportunity for gathering ideas, comments and positive criticisms. When a forum with groups, themes etc. is not suitable there are alternatives, for example a competition of some kind. An excellent example is the Smart Design Contest. This success of this well designed interaction shows that customers and prospects will happily contribute constructive ideas and comments. Apart from gathering new ideas for product development, marketing specialists have an excellent basis for trend analysis.
Every forum needs administration and editing – not all comments are friendly or suited for publication – but the costs and effort involved are balanced by the advantages of closer customer relations and also by the value of information gained.
Integration with a CRM application should filter information gathered and channel this information to the relevant employees or user groups. In the case of support oriented applications the business processes for handling incidents (ITIL) are generally well defined and implemented. In the case of sales, this is very often not the case although CRM software with workflow and customizing tools is available.
Tags: CRM Forum
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