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CRM Software vs. Microsoft Excel

Sep 2

Gepostet von David Duncan in CRM, Customer Relations, Marketing | Keine Kommentare

 

In a discussion today with a major PC systems integrator, I was told that the company worked quite happily with Microsoft Excel and Word  for CRM purposes and had no plans to make any changes. This was bad news for someone offering CRM consultancy, so I followed up with some questions.

The sales and marketing organizations are producing good results. Sales activities are largely not documented, but a well organized ERP application provides reliable information on goods and services purchased. A simple ticketing system provides a record of service activities. The company has a stable customer base. Sales processes are simple and are supported by the ERP-System.

In this particular situation, there really would be little gained by introducing a CRM system. There is no need for sales persons to produce offers or take orders while on the road. News letters and customer correspondence can be produced and sent with Microsoft Office products. A Sharepoint depository holds all customer records.

The situation would change however, if the owner/manager were not coordinating and guiding operation himself, thus ensuring a high quality of customer service. If further management levels were introduces this would also change the scenario as would a period of rapid growth. In this case the strategy of the company is to maintain and protects its customer base and to grow only through the sale of more services to a slowly growing number of customers.

So what am I trying to say? Basically that CRM sales persons should be aware that CRM systems are not per se essential for a successful operation. This will depend on the size and processes of the organization. Particularly in the case of an owner managed company, the owner will (normally) be the first to notice when the operation is not running efficiently.

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Two views of Social Media in relation to CRM

Aug 12

Gepostet von David Duncan in CRM | Keine Kommentare

Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have generated considerable hype and this seems to have given CRM Product Managers an opportunity to produce new ideas, not without reason.

 Not only the number of users, but also the average amount of time spent per user on social networking sites has climbed substantially in the past year. So it is not surprising that Social CRM is being pushed as one of the top ten technologies for 2010! We have however seen a number of hypes which have not had the expected results, so let’s look at the situation more carefully.

What is Social CRM? Certainly nothing new, since Customer Relationships have always been relationships whether based on person to person contacts, on telephone calls or print media. What we do have is a new set of tools, though unfortunately no-one in the CRM Software industry seems to know how they should be used.

There are two ways of looking at the situation, one from the point of view of a sales organization looking for information on prospects or customers and one from the point of view of the prospects and customers. For B2C sales and marketing, the relevance of social media is self evident, here I am more concerned with B2B.

Sales people will be interested in gathering information on the contacts they know or in finding new contacts. A surprising amount of information is out there to be found in facebook, xing, youtube etc., so it is to be hoped that CRM software will soon offer tools which gather information from these sites more or less automatically. Ideally this information will include any posts relevant to the suppliers products or services.

To quote from Siebel (http://blogs.oracle.com/socialcrm/)

 Sales users are able to get a quick view of activities in their social networks such as recently published content and posting from other members

Prospects and customers will (hopefully) wish to have access to product and other information. Whether or not suppliers provide this information by their web site, in blogs or other social sites is in my opinion not an issue for CRM software. The software should provide however for capturing any access to this information for lead generation.

To quote from Siebel ()

To date, the number of qualified leads coming from social media seems to be low, but this will change as the new media come to be used for more than chat and self-expression.

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Check this out – Pivotals Social CRM Solution

Jul 19

Gepostet von David Duncan in CRM | Keine Kommentare

This is a pragmatic approach to linking CRM with Social Web: http://www.cdcsoftware.com/en/PivotalCRM/Products/Social-CRM.aspx

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The importance of call scheduling for CRM

Jun 11

Gepostet von David Duncan in CRM, Customer Relations | Keine Kommentare

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!

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What can CRM learn from the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa?

Jun 10

Gepostet von David Duncan in CRM, Customer Relations, Social CRM | Keine Kommentare

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.

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CRM, Gauck und das Volk

Jun 7

Gepostet von David Duncan in CRM | Keine Kommentare

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?

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How to select CRM Vendors for a short list

Jun 2

Gepostet von David Duncan in CRM, CRM Projects, CRM Software | Keine Kommentare

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:

  1. Define your infrastructure requirements
  2. Name the required interfaces to groupware, ERP or other essential software
  3. 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
  4. Name the major modules you require such as sales, marketing and support and the most important processes required
  5. Work with an experienced consultant or use online services to make a list of 20 vendors
  6. 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.

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Working with consultants

Mai 31

Gepostet von David Duncan in CRM Projects, CRM Software | Keine Kommentare

Here we need a distinction between the well known consultancy organizations such as Accenture, Bearing Point or Deloitte and freelance consultants or small specialized companies.

Large companies will tend to talk to large organization, so let’s start there. Accenture and similar organizations will tend to give the impression that due to their size, they have specialists for everything. To a certain extent this is true, but it is generally surprising how few specialists for each topic there are and it is also true that there will be virtually no people with in depth knowledge of several products, so be sure to look carefully at the qualifications of the staffing proposed. Of the three main project phases

  1. requirements definition
  2. product selection
  3. implementation

these organizations are well suited to assist in phases 1 (maybe) and 3 (recommended), but should not be involved in  phase 2. Large organizations are interested in selling large numbers of consulting days and this is more likely with a product such as SAP than of say Pivotal CRM, so it is not difficult to guess which product will be recommended.

Freelancers and small partnerships may well be involved in phase 2. Do not expect these consultants to know all the CRM Products in detail. They will know however, which suppliers have a good track record in your line of business and will be able to assist you in the selection process. The selection and the responsibility for the selection remains with the buyer. These smaller organizations may will be involved in phase 1 if the number of potential users is not too high.

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sales and service fair in Mainz

Mai 25

Gepostet von David Duncan in CRM, CRM Software | Keine Kommentare

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.

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How do I start looking for a CRM solution?

Mai 7

Gepostet von David Duncan in CRM, CRM Projects, CRM Software | Keine Kommentare

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!

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