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What can a good CRM system do for a business?
What benefits should I expect to reap from a properly implemented CRM system?
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9 Answers
Hi Courtney,
What is most interesting about the first three answers is that they are all different and frequently discuss functionality. From these answers, then, we can see that CRM does different things for different companies and provides multiple functionalities in most implementations.
But enough of functionality.
Let's answer your actual question, Courtney, which was about BENEFITS. Let's also assume a well implemented CRM system with good usage and compliance.
Higher level benefits include:
- increased sales effectiveness
- higher sales numbers and lower sales costs
- shorter sales cycles
- more effective sales and operations management through
....- more accurate and more detailed reporting
....- more effective forecasting
Second level benefits that drive those higher level benefits inlcude:
- Automated repetitive, routine sales tasks
- More time freed up for
....- creative selling
....- face-to-face selling
....- phone-to-phone selling
....- creative (non-repetitive) email-to-email selling
- Encouragement and/or enforcement of best practices in
....- sales
....- customer service
- Encouragement of best use of staff resources by
....- enabling team selling
....- sharing of information among all team members
....- using the right staff resource for each task
.......- (could include 3rd party call report and data entry)
.......- (See Telenotes SPS)
.- Closing of more opportunities by better opportunity tracking
- Retention of all customer information and activities when
....- customer facing staff goes to with the competition
....- customer facing staff is let go
- More effective campaigns due to
....- better retained info about customer/prospect
....- stated preferences
....- past actions
....- projected future buying trends
- Easy accessibility of sales resources to everyone
What one benefit is most important?
Jim Dickie, a Partner at CSO Insights, makes the point that when a company increases sales effectiveness, all the other benefits follow. Thanks Jim. Good point.
Are there other benefits available from CRM?
- Sure.
Are some benefits more important in one company than another?
- Sure.
If you want to really win big in the benefits department, consider working with a good CRM consultant to insure that you properly develop and understand
- the prioritized benefits you need for your company
- the right technology to deliver those benefits
- the right alignment of technology, processes and people
- the corporate goals for sales
- the strategies to achieve the goals
Remember, the best benefit of all is better sales effectiveness. With that, everybody wins and other benefits follow.
Consistency. CRM = Customer Relationship Management. It helps you manage your relationship with your customers, ensuring you are giving the best service. A well designed CRM will assist your organization in ensuring you are providing consistently great customer service. By using the CRM with all customer contacts, you have a record of what has been said to them, by whom, what has been sent to them, when you followed up, when you need to followup, etc.
Additionally, when that top producing sales person leaves the company, the history of his/her dealings with that customer are retained.
Need to move staff around, their customer base is document, along with what has been sold, what is in the pipeline, etc.
Need to send out marketing material, your customer base is invaluable. Need a form letter sent to a customer, its as easy as a couple of clicks to generate a personalized letter with your form format on it, along with a shipping label.
Customer service - the records are centralized, and integrated with sales orders, change orders, etc. to help understand what is going on with the customer. Additionally, many have access to those records via a customer portal - saving valuable staff time, giving customers faster access to their own situation.
This is touching on some of the features, yours could be very different depending on how you want to use and implement the system - but its a must if you want to provide consistently great customer service to your customers.
David - I think you'll find that is an advert :)
A good CRM brings all the information flowing through a company regarding their customers/prospects into one centralized location. This information should then be accessible to everyone within the company who is responsible for the satisfaction of those clients and prospects.
A good CRM MUST be a no brainer for field sales people. It must be easy to use and always available even while they are in the field.
A good CRM must be adopted and fully supported by senior level management.
What can it do for you? You should expect to see an increase in sales simply due to the fact that important details regarding every opportunity are easy to view, engage, delegate and complete. Nothing slips through the sales opportunity cracks.
Best of Success!
Tom
A good CRM system will do absolutely nothing for your business. It is a simple answer and I guess I should qualify it.
Without knowing what it is you want to do with it, it doesn't matter if your CRM is good, bad or indeed some oranges.
The key to good CRM and increasingly good CRM is currency of data, mandated for use across the sales, marketing and service organisations and as easy to use as possible.
CRM systems are knowledge and knowledge is what drives business; especially knowledge of what your clients and prospective clients need right now.
Traditional CRM systems will bring you great knowledge of how things were the last time you asked. They are only as good as the dedication of your people. Social CRM, done the right way, tells you what your existing contacts and people you don't even know yet want in as close to real-time as possible.
It doesn't have to be hard, it just has to be done.
Steve - Whilst I accept my answer is 'different', with respect it doesn't discuss functionality at all. I totally concur with your benefits driven view of CRM however benefits only come with realisation and realisation only comes with mandate and buy-in. I reiterate my point that it doesn't matter how good the software is, it is the business process that makes it beneficial.
Hi Chris,
Great comment.
The assumption in my response was "assume a well implemented CRM system with good usage and compliance".
Clearly you are correct in that the three key points that you have addressed:
- obtaining and sustaining mandate
- obtaining and sustaining buy-in
- good business processes
are key ingredients in that assumption and necessary to maximizing benefits from CRM.
I hope we agree that while the goal of "maximizing increased sales effectiveness" as a desired benefit is easy to say and understand, it is challenging to accomplish well and requires your three points . . . and a lot more.
Fair enough, my apologies. Feel free to remove.
I'm going to explain this through the 'WORKetc' perspective because I work with them and I believe their software is ''good."
WORKetc's CRM portion is infused with project management tools and billing tools. It therefore puts contacts at the center of the software, but allows tools to manage an entire business throughout. There's easy access to client information at all times, from wherever you are in the program.
To name a few of WORKetc's 'CRM' features:
-assign sales leads
-qualify leads/set status'
-sales pipelines
-collaborate on leads
-set sales actions/alerts
-detailed reports
-custom web forms
-automatic conversion of leads into quotes, projects, invoices
-help desk support
-thousands of customization options
-intuitive/easy to learn software
I think these are exemplary when it comes to sufficient CRM features, along with the bells and whistles. You can see the rest of WORKetc's features in a feature by feature comparison to competitors here: http://www.worketc.com/compare
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