Alcohol, in moderation is good for you, but too much fixes nothing. Equally Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions are fantastic at solving specific business issues, just don’t expect them to fix everything. Certainly don’t fall for the line that XYZ CRM solution from ABC Ltd will increase your business by 25 per cent and reduce your marketing costs by half.
CRM solutions are built around one single premise: grow your business by winning new customers or selling more to existing customers. Every CRM solution that I have looked at in the last five years – be it a hosted ASP solution like Salesforce.com or an in-house solution like SalesLogix has – “Win more customers and grow your business” at the centre of what it does. So if that’s what CRM does for business you’d expect adoption rates to be much higher than the current five per cent take-up to date in the UK B2B market place.
So why is this the case? It’s down to the fact that CRM companies market their products on functionality and brand alone and often rely on their business partner channel to translate their software functionality into business needs. And it’s getting to the bottom of these needs that is absolutely essential when deciding whether CRM can be used to solve your company’s issues today.
Understand business needs
We now have a starting point for a CRM project. Define the needs of your business first; don’t go out searching for products yet. If you do, you’ll suddenly find that your business needs match exactly the product functionality being touted by the best CRM product salesman you see. Funny that.
How do you define needs? It’s pretty straightforward, but you have to be methodical about it. Look at all the areas of your business that touch your customers and prospects and build your needs around those. Take each department or function in turn and take time to understand how your processes work and information flows from department to department today. Once you start looking, you’ll quickly realise that you’ve probably been doing day-to-day tasks in a way that can really be improved upon.
Tracking ROI
As marketers we all need to give a credible answer to the question: “what revenue does marketing activity bring to the business?” We know that we can only give this if we can create a reliable link between campaign responses and closed business. Ideally, we need to maintain a link in the business systems between an initial response to a marketing activity and the value of a closed order.
How many companies can do this today, at the touch of a button without trawling through different company systems? When I joined my last company as marketing manager, my process went something like this: do an exhibition, fill in a lead enquiry form, record it on Excel, email it to the sales manager, allocate it to an account manager and then nothing. It was like the lights went out, the lead would fall into the account manager’s bag, maybe a call would be made to follow it up, maybe it wouldn’t, I’d have no way of knowing
There was precious little mechanism in place to manage opportunities let alone feed information back to the marketing function. I identified marketing returns by trawling through the accounting system matching invoices up against enquiries. It took a day a month and believe me it was a heartless task.
Support benefits
Tracking marketing return on investment was my main need but CRM has the ability to do much more for a business than that. There are obvious benefits to the sales and customer support processes that CRM is designed to bring. But again, before you come in steamroller-style declaring that CRM is going to sort out your falling sales, take a step back and identify how improvements can be made to the way these functions work today.
By understanding the needs of the company as a whole and applying those to the CRM implementation, you will find yourself well on the road to realising the benefits you need from day one of the system go-live.
