CRM — CRM Guidebooks

CRM Lead Management

May 6, 2013 By leighton Leave a Comment

Here is a new CRM Lead Management Magic Quadrant from Gartner.

Lead management integrates business process and technology to close the loop between marketing and direct or indirect sales channels, and to drive higher-value opportunities through improved demand creation, execution and opportunity management.

The two leaders are Eloqua and Marketo, the leading “Marketing Automation” vendors. CRM systems like salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics have basic lead management.

Leaders in the CRM lead management market provide market-leading functionality that supports B2B, B2B2C and B2C lead management processes across multiple channels, and supports both outbound and inbound marketing processes

The summary is shown below but you can get the full report from Gartner or some of the vendors,

Why Mobile is critical to your CRM/ecommerce Strategy

June 4, 2012 By leighton Leave a Comment

If you want to be successful marketing at senior levels of B2B prospects you need to enable you web presence and systems to:

Handle web queries via Mobile

Market to visitors on Mobile devices

Deliver relevant content to a mobile enabled device

Drive the “buyers journey” on a mobile

Mobile is hot, but generally considered in the context of B2C rather than B2B businesses. A couple of new reports/graphs summarised here indicates that B2B and particulalry senior B2B executives have jumped ahead of the mass market.

The drivers behind this are:

High penetration of smart-phones in senior management
Lack of ‘desk’ time means that senior management needs access whilst mobile

The key behind success in this markt is to deliver a good mobile expereience across ALL phases of the sales cycle. Here’s a couple of data points to support the argument.

One-quarter of B2B ecommerce professionals around the world said the mobile web was one of the most influential touchpoints for their customers.

28% of USA B2B C-level executives used a mobile phone to research business purchases, compared to 25% of those outside the C-suite. This was even more apprent on tablets, where 21% of the C-level used a tablet compared to and 12% for those outside the C-suite.

Filed Under: CRM News and Views Tagged With: B2B, CRM, ecommerce, Mobile

Enterprise Tablets

May 11, 2012 By leighton Leave a Comment

How does your mobile workforce connect to your enterprise systems, like workflow, CRM and ERP? Typically today it will be by smart phone or PC but its likely that many are clamouring for a Tablet. This Infographic from Vertic gives a good summary on a sector that should grow 50% this year.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook summed up the tablet adoption phenomenon best:

“through the last quarter <Q1 2012>, I should say, which is just 2 years after we shipped the initial iPad, we’ve sold 67 million. And to put that in some context, it took us 24 years to sell that many Macs and 5 years for that many iPods and over 3 years for that many iPhones.”

Filed Under: CRM News and Views, CRM Presentations Tagged With: CRM, enterprise, iPad, Mobile, Tablet

How important is CRM Lead Generation & Lead Scoring

February 15, 2012 By leighton Leave a Comment

How important is Lead Generation to your Business? A high priority of THE TOP PRIORITY?

Does Lead Scoring Help?

A recent Marketing Sherpa report throws some light on these questions. In terms of Lead Generation, 3 of the top 4 “B2B Marketing Challenges” were related to Lead Generation.

The thing to note is that of the seven highest areas, only two were unrelated to lead generation and marketing to companies in the sales funnel. The CRM as the repository of the sales funnel, therefore has a critical role to play in helping with these challenges. To summarise the graphic, the focus is:

Generating High Quality Leads
Generating a high volume of Leads
Lead Generation across multiple content channels
Marketing to a lead already in the sales pipe and helping to nurture
Marketing to a prospect/lead and ALL the decision makers and influencers

While this happening, budgets are getting squeezed, so its important that your activities generate a return or ROI. Good news is that Marketing Sherpa have looked at this and have some good news on Lead Scoring.

Click for larger image

Great news if you do lead scoring, you get a 138% return, bad news is that 79% of B2B marketers are not lead scoring.

Next Steps:

Start working on Lead Scoring – this involves Sales and Marketing getting in a room together and nutting out some key issues. More here for Tips on Lead Scoring.

Download our Marketing Automation and Sales Key Account Management Guidebooks

Filed Under: CRM News and Views Tagged With: CRM, lead generation, lead scoring

CRM for Small Business

February 23, 2011 By leighton Leave a Comment

Here is the Salesforce.com CRM Demo for Small Business. If you are unsure whther you need a CRM then download our “Do you Need a CRM Guidebook” that covers benefits and reasons why not to buy.

Filed Under: CRM News and Views, CRM Videos Tagged With: CRM, salesforce, Small Business, SME

BI for CRM – Gartner’s View

February 17, 2011 By leighton 1 Comment

As I wrote in an earlier post Trends in BI for CRM there have been many mergers and acquisitions in this product area in recent years. There investments seem to have now paid off with acquiring companies SAP, Oracle and IBM now firmly entrenched in the Leader’s Quadrant.

When buying an CRM(or ERP) you will need to also buy some BI Products. You can either buy from your main system vendor or you can buy via another supplier. MicroStrategy, SAS and to a lesser extent Microsoft provide tools that integrate well with CRM systems to provide alternatives. New vendors include Tibco’s Sportfire which provide innovative SaaS tools and pricing models (very cheaply until you have lots or users – I have a friend who raves about it!).

Below is the quadrant image. We think that key areas to consider are reporting and collaboration, including reporting, management dashboards, KPI monitoring and sharing to MS Office or Intranets/SharePoint – add your BI specific needs to our CRM Checklist.

Filed Under: CRM News and Views, CRM Papers Tagged With: BI, CRM, Gartner, Oracle

BI trends for CRM

February 11, 2011 By leighton Leave a Comment

Business Intelligence or BI is a hotbed for activity in the CRM market at the moment. The key drivers have been market consolidation and a series of new trends.

There have been major rounds of consolidation:

SAP buys Business Objects/Crystal Reports,
IBM buys SPSS and Cognos,
Oracle buys Hyperion

The major standalone vendors is SAS. The CRM vendors have been busily buying into BI vendors to both gather market share and to use the installed base as a wedge into the competitor market s-hare. eg Oracle can attack the SAP base with Hyperion and vice-versa. In addition, most of these tools were vendor agnostic – so they play well on competitor platforms

As for trends, the key ones are:

BI on demand – cloud-based scalable capacity
In memory tools and data
Reporting and dashboards
Analysis and prediction tools
Enterprise Management

ERP and CRM systems are essentially ‘systems of record’. The BI tool-sets essentially can take their data and use them for decision making and action, but today this does not happen in real-time at the pace that the market needs. Hence why BI on-demand is important, as is ‘in memory’ BI – both promise faster results in real-time to the range of ‘what-if’ questions that get asked of managers.

Download our CRM Solutions Guidebook for more information.

Filed Under: CRM News and Views Tagged With: BI, CRM, IBM, Oracle, SAS

Microsoft Dynamics CRM launch

January 17, 2011 By leighton Leave a Comment

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 launch is only 2 days away.

Here are some resources if you are interested in Microsoft’s Cloud CRM options:

Launch event

30-day free trial

Special Launch pricing

If you have not decided on a product yet, download our CRM Checklist to help you pull together a list of things you need – and how to prioritise them.

Filed Under: CRM 2011 Resources, CRM News and Views Tagged With: CRM, CRM 2011, Dynamics 2011

CRM Basics

January 7, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a broad term for a variety of software solutions which aim to help a business:

learn more about customer needs and how they behave
develop stronger relationships with customers
to acquire more customers and to sell more to current customers
enhancing relationship with and retaining of customers

When buying a CRM system, there is usually a particular business problem that is being addressed – such as marketing, sales or customer service. The CRM system is designed to enhance and automate the business processes around customer relationships.

Download the free CRM checklist here and clarify the reasons you need CRM to ensure you find a successful solution.

Things to consider in a CRM solution

In addition there are other considerations such as what systems need to exchange data with the CRM system or whether the system is on-site or off-site. Other things that are important in selection a new system include the size of your business, whether the business is large or small, whether it will be used by a large number of people or a discrete group. You can consider buying an all encompassing solution called a suite or you can buy standalone systems to carry out specific functions. In the main small to medium businesses should consider suites whereas large businesses will consider suites and standalone solutions.

To find out more, based on your needs, you’ll find more information by following links below or via the tabs and menus above or by downloading our free CRM checklist.

Areas of CRM solutions

Marketing

CRM management of marketing resources, segments and lists, campaigns, leads, trade promotions, and marketing analytics.

Sales
Functionality for sales planning and forecasting and the management of territories, accounts, contacts, activities, opportunities, quotations, orders, product configuration, pricing, billing, and contracts.

Service
More effectively manage service orders, contracts, complaints and returns, warranties, resource planning, e-service, and service analytics. Functionality to support call centres, field service, and e-service provides flexible delivery options.

Partner channel management
Improve processes for partner recruitment and management, communications, channel marketing and forecasting, collaborative selling, partner order management, channel service, and analytics for partners and channel managers.

Call Centre

With CRM, a company can maximise customer loyalty, cut costs and boost revenue by transforming interaction center into a strategic delivery channel for marketing, sales, and service. Effectively handle activities such as telemarketing, telesales, customer service, human resources, IT support, and interaction center management.

Web channel enablement
Increase sales and reduce transaction costs by turning the Internet into a valuable sales, marketing, and service channel for businesses and consumers. Increase profitability and reach new markets with a fully integrated Web channel, including support for e-marketing, e-commerce, e-service, and Web channel analytics.

Analytics
CRM analytics are designed to provide you information as well as data from your CRM system. Analytics add-ons fall into a variety of types such as Business Intelligence, Reporting, Dashboards and Data Mining.

However, the key behind all these is the need to aggregate data in your CRM system to provide management information. This helps marketing people to design, target and run a marketing campaign, or helps a sales manager review his opportunity pipeline.

Mobile
CRM systems can extend their capability out to smartphones or notebooks with a communications capability. These are usually tailored for mobile ‘field’ staff such as sales people or technicians. They are designed to provide the core application functionality on a small screen. Typical applications are that a sales person can place an order or check product availability; a technician can run diagnostic checks or order spare parts.

Social CRM

Social CRM consists of tools that look into the social networking environment to understand how they affect your business, its reputation and what customers are saying about you. Products like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo are all tools that people connect, converse and communicate through. In the main they may talk about your business but that is not reflected in your customer systems. Social CRM tries to address this by extending traditional CRM platforms to capture this information. There are also a new breed of Social CRM platforms that focus only on capturing these elements and aggregating them.

Discover what basic features every CRM solution needs to help your business perform today!

Filed Under: CRM Basics Tagged With: Call centre, CRM, Marketing, Mobile, Sales, Service, Social CRM, Web Channel

Software Selection – Secrets of Success

October 26, 2010 By leighton Leave a Comment

Download our Buy the Right CRM Guidebook

eSavvy are an Australian CRM vendor – focused on Microsoft Dynamics. They have a great team and also consult to other Microsoft partners – they were also involved in the development of the Microsoft Sure Step implementation methodology. If partners are prepared to follow the lead of another partner, then that’s a sure sign of competence.

Read their full article on the pitfalls of getting it wrong.

Filed Under: CRM News and Views Tagged With: CRM, Dynamics

Outlook and CRM 2011 – Email Processing and Appointments

October 17, 2010 By leighton Leave a Comment

Microsoft are working hard at improving the processing of emails into appointments or sales opportunities. This reduces the amount of double handling of emails, as well as reducing mistakes and ‘lost’ opportunities.

The full post on the Dynamics 2011 Blog.

The Outlook integration should be Microsoft’s greatest strength for CRM and looks like they have worked that out at last. Read more about CRM 2011 under the CRM Resources tab. Pick a CRM Guidebook to help you learn more about successful CRM projects,

Filed Under: CRM 2011 Resources, CRM News and Views Tagged With: CRM, Dynamics, Dynamics 2011, Outlook

CRM functional Diagram

October 14, 2010 By admin 2 Comments

What is in CRM? A diagramme showing you all pieces that you may need to consider in a CRM

Filed Under: CRM Products Tagged With: CRM, Marketing, Sales, Service

Outlook and CRM

October 5, 2010 By leighton Leave a Comment

One of the more common queries on CRM-Guidebooks is people looking for information on Outlook and CRM. Its probably not surprising as many people spend much of their office life in Outlook, using it for email, calenders, tasks and contacts.

They often use the same functions in a CRM but rather than keeping all the information on one PC, its stored centrally. Within a CRM system the information becomes shareable, so both sales and customer service can work together on a customer issue.

So, the question seems to be – how do I get the best of both worlds? How can I work with both? There seems to be a number of options:

Using Outlook as the CRM – applicable for small businesses in the main. This is where a software company has developed and extended Outlook into a functional CRM platform that can be shared. Microsoft has a product called Business Contact Manager, that comes shipped with some version of Office. Other solutions can include Prophet, SalesOutlook and OpusFlowCRM.

Using Outlook Plug-Ins/Synchronisation tools – these are tools that allow customer-related contacts, calendar, tasks and emails to be synchronised between Outlook and the CRM. This means that the staff that use Outlook only need to synchronise when they are in the office, but ensures that if an email campaign needs to be sent, then the data is up to date. This is the route that salesforce.com and Zoho have taken.

Same Look and Feel – Microsoft is currently planning its release of CRM 2011 – where the integration between Outlook and CRM will be tighter. It appears that CRM has borrowed some features from Outlook – some videos are available under the resources tab.

Filed Under: CRM News and Views Tagged With: CRM, Dynamics 2011, Outlook, salesforce

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 – first look

September 22, 2010 By leighton Leave a Comment

Microsoft has gone to Beta on its new CRM 2011. Beta is usually the phase of a product’s development cycle just before release to the market. The objectives are for a large number of businesses to install it and try out the functionality – then to report back the issues they found. These issues are then fixed before final release.

Its usually done by companies that have already committed to a Microsoft CRM and want to use some new piece of functionality.

Here’s a couple of videos that have been posted. For this one – move forward to about minute 6 for a first look.

This video look at how the product can be configured. Start watching from 4 minutes.

Filed Under: CRM 2011 Resources, CRM Videos Tagged With: CRM, Dynamics 2011

Microsoft CRM is released for testing

September 21, 2010 By leighton Leave a Comment

Microsoft has begun Beta testing its next version of its CRM software – Dynamics CRM 2011. Looks like its got a lot of new functions and will more closely match the user interface of the Outlook email software. We’re searching for the best content on this at the moment – for now, here’s a piece from cnet showing some screen shots.

Here are some videos of the new look and feel – some nice touches.

Filed Under: CRM News and Views Tagged With: CRM, Dynamics 2011, Microsoft, Outlook

Choose the Right Solution

June 8, 2010 By leighton Leave a Comment

Smix Rego Page

Filed Under: Choose the Right Solution, Featured Tagged With: CRM, Data, Solution, Useability, Vendor

On-site

June 7, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

See Guidebook: Comparing Cloud with On-site CRM

On-site CRM, also known as licensed, on-premise, or in-house CRM, is a customer relationship management application that is housed at a client’s location, and managed by its own employees. Internal IT personnel are responsible for installing all hardware and software components, integrating the solution with existing systems, deploying it to end-users, and storing all related data. System administration, upgrades, and other routine maintenance are also performed by IT staff.

This means that the software, servers, network, user management are managed by the IT department. This is the traditional way of implementing a system.

Options here include

Microsoft Dynamics CRM
SAP CRM
Siebel from Oracle

Filed Under: On-site, Technology Tagged With: CRM, Dynamics, On-site, Oracle, SAP Business One, Siebel

Service

June 7, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

CRM can help a company deliver better customer service. By ensuring that all customer data is kept in one place and customer questions can be answered by one person, from the minimum number of systems.

Service CRM can more effectively manage service orders, contracts, complaints and returns, repairs, warranties, resource planning, e-service, and service analytics. Functionality to support call centers, field service, and e-service provides flexible delivery options.

Service functionality can be found in all the major CRM suites such as:

SAP
Salesforce.com
Microsoft Dynamics
Netsuite

In addition there are service specialist companies such as:

Kana
Ivinex
Parature

New revenue streams from support for service offerings are a common benefit coming out of CRM implementations.

For a quick four minute view – watch this video from salesforce.com

Service CRM: Learn the Key Features For Choosing a Service CRM Solution Here!

Filed Under: CRM Products, Function, Service Tagged With: CRM, Field, Field Service, Mobile, Service

Marketing

June 7, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

CRM systems when used well can help marketing departments prove their value to the business. Some types of marketing such as advertising provide only vague returns, as its hard to measure who bought your product from a newspaper advert. However, by using a CRM and sending out an email or a brochure you are able to measure who bought products – and so measure how much revenue was generated.

CRM can simplify marketing processes and drive customer. CRM functionality enhances management of marketing resources, segments and lists, campaigns, leads, trade promotions, and marketing analytics.

The benefits

Drive customer demand
Increase returns on marketing investments
Make intelligent business decisions with enhanced customer insights
Increase speed to market
Maximize visibility into and control of entire marketing process

Marketing functionality can be found in all the major CRM suites such as:
Microsoft Dynamics
SAP
Salesforce.com
NetSuite

In addition there are marketing specialist companies that do Marketing Austomation:
StrategyMix
Aprimo
Marketo
Eloqua

SilverPop

CRM Checklist: Compare And Score Your Top CRM Vendors Now!

Filed Under: CRM Products, Function, Marketing Tagged With: aprimo, CRM, eloqua, Functions, Marketing, marketo, silverpop, Solution, strategymix

Guide for Buying the right CRM

June 7, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

Smix Rego Page

Filed Under: CRM Guidebooks, Featured, Guide for Buying the right CRM Tagged With: Buyers Guide, Buying Guide, CRM, Guide, Guidebook

CRM Checklist

June 7, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

Smix Rego Page

Filed Under: Checklist for Choosing CRM, CRM Guidebooks, Featured Tagged With: Buyers Guide, Buying Guide, Checklist, CRM, Guidebook

Your need – new system or replacement

June 7, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

What is your experience with a CRM system? If you have never had a CRM system installed then look at the section in CRM Guidebooks on choosing the right solution and vendor. Both have downloads to help you look into and define your requirements. In simple terms you need to

look at what you do today
honestly judge whether have:
- good processes in place today (that you want to automate)
- limited processes or structure
- or bad processes in place ( that the CRM will ‘fix’ if you implement well)

If you are replacing a CRM system then you need to consider why it is being replaced? Is it a system that is not viable for the long term because it won’t grow with your business or have you lost confidence in it.

Similarly, if the solution did not work as well as you expected – what were the reasons – were they in the solution or were they due to commitment from your firm?

Download the Choosing a Solution and Choosing a Vendor Guidebooks for your business today!

Filed Under: CRM for Your Business, Your need – new system or replacement Tagged With: CRM, CRM Replacement, Process, Solution, Vendor

Size of Your Business

June 7, 2010 By admin 4 Comments

The size of your business is an important input into understanding the best solution.

There are systems designed for large companies and there are solutions designed for small business. For example, a system such as a Cloud-CRM is designed for either a small business or a department in a larger company. These are designed and built ‘from the ground up’ to handle small to large numbers of users.

On the other hand, some CRM systems are designed specifically for large busines. The overhead of these systems is such that it would be uneconomical to use in a small business.

For example, a small Business would not use a Siebel CRM or SAP CRM, but could consider Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Some vendors such as SAP have different products such as Business One with CRM functionality to fit into these small business segments.

Find the right CRM Vendor for you small, medium or enterprise business today!

Filed Under: CRM for Your Business, Size of Your Business Tagged With: Cloud, CRM, Dynamics, salesforce, SAP, SAP Business One, Siebel

Why Mobile is critical to your CRM/ecommerce Strategy

Enterprise Tablets

How important is CRM Lead Generation & Lead Scoring

How important is Lead Generation to your Business? A high priority of THE TOP PRIORITY?

Does Lead Scoring Help?

CRM for Small Business

BI for CRM – Gartner’s View

BI trends for CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM launch

Software Selection – Secrets of Success

Outlook and CRM 2011 – Email Processing and Appointments

CRM functional Diagram

Outlook and CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 – first look

Microsoft CRM is released for testing

Choose the Right Solution

On-site

Service

Marketing

Guide for Buying the right CRM

CRM Checklist

Your need – new system or replacement

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How important is Lead Generation to your Business? A high priority of THE TOP PRIORITY?

Does Lead Scoring Help?

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