Helping you select the right CRM for your business
This video happens to feature a Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner. It covers some key points on why I think Sales Force Automation has failed as I noted a few weeks ago.
Ignoring the technology stuff I liked the focus on:
What are your takeouts?
One of the major reason’s companies implement CRM is for Sales Force Automation(SFA). I think in this context it is over-sold and it under delivers.
The main gripe I have is with the Automation - SFA automates nothing, zero, zilch. It’s a bit of vendor jargon that sounds great but over promises.
SFA does not make the phone call, ask for the business, handle objections, build rapport, target the right people, answer the RFP, arrange the demonstration, do product training, agrees the price or arrange the client birthday cards. All these are key selling activities – so what does SFA do?
Many companies implement SFA and get many benefits ( see diagram below).
These are all valid benefits but there’s no Automation in sight:
My fundamental belief is that putting in a CRM/SFA system does deliver lots of benefits, but it’s not automating anything. OK, so getting a reminder to call your customer in 10 days time can be ‘automated’ but that could be done equally as well by a diary system.
What SFA does do is help the sales manager, by creating a common sales ‘system’ that can be pushed out to the sales team, which can then be measured and monitored. In many respects therefore, SFA automates aspects like sales pipeline reporting, but not the actual role and activities the sales people undertake – that takes humans and people management skills.
Suggested further reading:
Getting end to end Marketing funnel to Sales pipeline is getting harder to deliver:
The investments by Oracle as demonstrated in this video may address many of the issues and provide a single database style solution. They have invested in Market2lead for Automation, ATG for web data and content management, and now InQuira for analytics and Knowledge Management.
Add this to your CRM Checklist if its important to your business.
Sales application demo – Provides reps, managers and execs everything they need to focus on what’s important: more selling and less administration.
Watch and then download our Key Account Management Guidebook to help you plan a sales CRM strategy.
Setting sales goals and territories in the ‘perfect world’ would be a once-a-year activity, but rarely is. Its broken down into two phases:
Read our Sales Key Account Management Guidebook for a resource that outlines a process for assigning budgets, territories etc.
Also, from this Microsoft Dynamics CRM blog you can see how that product handles the need to vary budgets as the year goes by. Good to see that the reality of sales management and goal setting has made it into the product.
I came across this good summary slide on the options available. Different vendors have different capability and positions on each – this is often because of the way they built and designed their applications.
Identify your preferences and put them into your CRM ‘must have list’. Our CRM Checklist will help as a template for your needs and to evaluate vendors.
Double Click to get a larger version of table
We’ve had lots of interest in Key Account Management articles we have written. Here is a quick video on implementing a KAM plan in SAP’s CRM system. Many of the lessons can be applied to other platforms.
This is a presentation available both as a video and also slideshare. Read more about CRM for Marketing.
It comes from a recent salesforce conference called “Dreamforce”. Looks at Marketing as a Revenue Generation department, rather than a cost only department.
Its about an hour long, so grab some lunch and watch.
Slides
Getting hard data for the benefits of CRM can sometimes be a challenge. Here is a report by CSO insights (on behalf of Microsoft) on the benefits.
Top 3 benefits measured
These are pretty significant results as they can increase ‘selling time’.
Read more about CRM for Sales or Download our Checklist that includes Sales Functionality you should review.
Click on image to enlarge.
This blog was prompted by a recent article describing the benefits of CRM to small business. On reflection it was an article describing features and functions but light on benefits. Download our “Guide for Buying the Right CRM” to choose your solution and vendor.
CRM systems are designed for three business functions:
The key features of sales functionality are managing contacts, organising sales appointments and managing sales opportunities. The Service features include the ability to share knowledge and expertise across the support staff to deliver quality customer service. The marketing features include campaign management, market feedback and optimised tactics and messages.
Even at this level, it seems that these remain features rather than benefits. Below are the key benefits for each.
Sales
Managing contacts is all about capturing the details about an individual and a company in one place. On an individual you will want to capture all the details on a person’s business card. You will also want to capture that person’s “role” rather than their title e.g. the role may be Chief Financial Officer (CFO) although the “title” can be different, such as GM Finance( we will see why this is important later).
At a company level you will want to capture all the individuals within that company under the company umbrella.
A sales person will also want to manage appointments in the CRM. This will allow you to plan your sales effort and opportunities to ensure that you are contacting the right people and companies.
Sales opportunities are where leads are managed from suspects to prospects to opportunities to customer and then repeat customers. CRM is good at helping a business manage their future growth in this arena
The major benefits for sales is time saving, making it more efficient, reducing rework and cross checks. As a management tool it also provides a better understanding of future sales and what resources are being applied.
Service
Service functions of CRM are about sharing knowledge and expertise. Questions can be posed, answers captured and shared. A service representative can identify a problem and share a resolution if it’s new. Experience can be digitised and shared as can manuals and training.
The benefits are that patterns can become clear and the service operation can become proactive. For example, if a product has an issue then all owners of that product can be contacted. This demonstrates preventative maintenance, a reduced time to repair and reduced downtimes.
Marketing
Marketing is often one of the weakest areas within a business, and often misunderstood. Similarly the marketing functions of a CRM.
Marketing Campaigns are in the simplest terms a set of activities to communicate a message to customers or prospective customers. Campaign Management is how these are pulled together:
For example if you wanted to send an email to people in the finance function. The best way would be to use the CFO “role” we discussed above, rather than looking through individual finance titles. In this case the medium is email; the message may be a new product or service you want to promote. The CRM will help you assemble this campaign and then to send it out to the target list. The CRM system can also capture responses or actions such as people visiting your web page.
The marketing functionality can provide you insight into customers and prospects at a macro-level (what was the most read articles, what was least read) as well as micro-level (a customer looks at a new product pricing page) that may generate new business opportunities.
The key benefit to a marketing function is that what could be complex marketing campaigns if done manually, can be easily created and executed. Even more important is that you can measure the response to a campaign more easily and then create a new one from the experience.
Summary
One of the terms often held up as a benefit of CRM is “a single source of the truth”. This requires a little time and effort, but it means that all the customer facing information on a client is held in the CRM, this is then accessible and shareable to all relevant staff. This reduces the amount of cross-checking and reworking of activities associated with that customer. This saves time and money – and allows you spend more time on activities that grow your business.
Download our “Guide for Buying the Right CRM” to choose your solution and vendor.
Key Account Management is used as a sales management too where the company has limited sales resources – it is used to identify the right sales targets, align sales and marketing resources to maximise opportunities. CRM system can be used to store the information relevant to that customer.
Download the Sales Key Account Management Guidebook for which CRM features are critical.
Key Account Management is an important area of sales management, particularly in B2B environments. Its used when a large part of the revenue comes from a small number of the customer base.
In this case, its important to assign resources around these customers to grow the revenue. This involves identifying the Key accounts and then building plans for each of them.
Once all of this has been done, CRM is used for a number of reasons:
For more information and some vendor ideas read CRM for Sales.
For more information on what functionality Sales needs from a CRM then Download the Checklist.
One of the key motivators for businesses to invest in a CRM solution is to better manage sales, sales people, sales pipeline etc. This is usually due to the frustrations of trying to manage these things on spreadsheets.
I like how this is explained and handled in the new Dashboards from Microsoft. The full article has nice pretty pictures to give you a complete view – in essence it answers these typical questions from a sales manager:
1. When entities I am interested in were modified?
2. What does my lead and opportunity pipeline look like?
3. Are there any accounts that have been deactivated?
4. How many leads were disqualified recently?
5. Have we lost any opportunities?
6. How many orders are in the pipeline? Have any orders been cancelled?
7. How many quotes are we working on? Have any been cancelled?
Mobile – trends and implications
This Aberdeen research seems to be raising the bar in CRM!
Sales is in transition, with laptop/computers being replaced by tablets. However, they are not ‘just’ screens, but mobile applications.
Those mobile applications are not a one-size-fits-all product. They are replacing the generic CRM mobile client with a more wholistic toolset that is
Mobile apps improve productivity according to the Yankee Group and this is covered in more detail in Mobile Productivity gains.