CRM is Customer Relationship Management. It is a strategy used to learn more about prospects and customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together disparate of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends using converging technologies.

The idea of CRM is that it helps businesses use technology and human resources to gain insight into the behavior of customers and the value of those customers.

The Benefits of CRM

We can exhaust you with more words so better to graphically demonstrate our philosophy and experience.

As for the results, for example but not limited to:

• Provide better customer service and satisfaction from faster issue resolution.
• Make call centers, inbound and outbound contact more efficient.
• Cross-sell products more effectively.
• Help sales staff close deals faster.
• Simplify marketing and sales processes via configurable workflow tools.
• Discover & respond to new potential customers quicker.
• Increase revenues from improved lead follow through.
• Lower cost through improved productivity.
• Manage risk through succession planning.
• Add shareholder value.

Good CRM can help improve your business processes in areas such as:

• Increased accuracy, consistency and timeliness of information.
• Improve responsiveness to marketing campaigns.
• Map and automate workflow.
• Share account status and histories.
• Web lead and registration data.
• Systematic and consistent event management.
• Service and support management.
• Automated alerts and reminders.
• Demographic data profiling.
• Distribution of sales and forecast data.
• Up to date information, thanks to comprehensive, real-time measurements and analytical metrics.

Actually CRM technology has been specifically designed for small and medium scale businesses. There are elements of CRM systems, such as contact, lead, account, order, and case management, which are fundamental to SME businesses and deliver tangible business value.

The benefits of CRM philosophy and technology stem from increased revenue and decreased costs. Increased revenue primarily comes from more satisfied customers, the ability to up sell and cross-sell, and higher acceptance rates on marketing campaigns. Reduced costs are attained through a reduction in administrative time used to track down information, improved reporting, and quicker issue resolution.

Creating a Single View of the Enterprise

For newly emerging businesses regardless of scale, CRM is not longer an after thought in the businesses genesis. CRM is the core, the foundation of a great business. CRM Works mission is that with converging technologies and competition, contact management solutions can now be eliminated early as true, scalable, adaptive, integrated and internet enabled CRM is universally affordable through partnership with CRM Works and Sage Business Solutions.

Critical Success Factors

Entry level contact management solutions are no longer a viable and economic fix. Software costs may be low but deployment costs are the same as a contemporary true CRM solution such as Sage Accpac CRM. If your business is successful, the limits of a poorly conceived contact management solution are quickly reached and the business could falter as the entire assessment process must restart. The impact on morale alone can be devastating.

For existing businesses

Successful CRM projects address an acute pain felt by salespeople, customer service agents, or marketers. Functionality should be purchased in priority order to address the highest pain points. Small successes are then built on to keep momentum going.

The top 10 SME business pain points are:

Decision-Making Factors

SME businesses should consider four key decision-making factors when embarking upon a CRM project: business process change, vendor selection, timeline, and cost.

Business process change: The goal is to introduce common processes, not to fundamentally change the way the company does business. Small businesses should choose ease of use over complex functionality that requires major business process adaptation.

Vendor selection: It is often necessary to make two vendor decisions: software vendor and implementation vendor. Implementation partners are chosen based on their ability to work well with business and IT teams and their understanding of industry-specific requirements. The software vendor selection is based on architecture, functionality, ease of use, implementation time, scalability and company viability.

Timeline: Implementation timeline varies from two weeks to two months with an average of thirty days.

The Sustainable Benefits of Great CRM are:

• High user adoption due to ease of use.
• Lower costs through reduction in administration time and overall improved productivity.
• Increased revenue from improved lead follow through.
• Improved revenue from well defined sales cycle.
• Increased customer satisfaction from improved access to data.
• Increased customer satisfaction from faster issue resolution.

Summary

Choosing the right CRM technology will help your businesses to sell more to existing customers, acquire new customers faster, and better manage the business. Well considered CRM solutions pay for themselves by capturing the business that would have otherwise been lost.

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