Introduction
Keeping in mind the three main components of CRM, the customer, the relationship, and management, we will expand on specific customer relationship management (CRM) system strategies that will help you realize your investment.
Some crucial strategies you must adopt are
* Develop specific, measurable goals
* Establish ROI strategy to achieve your goals
* Build the technical framework
* Identify explicit sales and marketing strategies
* Outline Internet strategies
* Develop and maintain customer satisfaction metrics
Develop specific, measurable goals
Vague, abstract mission statements were pervasive in the business culture of the 1980s. Companies sought to motivate their employees by posting "catchy" slogans and ambiguous corporate agendas all over their office spaces. Statements like "to provide the best quality" or "to provide quality customer service" are all positive goals that employees want to strive for. However, these mission statements are hard to live up to if there is not a substantial measure of standard to compare to. "Quality" and "Best" are all unquantifiable.
Create your catchy mission statements but find ways to quantify the results. Set specific and measurable goals. For example, increase your revenue by x percent, decrease product exchanges by y amount, increase profit margin by x dollars, decrease attrition by y percent. If you want to increase the quality of your product, consider what happens when your products are less than 100 percent quality. Do you spend more money replacing the product? More dollars are spent servicing products still under warranty. Does your call center experience more calls? Is there high wastage? Do you set out to decrease money spent on replacement products or parts by $100,000, or decrease call volume by 40 percent, or decrease wastage by half? These are goals your employees can understand and strive for.
This is Part Four of a four-part note.
Part One discussed new approaches to CRM implementation,
Part Two discussed implementation strategies, and Part Three described achieving and maintaining the competitive edge.
Establish ROI strategy to achieve your goals
It is no accident that CRM performance accounts for a large part of a companies profitability or lack there of. Once you've identified your goals, compare those numbers to the investment you've made in your CRM system. Create a return on investment (ROI) strategy that delivers the best return on your investment, and will provide more dividends in the future. Utilizing the analytical tools that your CRM applications provide is the key to understanding and defining a company CRM ROI. CRM analytics help companies to recognize consumer behavioral patterns and identify new opportunities in the marketplace. Mine your data to learn about customer's buying habits, their marketing profile, consumer risk thresholds, and segmentation.
The main objective here is to ascertain if your investment was worthwhile. Did it reach optimal return? If not, how much did it reach by? Can you make up for it in economy in size?
To calculate your ROI, estimate your per-customer cost of implementation. Add to it the cost of maintenance, including head count and overhead (of the employees you've added to support the system), hardware, storage, user education, and upgrades. Multiply this by the number of customers you have. This is the cost of your CRM initiative. Next take your number of customers multiply it by your gross profit, multiply that yet again by your success rate. Take the product and subtract from it the total cost of your CRM initiative. The result is your return on investment.
Calculating ROI involves numerous factors and the analytical tool in your CRM application will help you with the complex equation. However, you need to determine what elements need to be measured and how to measure them. Key elements include per customer cost for the implementation, maintenance (including any employees hired to maintain the system), user training, upgrades, and general overhead. Also include the gross profit and the success rate, which is normally expressed as a percentage. It is here were establishing metrics is crucial. You need to determine what factors will be included in the success rate, such as office efficiencies, sales growth, customer growth etc. and you need to establish how they will be weighed. Depending on your industry and your company's goal, the presence and weight of these factors vary. Remember, you need to establish that your CRM investment will not only pay back in time, it will actually make or save you money. Knowing where your company currently sits and where the CRM system will take it, will make the case for a CRM system.
Build the technical framework
CRM strategies are turned into action items by implementing innovative software and powerful databases. Your sales and marketing strategies have worked for you in the past—there is a reason why your company is a mid-market organization and not a small business. To continue on the path of growth, your organization needs to relate your sales and marketing actions to the technology at hand. The technology is there, take advantage of it. Why invest in the system and not exploit it to make your job and your employees' jobs easier?
Your CRM system can automate processes and provide data analytics. Before CRM, your marketing manager would storyboard a marketing campaign, hold meetings to discuss the idea, put together a spreadsheet of prospective customers, make multiple copies of the list, hand them out to each sales representatives, walk back to his office, and wait for his sales people to make the phone calls, and write up the order.
However, your CRM system can drastically reduce those manual steps. Collaborative tools are available to users for discussing ideas, getting budget authorization, obtaining concept approval, setting up meetings, and exchanging e-mails. Marketing tools can help you import lists, assign leads, qualify leads, generate quotes, and create sales orders.
Sales analytics can help you recognize patterns and track buying habits. Knowing how to use these individual tools is not enough. A successful CRM strategy encompasses the entire CRMBC. Integrate your sales and marketing functions with your customer service efforts, and circle around to your customer satisfaction evaluation. The CRMBC is a continuous feedback loop that integrates the application with organizational strategies to facilitate, gather, and process customer behavioral patterns in terms of discreet units of data.
Identify explicit sales and marketing strategy
How will you achieve your company's goals? What key sales and marketing strategies do you need to get your organization from point A to point B, from 10 percent profit margin to 30 percent profit margin, from 50 percent attrition rate to 25 percent, from 800 service calls a day to 500? Your plan must be specific and detailed. It should consider your customer's needs and how you react to those needs.
Sales and marketing strategies can utilize CRM to provide contact points with the customer to present product offerings. It is this interaction that your marketing plan must take advantage of. A sales person that makes an outbound call is an event that can trigger a step in your marketing strategy. When a customer calls into your service center, that is a contact point. How can your marketing department capitalize on this event?
Wrap your sales and marketing plans around these points of contact for opportunities to execute.
Outline Internet strategies
The World Wide Web has decreased the cost of doing business by enabling economy of scale. Nowhere else can you potentially reach billions of people, make millions of contact points, and create a fortune in opportunities, all with the luxury of mass communication, dynamic content, and instant recall. You can invest very little in Internet technology and receive a high return.
Mid-market companies seldom capitalize on this relatively inexpensive tool. Consider a mass mailing of 100,000 households. The list would cost you a few hundred if not thousand of dollars. The print and paper would cost you more, and postage, if mailing in the US, would set you back about $17,000 (USD). If you're lucky, you will get a 10 percent response rate. Most people will throw your mailer away. If it crosses their mind later, they won't remember what was on it and they certainly wouldn't have memorized your phone number.
SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/customer-relationship-management-strategies-part-four-strategies-and-case-study-17787/
Keeping in mind the three main components of CRM, the customer, the relationship, and management, we will expand on specific customer relationship management (CRM) system strategies that will help you realize your investment.
Some crucial strategies you must adopt are
* Develop specific, measurable goals
* Establish ROI strategy to achieve your goals
* Build the technical framework
* Identify explicit sales and marketing strategies
* Outline Internet strategies
* Develop and maintain customer satisfaction metrics
Develop specific, measurable goals
Vague, abstract mission statements were pervasive in the business culture of the 1980s. Companies sought to motivate their employees by posting "catchy" slogans and ambiguous corporate agendas all over their office spaces. Statements like "to provide the best quality" or "to provide quality customer service" are all positive goals that employees want to strive for. However, these mission statements are hard to live up to if there is not a substantial measure of standard to compare to. "Quality" and "Best" are all unquantifiable.
Create your catchy mission statements but find ways to quantify the results. Set specific and measurable goals. For example, increase your revenue by x percent, decrease product exchanges by y amount, increase profit margin by x dollars, decrease attrition by y percent. If you want to increase the quality of your product, consider what happens when your products are less than 100 percent quality. Do you spend more money replacing the product? More dollars are spent servicing products still under warranty. Does your call center experience more calls? Is there high wastage? Do you set out to decrease money spent on replacement products or parts by $100,000, or decrease call volume by 40 percent, or decrease wastage by half? These are goals your employees can understand and strive for.
This is Part Four of a four-part note.
Part One discussed new approaches to CRM implementation,
Part Two discussed implementation strategies, and Part Three described achieving and maintaining the competitive edge.
Establish ROI strategy to achieve your goals
It is no accident that CRM performance accounts for a large part of a companies profitability or lack there of. Once you've identified your goals, compare those numbers to the investment you've made in your CRM system. Create a return on investment (ROI) strategy that delivers the best return on your investment, and will provide more dividends in the future. Utilizing the analytical tools that your CRM applications provide is the key to understanding and defining a company CRM ROI. CRM analytics help companies to recognize consumer behavioral patterns and identify new opportunities in the marketplace. Mine your data to learn about customer's buying habits, their marketing profile, consumer risk thresholds, and segmentation.
The main objective here is to ascertain if your investment was worthwhile. Did it reach optimal return? If not, how much did it reach by? Can you make up for it in economy in size?
To calculate your ROI, estimate your per-customer cost of implementation. Add to it the cost of maintenance, including head count and overhead (of the employees you've added to support the system), hardware, storage, user education, and upgrades. Multiply this by the number of customers you have. This is the cost of your CRM initiative. Next take your number of customers multiply it by your gross profit, multiply that yet again by your success rate. Take the product and subtract from it the total cost of your CRM initiative. The result is your return on investment.
Calculating ROI involves numerous factors and the analytical tool in your CRM application will help you with the complex equation. However, you need to determine what elements need to be measured and how to measure them. Key elements include per customer cost for the implementation, maintenance (including any employees hired to maintain the system), user training, upgrades, and general overhead. Also include the gross profit and the success rate, which is normally expressed as a percentage. It is here were establishing metrics is crucial. You need to determine what factors will be included in the success rate, such as office efficiencies, sales growth, customer growth etc. and you need to establish how they will be weighed. Depending on your industry and your company's goal, the presence and weight of these factors vary. Remember, you need to establish that your CRM investment will not only pay back in time, it will actually make or save you money. Knowing where your company currently sits and where the CRM system will take it, will make the case for a CRM system.
Build the technical framework
CRM strategies are turned into action items by implementing innovative software and powerful databases. Your sales and marketing strategies have worked for you in the past—there is a reason why your company is a mid-market organization and not a small business. To continue on the path of growth, your organization needs to relate your sales and marketing actions to the technology at hand. The technology is there, take advantage of it. Why invest in the system and not exploit it to make your job and your employees' jobs easier?
Your CRM system can automate processes and provide data analytics. Before CRM, your marketing manager would storyboard a marketing campaign, hold meetings to discuss the idea, put together a spreadsheet of prospective customers, make multiple copies of the list, hand them out to each sales representatives, walk back to his office, and wait for his sales people to make the phone calls, and write up the order.
However, your CRM system can drastically reduce those manual steps. Collaborative tools are available to users for discussing ideas, getting budget authorization, obtaining concept approval, setting up meetings, and exchanging e-mails. Marketing tools can help you import lists, assign leads, qualify leads, generate quotes, and create sales orders.
Sales analytics can help you recognize patterns and track buying habits. Knowing how to use these individual tools is not enough. A successful CRM strategy encompasses the entire CRMBC. Integrate your sales and marketing functions with your customer service efforts, and circle around to your customer satisfaction evaluation. The CRMBC is a continuous feedback loop that integrates the application with organizational strategies to facilitate, gather, and process customer behavioral patterns in terms of discreet units of data.
Identify explicit sales and marketing strategy
How will you achieve your company's goals? What key sales and marketing strategies do you need to get your organization from point A to point B, from 10 percent profit margin to 30 percent profit margin, from 50 percent attrition rate to 25 percent, from 800 service calls a day to 500? Your plan must be specific and detailed. It should consider your customer's needs and how you react to those needs.
Sales and marketing strategies can utilize CRM to provide contact points with the customer to present product offerings. It is this interaction that your marketing plan must take advantage of. A sales person that makes an outbound call is an event that can trigger a step in your marketing strategy. When a customer calls into your service center, that is a contact point. How can your marketing department capitalize on this event?
Wrap your sales and marketing plans around these points of contact for opportunities to execute.
Outline Internet strategies
The World Wide Web has decreased the cost of doing business by enabling economy of scale. Nowhere else can you potentially reach billions of people, make millions of contact points, and create a fortune in opportunities, all with the luxury of mass communication, dynamic content, and instant recall. You can invest very little in Internet technology and receive a high return.
Mid-market companies seldom capitalize on this relatively inexpensive tool. Consider a mass mailing of 100,000 households. The list would cost you a few hundred if not thousand of dollars. The print and paper would cost you more, and postage, if mailing in the US, would set you back about $17,000 (USD). If you're lucky, you will get a 10 percent response rate. Most people will throw your mailer away. If it crosses their mind later, they won't remember what was on it and they certainly wouldn't have memorized your phone number.
SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/customer-relationship-management-strategies-part-four-strategies-and-case-study-17787/
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