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Four
Thoughts
To help you
understand where your organisation stands in the progression towards
CRM, here are a few simple questions to consider. To evaluate your
position, consider whether the information required to complete
the action specified in the four questions below would be:
- immediately
available with little or no additional work
- available,
but with the need to reproduce it every time the question is asked
- not available/extremely
difficult to obtain.
1. Could
you broadcast an email to your customers announcing an important
piece of information that:
- Targets the
key contact in each organisation?
- Targets departmental
heads in your customer database with a tailored message reflecting
the impact of the announcement to them?
- Changes in
content to reflect the banding of your customer base from most
important (A category) through to least important (D category)?
To achieve this
simple task, you would require a centralised database of all customers,
with up to date records on all the key contacts, and a structured
analysis of customer categories based on turnover through integration
with your accounting software.
CRM does not
get any more basic than this; the use of a centralised, up to date
record of who your customers are and their respective value to you,
and a structured approach to how each band of customers is proactively
managed.
2. Can you
analyse the source of sales leads by marketing activity, including:
- Those qualified
out immediately as 'of no use'?
- The value
of those opportunities lost?
- The value
of those opportunities won?
How can the
marketing department improve its efficiency and effectiveness without
this basic information? The only alternative is to keep throwing
money at the wall.
3. When your
sales staff attend an account meeting with a customer, how easily
can they access the detailed information required to understand
the current state of the relationship, including:
- How much
has the customer spent with you, on what?
- How many
queries/problems have taken place and what is their current status?
- What is the
status of the outstanding account?
- What other
products/services might be relevant to their needs?
- What actions
need to take place?
Is all this
information available without any reference to other members of
staff? Or does the sales person need to do a "round robin"
with each department, each time? Or do they just walk in cold and
hope for the best?
In the majority
of cases, over 70% of an account meeting is spent with the customer
informing the sales staff of the problems and issues in their relationship.
More and more customers are asking the question why they should
foot the bill in organising and managing their relationship with
their suppliers.
4. Is key
business information regularly documented and published electronically
to both the intranet and extranet, utilising a structured security
methodology that provides selective access to the information? Is
this information published and held centrally in a Word/Excel file
on a central server available to all for reference?
Business knowledge
has historically resided with the employees of a company. It is
in their head, on their PC, in their notebook, on Post It notes
etc. If they are absent, or leave the company, that knowledge has
no value. Too often, information is also seen as power, on the basis
that one person/department has it and another doesn't.
Web-based self
service applications recognise that information should be immediately
available to all, 24x7, 365 days a year. It is an extension, not
a replacement of the current services offered and an enabler to
allow every employee and every customer to get the information if
they need it, when they need it. This is going to become mandatory,
either because one of your competitors offers the service to differentiate
their business from yours, or because one of your largest customers
demand it.
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