After several articles discussing more "philosophical" aspects of the concepts, opportunities, successes and "problems" related to CRM projects, in this article we are going to further develop the practical aspects of CRM, that is, what can it contribute to an organization like yours.
Actually, the ultimate goal of CRM is to sell more and better, that is, to sell as much as possible under the best possible conditions. For this reason, CRM is nothing more than the application of marketing concepts together with the current technological situation.
But the reality is that selling is not easy since sometimes some problems appear:
At a strategic level:
- The positioning of our organization is not as competitive or as differentiated as we would like with what we enter into "trade wars". This leads us to progressively reduce our margins. There is not perfect information on each customer segment: their characteristics, their profitability, their growth potential, their trends, their loyalty, etc. The costs per customer and their profitability are not exactly known. by clients / segments of the different products / services. There are no mechanisms for defining new products / services adapted to the needs of the segments.
Sales, marketing and customer service area:
- Sales personnel waste a lot of time in administrative tasks preparing visit reports, customer reports, follow-up, doing internal meetings, etc. Thus, together with the significant cost that sales personnel have, this translates into very important costs. Sales personnel often do not have updated information about the client and about their latest incidents, offers, sales, evolution, forecasts, delivery times, etc. This information cannot be accessed from anywhere and at any time. There is no correct definition of objectives, monitoring and variable remuneration for the team in this area. Training is insufficient both at the product level / service as well as sales techniques in order to achieve the desired objectives. The development of sales plans,Goal setting and sales control by managers is complex, inaccurate and also time consuming and generates a high level of uncertainty. Opportunity tracking is not always effective because the processes and technologies used are not correct and also cannot be properly developed by sales managers. Customer service is often ineffective and inefficient. The effectiveness of marketing campaigns is not measured. There is no communication between marketing, sales and customer service with what the opportunities generated by some are not taken advantage of by others and vice versa.Opportunity tracking is not always effective because the processes and technologies used are not correct and also cannot be properly developed by sales managers. Customer service is often ineffective and inefficient. Effectiveness is not measured. of marketing campaigns. There is no communication between marketing, sales and customer service so that the opportunities generated by the one are not taken advantage of by the other and vice versa.Opportunity tracking is not always effective because the processes and technologies used are not correct and also cannot be properly developed by sales managers. Customer service is often ineffective and inefficient. Effectiveness is not measured. of marketing campaigns. There is no communication between marketing, sales and customer service so that the opportunities generated by the one are not taken advantage of by the other and vice versa.sales and customer service so that the opportunities generated by some are not taken advantage of by others and vice versa.sales and customer service so that the opportunities generated by some are not taken advantage of by others and vice versa.
At the organizational level:
- There is no database with all the information related to clients, but the information about clients is dispersed in small departmental databases, in people's heads, personal agendas, notes, card holders, etc. a culture of customer orientation. The multichannel nature of customer relationships is not taken into account and new channels of increasing importance such as email and website are not properly managed. The organization chart is not developed with the customer in mind but thinking about the internal tasks of the organization.
Example
One day, the marketing director of a company decides to boost sales by mailing current and potential customers of a promotion for a given product at a lower price than usual.
When the promotion arrives, customers who consume products that are not that of the promotion, after a first glance and realizing that it is not a suitable promotion for them, decide to throw it away and have a feeling of impersonal treatment with what they associate the brand with a "negative" experience.
Another problem is that current clients are treated the same as potential clients, when obviously the circumstances of both are totally different and the way of communicating with them should also be different.
In addition, when the clients who have been interested in the promotion telephone the company, the people who serve them are not perfectly informed of the promotion and of the arguments and treatment that it has to make to these clients. If the contact is made through email or the website, there is no defined procedure to reply shortly, but it takes days and even weeks.
When someone from sales visits customers and they talk about the promotion, they hardly know what they are talking about since it was a marketing initiative that, although the sales manager knew about it, it was not communicated to them. In addition, if several sales people visit the same customer, each of them does not know what has happened in the previous visits since the information of each of the visits is not shared among the sales staff but is only known by the director.
Another problem is that there is no methodology to follow up on the opportunities generated by mailing, but many opportunities are not closed due to the lack of methodology.
It should also be noted that the profitability of this marketing action is not measured in any way, so it will never be known whether it is interesting to continue developing actions of this style or not.
In an organization with a correct CRM project developed, the situation would have been:
- The customer segments would have been perfectly identified, so the promotion would only have been sent to the potential customers of the product and those whose proposal is most valued is the price, while others who value other concepts such as service or quality would be promoted. In addition, both physical and electronic mail would have been used, achieving a higher profitability of the action. Clearly, the message will be different for potential customers (acquisition) than for current customers (loyalty). Within current customers, it will differentiate the best clients - or with greater potential - instead of making an indiscriminate treatment of all clients. Furthermore, this campaign would have been coordinated between marketing,sales and customer service by sharing the information using a database that centralizes the information of each customer and the planning of marketing and follow-up actions. When a request for information is made to the company, through any channel (phone, email or website), the response is immediate due to the "passion for the customer" that is breathed in the organization, to the technological tools and to what is defined in the organization's procedures. When sales personnel visit the Clients that are the object of this promotion (and others), access through their PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) all the client's information indicating what happened on the last visits (both theirs and others in the sales area), the incidents that have occurred, their sales, their segment,etc.In addition, there is a perfect knowledge of the costs with which it is evaluated whether the cost of acquiring a customer is permissible taking into account the life cycle of the customer and the value of each customer.
In addition, due to the focus and monitoring of the results of the campaign, the profitability of the promotion is known exactly so that it will be possible to know if it is interesting to carry out more promotions or not and why.
Also, sales and marketing managers will have all the information they need for their sales planning and forecasting. At all times, they can know the status of all the operations related to the offer as well as the probability of closing each one of the operations in order to act accordingly.
Obviously, the possibilities of CRM are much broader but I think that with this simple example we can begin to guess in a clear and simple way its possibilities. A CRM project has solutions to all the aspects developed at the beginning of this article, managing strategic concepts, processes, technology and people.
I think now is a good time to re-read the "problems" defined at the beginning of this article and think about your organization. If you have felt identified in more than three of these "problems", possibly a CRM project can help you, thus achieving a significant improvement in the results of your organization.
