February 2009: A Note from Jeff Mack
The Bottom Line: Distancing Your Company from the Pack

Are you wishing you had a better way of staying top-of-mind with your customers and prospects? Are you looking for a few more projects or quotes to bid? Are you longing to hear the sales bell ring a little louder and more often? Do you find yourself wondering if a new CRM system is the missing ingredient that would propel you over the top? If so, you are certainly not alone.

If you are considering embarking down a CRM path, you should be aware of some valuable lessons learned by those who have gone before you. The first and most important thing to understand is that CRM is not an overnight cure for what might be ailing your sales pipeline. CRM Is not a Band-Aid that can be applied to an isolated sore and expect it to heal itself. Although many organizations have attempted to deploy CRM at a departmental level or in a patchwork type approach, this typically does not render the best results.

When considering CRM, it is critical to think of it in a holistic fashion as it pertains to your organization and the entire customer experience. In other words, don’t think initially about the technological merits of a CRM system or the functions and business processes you want to automate. Rather, think about customer relationships, and what could be done to improve them. Think about the complete life cycle of a customer from the moment they land on a target list, through the nurturing stage, to the point at which they become a customer, and hopefully to decades of productive sales and service interactions thereafter. In an ideal world, what would enduring customer experiences entail? Keep in mind: it will be different for various customers depending upon their needs, location, etc. Can you begin to visualize an environment where the phone rings consistently and there’s an undeniable energy in your sales and service staff? As you can see, this is much more about strategy than tactics or technology.

Being able to understand your customer’s perspective comes down to being able to closely examine your organization from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. I recently read a good book entitled Tuned In by Craig Stull, Phil Meyers, and David Meerman Scott. I highly recommend it as it is 100% focused on the very subject of examining your company and its offerings from your customer’s perspective, in other words from the outside in.

Once you have a strategic vision in mind for creating a valuable and highly sought after customer experience, you can begin to think about how a CRM system can help you envelop your sales/service team and your customers in this heightened experience. This is where you begin to think about the business processes, workflow and data that will be required to achieve your objectives. Be careful, however, when doing this to maintain the outward in customer focus as it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking about how to make our day-to-day tasks easier as opposed to how to make the customer experience significantly better. That’s not to say we ignore the significant challenge of making sure the users of the system enthusiastically embrace it. User adoption and proper utilization of the system are critical to the project’s success.

Unlike an accounting system which has a number of rules and disciplines built into it, a CRM system is more of an open slate, so it will require more thought and discipline on your part to get it right. It will be important to ensure great communication and connectedness between all the users, departments, and processes and the corporate culture. There are no GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) constraints to serve as a design foundation. That’s also the good news in that your CRM can be anything you want it to be - which means that the sky’s the limit in terms of the customer experience you want to create. Flexibility and agility are great assets when used properly.

A great set of tools will only produce great results when used with care and determination. A CRM system is no different. Therefore it is imperative to determine ahead of time specific measurable criteria so that you can gauge the success of your CRM project. It’s important to determine the goals in advance so that they can be used to help guide the project and to ensure that the goals are not being modified on the fly to suit the reality on the ground. I am sure you can think of many critical measures in your business relative to sales volume, average order size, margin per order, frequency of orders, fill rates, lost opportunities, customer retention and satisfaction indicators (just to name a few) that could be benchmarked before and after.

Great CRM systems and tools are available today that integrate seamlessly with your back end accounting systems. They can empower every member of your organization, regardless of whether they sit behind a desk or are out in the field, to serve your customers and your business in a more informed and empowered manner. All that’s needed is a little strategic vision to set the course. A well implemented CRM system can help reduce your cost of sales while simultaneously helping increase sales. By any measure, that’s a strong impact to the bottom line. And that’s the bottom line.

If you're interested in learning more about how CRM works and how it can benefit your company, contact me at jeff@ics-support.com.

 

In an ideal world, what would enduring customer experiences entail? ... Can you begin to visualize an environment where the phone rings consistently and there’s an undeniable energy in your sales and service staff?