I keep hearing I should have a CRM system, but I don’t get why!

With a customer relationship management (CRM) system you can keep a list of your clients, prospects and leads just about anywhere – from Outlook to a spreadsheet to an old fashioned card system.

If you are the only person doing sales in your business (unlikely!) then it doesn’t really matter what you use.  But when you figure out what the industry leaders are doing with a CRM system, you might see you need something more sophisticated.

Today I am going to share a few ideas and concepts with you of what to do with a CRM.  These are the keys that are helping me beat this recession.

It is clear to me that sales cycles are currently longer and more competitive than usual, as business owners put more care into ensuring they have the best solution before spending money. So, ensuring that EVERY contact with a prospect is logged ensures we keep track of each opportunity from start to sale made, and beyond.

I now need to target my marketing to clients more carefully to ensure it remains valuable to them, so keeping details of source and interest of each person or company is imperative. We systemically gather every piece of important information about a prospect so that when we do targeted marketing and lead nurturing to potential buyers, they are turned on by the accuracy of our pitch, not turned off by the volume. Could you improve your targeting of interest topics?

We have introduced well-defined lead nurturing processes that automates a series of messages, each with a call to action for each product line we offer. So now a quote for a product or service is followed up by a nurturing campaign run automatically out of our CRM application.

Of course, as we get more active in our marketing, both electronic and direct, we must ensure that we manage duplicate prospects in the CRM system. The trick is not necessarily to prevent them in the lead identification stage, as the same lead may come from multiple places, but to process them out during the qualification stage.

From a sales activity perspective, it is important that we can track our progress through a defined set of sales stages, particularly to understand where buyers are leaking from our sales pipeline. Are they still buying but from someone else, or are they just not buying at all! If the first, we may need to adjust our “product”; if the second, we may need to improve our call to action.

By being systematic about progressing each opportunity through the defined sales stages, we get a great overview of how our sales are progressing and what our likely outcomes will be over the months ahead.  We are also starting to track how long it takes our buyers to move through the sales stages so we can see where people are getting “stuck”.

It is also most useful to us to have mechanisms (again both systemic and in the business process) to drive data quality and strong segmentation in our existing database. Now is when we need to get the best possible results from the database we have. These people who know us and have met us over time are potentially much more likely to buy from us than total strangers if we have the right product to sell them.

By creating our marketing campaigns in the CRM and tracking who each campaign is run against, we are also able to build information that allows us to track ROI on particular campaigns. Which ones are working and which ones aren’t?  What other factors are influencing?

We also use the web to lead forms, to receive a lead from a particular campaign via our web site, directly into the CRM database and track that lead all the way through to a sale and then attribute the revenue and margin back to the campaign that brought us that client, even though they came from the website.

No doubt many of you reading this have similar CRM systems in your business and know the kind of benefits this technology is driving to your bottom line.  I would love to see some comments below on where you are up to with your use of CRM, and how that correlates with your success in the current recession market place.

Got a question for one of our Experts? Choose one that suits your area of inquiry and send it in to asktheexperts@smartcompany.com.au

Click here to read more IT Systems expert advice