Contents
CRM Software is the technology supporting Customer Relationship Management. It is a place where to store all the information about customers, partners, suppliers and all those who in any way are connected with the company. With this solution, you can easily check the history of the customer, manage correspondence, prepare and send a tender to select the most cost-effective customers, organize the work of traders, manage marketing campaign and sales flow. In the market, you can find a lot of CRM systems - both stand-alone and integrated within larger software packages (e.g. ERP). Among them are commercial solutions, as well as a completely free (open source) software, offering no fewer opportunities. The most popular is a Salesforce, Zoho, Insightly, SAP, Act!
Action CRM systems is to automate and supporting processes related to recruiting and retaining (service) customer by the company. CRM systems support the work of the following departments of the undertaking:
1.
Marketing (including advertising easier by allowing sending mass mailings, telemarketing management or service company accounts on social networks)
2.
Sales (allowing e.g. to estimate the probability of sales, creating and analyzing sales funnels, management agreed with the budget, planning phone calls and business meetings)
3.
Customer service (e.g. enable the management of contracts and customer information, monitor customer satisfaction, undertaking activities aimed at strengthening the cooperation with the client company)
4.
Board (allowing managers to monitor actions and effects work of traders, track individual projects, schedule tasks, generate sales reports).
•
Get people to use it: The most important way to get the most out of your CRM system is getting users to use the system, this is something that sounds obvious but it is still can be a challenge. It can be difficult to adjust to a new system; some systems are easy to learn how to deal with. The idea is that CRM software will make your business more profitable and employees’ life easier and this is the reason to use it. However, if those 2 main goals are not achieved than you either do not need a CRM or you are using the wrong tool.
•
Train your users : When you are planning to start using a new program it is important that you train the users on how to use it efficiently...and be patient!
•
Keep it simple: By keeping your CRM system simple and efficient you can get a better overview of the status of your customers. If a client is not yet a customer it is important to give attention to him/her, because hopefully and eventually it will become a customer.
•
Realize which customers produce the most profit: By analyzing the buying behavior and other data from your customers, your business can gain a better understanding of who are your best customers and in whom you need to invest more time. With a good CRM system, you can also see who brings you the highest profit and who has the highest margins.
•
Analyze buying patterns: When you get a better understanding of the buying patterns of your customers you can change your selling strategy for that customer. With a better understanding of your customer, you can maximize the profit per customer.
•
Use your data for marketing campaigns: The customer information that your CRM system gathers can be a good starting point for a marketing campaign. It is wise to use the information to your advantage. There are CRM systems that will offer you the possibility to create a marketing campaign and emailing straight out of the system, this means that there is no need for a third party software to run your marketing campaign.
•
Possibility to manage your business online: with a good CRM software you will be able to manage your business from A to Z everywhere and anytime, being all the information available online.
•
Possibility to have Centralized data: A CRM system keeps all the information about customers and deals in one place, so that you as a sales representative never have to dig through your inbox to reconstruct the history of the customer.
•
Possibility to use Standardized record- keeping: Every sales representative has a different way of tracking prospect information. A CRM system removes this variation and creates possibilities to evaluate your entire sales organization’s health at once.
•
Capacity to scale: When you are a small company it is easy to manually track every customer, but when your company grows, it will become harder to manually track every customer. It will also take a lot of time for the sales representative to manually track all customers.
•
Pipeline view: A pipeline view is an overview of how your business is performing and how it will likely perform in the future. A pipeline shows the progress of your target and it shows and allows you to see and track every opportunity that you have.
Furthermore, there are a few features that you need to look for in a CRM system.
-
Quote contact information
-
Note-taking inside CRM
-
Automated email tracking
-
Automated call logging
-
Pipeline view
-
Accounting system
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Title:
How to make the most of CRM software’s
Keywords
CRM Systems, Software, ICT
Author:
IWS
Languages:
English
Description:
This training fiche is focused on how to make the most of CRM software’s. Customer Relationship Management - CRM is a management concept, in which the main emphasis is on building long-term relationships with customers and gaining their loyalty. CRM implies that it is cheaper to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one, in addition not every client is "profitable" for the company, so you need to focus primarily on the most profitable customers. The concept of Customer Relationship Management is to identify the key client organizations, the application to them of relevant strategies to maintain, effective cooperation and influencing the growth of customer satisfaction.
Taking care of customer relationships requires an individual approach to each of them. This process is very time-consuming and challenging and to make this process easier, you can use specialized software.
CRM Software is the technology supporting Customer Relationship Management. It is a place where to store all the information about customers, partners, suppliers and all those who in any way are connected with the company. With this solution, you can easily check the history of the customer, manage correspondence, prepare and send a tender to select the most cost-effective customers, organize the work of traders, manage marketing campaign and sales flow. In the market, you can find a lot of CRM systems - both stand-alone and integrated within larger software packages (e.g. ERP). Among them are commercial solutions, as well as a completely free (open source) software, offering no fewer opportunities. The most popular is a Salesforce, Zoho, Insightly, SAP, Act!
Action CRM systems is to automate and supporting processes related to recruiting and retaining (service) customer by the company. CRM systems support the work of the following departments of the undertaking:
1. Marketing (including advertising easier by allowing sending mass mailings, telemarketing management or service company accounts on social networks)
2. Sales (allowing e.g. to estimate the probability of sales, creating and analyzing sales funnels, management agreed with the budget, planning phone calls and business meetings)
3. Customer service (e.g. enable the management of contracts and customer information, monitor customer satisfaction, undertaking activities aimed at strengthening the cooperation with the client company)
4. Board (allowing managers to monitor actions and effects work of traders, track individual projects, schedule tasks, generate sales reports).
• Get people to use it: The most important way to get the most out of your CRM system is getting users to use the system, this is something that sounds obvious but it is still can be a challenge. It can be difficult to adjust to a new system; some systems are easy to learn how to deal with. The idea is that CRM software will make your business more profitable and employees’ life easier and this is the reason to use it. However, if those 2 main goals are not achieved than you either do not need a CRM or you are using the wrong tool.
• Train your users : When you are planning to start using a new program it is important that you train the users on how to use it efficiently...and be patient!
• Keep it simple: By keeping your CRM system simple and efficient you can get a better overview of the status of your customers. If a client is not yet a customer it is important to give attention to him/her, because hopefully and eventually it will become a customer.
• Realize which customers produce the most profit: By analyzing the buying behavior and other data from your customers, your business can gain a better understanding of who are your best customers and in whom you need to invest more time. With a good CRM system, you can also see who brings you the highest profit and who has the highest margins.
• Analyze buying patterns: When you get a better understanding of the buying patterns of your customers you can change your selling strategy for that customer. With a better understanding of your customer, you can maximize the profit per customer.
• Use your data for marketing campaigns: The customer information that your CRM system gathers can be a good starting point for a marketing campaign. It is wise to use the information to your advantage. There are CRM systems that will offer you the possibility to create a marketing campaign and emailing straight out of the system, this means that there is no need for a third party software to run your marketing campaign.
• Possibility to manage your business online: with a good CRM software you will be able to manage your business from A to Z everywhere and anytime, being all the information available online.
• Possibility to have Centralized data: A CRM system keeps all the information about customers and deals in one place, so that you as a sales representative never have to dig through your inbox to reconstruct the history of the customer.
• Possibility to use Standardized record- keeping: Every sales representative has a different way of tracking prospect information. A CRM system removes this variation and creates possibilities to evaluate your entire sales organization’s health at once.
• Capacity to scale: When you are a small company it is easy to manually track every customer, but when your company grows, it will become harder to manually track every customer. It will also take a lot of time for the sales representative to manually track all customers.
• Pipeline view: A pipeline view is an overview of how your business is performing and how it will likely perform in the future. A pipeline shows the progress of your target and it shows and allows you to see and track every opportunity that you have.
Furthermore, there are a few features that you need to look for in a CRM system.
- Quote contact information
- Note-taking inside CRM
- Automated email tracking
- Automated call logging
- Pipeline view
- Accounting system