What is implementing a CRM software program worth to your company?
The question really boils down to a few simple issues.
Ask yourself these questions to determine what value a CRM software system will bring to your business.
1) What sales opportunities are you missing that you could close if you had more efficient management?
2) What do you NOT know about your current customers that you should, how many of them will switch to the competition, and what revenue will be lost as a result?
3) Are inefficiencies in your customer service creating extra costs or causing you to loose revenue?
4) Which of your current accounts cost more than they are worth and how much are they costing you?
5) How much could CRM software save you by making your lead generation efforts more effective?
Now add up all of the real costs, as well as the lost opportunity costs and it is likely that you will find that you are losing and spending a lot more than you expected. In most cases, the total you come up with will be more than the cost of CRM software implementation.
Now, here are some more questions you can use to determine the log opportunity cost of not implementing CRM software:
1) How many accounts did your company lose in the last year and what were the annual revenues of those accounts?
2) What would you estimate the number of sales opportunities lost in the last year to be and what were they worth?
3) How much time was spent adjusting orders because of inaccurate or incomplete information and what did this cost?
CRM software helps track employee actions and gives managers the ability to see the results of sales, marketing and customer service efforts. With the data collected, CRM software gives your company new capabilities. You can launch targeted sales and marketing campaigns to uncover new revenue opportunities and service customers better.
Technorati Tags: CRM Review, CRM Software
DAYTON, Ohio, Feb. 13 /PRNewswire/ — The Reynolds and Reynolds Company, a leading provider of software and services to automotive retailers, today announced that DealerMine is now participating in the Reynolds third party access program, which provides a platform for handling dealership data in a safe, secure, and verifiable manner. DealerMine is a CRM vendor with a focus on service CRM for automotive dealerships in North America.
“The benefit for DealerMine of standardized access through Reynolds is that it simplifies our processes and takes away a lot of non-productive work – running different queries into the DMS, cleaning and validating the data,” said Bob Quirion, president of DealerMine. “Now, we have a much smoother process to collect dealership data and to write back to the DMS – all of which will enable us to focus on serving our customers more effectively. We’re really pleased to be partnering with Reynolds.”
Since 2005, Reynolds and Reynolds has been working visibly with dealerships and OEMs on the safe, secure, and verifiable exchange of dealership data from a Reynolds dealership management system (DMS).
“At Reynolds, we have been addressing data access and security consistently for a number of years, as have other major DMS providers in the industry,” said Trey Hiers, vice president of Corporate Marketing at Reynolds and Reynolds. “Ultimately, dealers want to know that their data is safe and secure; that it is accessible by third parties, with appropriate safeguards and verification; and, that it will stay that way.”
The Reynolds third party access program provides a number of methods for dealerships to work with the vendor of their choice in a safe, secure, and verified manner when handling dealership data.
About Third Party Access
Reynolds and Reynolds provides the largest program for third party access of any dealership services provider in the industry. Dealerships that use a Reynolds and Reynolds DMS to run their business can choose from more than 100 third parties who can provide safe, secure, and verified handling of a dealership’s data.
About Reynolds
Reynolds and Reynolds is the automotive industry’s leading provider of automobile dealership software, services, and forms to help dealerships improve business results. The company is headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, with major operations in Houston and College Station, Texas, and Celina, Ohio. (www.reyrey.com)
Source: PRNewswire
CRM Reviews
Technorati Tags: DealerMine
The first rule in marketing probably should be: “Remember, You Are Not Your Customer!”
It is both easy and expensive to get in the way of what works based on your own biases and assumptions about your customers and what you think they want. Often when faced with different advertising options or marketing approaches a business owner will say “I would never call on an advertisement like that” or “I wouldn’t read something that long” or “That doesn’t fit our image”.
This can be a big mistake. A research study of advertising executives “guessing” what people thought vs. what the people really thought showed that the advertising executives were wrong by as much as 72% on various questions.
Making assumptions about your customer can be very costly. If you don’t know how your customer will react then you need to quit guessing and find out more about your customer through actual surveys and testing.
The more you know about your customer, the more customers you will have.
Conducting surveys to assess customer satisfaction and understand your customers needs can be an effective way to learn the truth about your customers.
Using a fully integrated CRM program will enable you to design a survey, send it automatically by email, measure the responses and take actions based on the analysis.
You can also assess customer satisfaction with every support ticket. Send an email when a ticket is closed to solicit feedback on the customer experience with the ticket.
In addition, you can use surveys to determine and optimize your marketing strategy by sending a survey to a select panel of customers/advisers, to determine their views on product direction or product positioning.
You can also conduct surveys to understand email and media preferences and run campaigns targeted at those who are most likely to respond.
Technorati Tags: customer research, customer survey
Conventional CRM programs help companies manage sales opportunities of products or jobs that typically end with the deal being either closed or lost. They may or may not continue to focus on additional sales to individual customers. The rules of the game are a little bit different for companies that provide professional services.
For service-based companies, such as financial, legal and consulting businesses, converting a potential customer into a client is only the beginning of what is hoped to be a long term relationship. Therefore it is important to implement a CRM software program that is designed with the specific needs of services-based companies in mind. There need to be a focus on tracking client service rather than closing deals.
The following are features that should be taken into consideration in your CRM decision:
Client Support & Service: This feature enables the recording and tracking of all client contacts by e-mail, the web and phone. Additional features may include automatic escalation rules and tools to improve trouble-ticket handling.
Services Item Catalog Creation: This feature allows for the creation of a portfolio of services. It may include client-specific price levels, discounting rules and preferred-client pricing.
Job/Project Tracking: Tracking allows you to manage and track multiple types of projects or jobs with linked activities that clients, sales, service and support personnel can all view.
Services Sales Management: That can manage the full sales cycle including tracking leads, generating proposals and contracts, forecasting bookings and support resources.
Advanced Calendaring and Activity Time Tracking: Normally this feature allows for sharing calendars, developing schedules and monitoring assets. It will also let managers track the employee actions on an individual or per-project basis with time-tracked activities (tasks, calls and meeting events).
Self-Service Center: A secure center where clients can track: project status, order history, current quotes, shared documents; knowledge bases, FAQs or submit a trouble ticket.
Document Management: Provides a location to store, organize and transfer documents in different formats. These documents can be published to intranets, corporate web sites or client self-service centers.
Technorati Tags: client support, crm, customer tracking, service business
Making a sale can be a time consuming process, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There are many steps in the process that can be automated in such a way that saves time and makes it easier to close the sale too.
Good follow-up with your prospects and detailed tracking of their progress through the sales process is one of the keys to success in sales. This can, however, be a limiting factor due to time constraints. There is hope however, since many of the necessary steps can be automated. Below is a list of steps in the sales process that can be organized and automated to make the job of selling easier and less time consuming.
1. Sending relevant, valuable information to EVERY PROSPECT on a scheduled, recurring basis helps you keep your name in front of the prospect and increases top of mind awareness. It also helps set you up as the helpful expert, which is better positioning then a begging salesperson.
2. Communicate to prospects efficiently, aside from the normal, time-consuming, one-on-one methods. This can be done in several ways, including such things as a newsletter, special reports, how-to tips, market updates, advice, etc. These communications can be sent via email, direct mail, voice broadcast, or fax.
3. Log all communications between your office and the prospect in an organized fashion. One of the keys to good follow-up is good record keeping, especially if the prospect is being contacted by more than one person. Even if you are doing all the contacting yourself it is impossible to keep every detail for every prospect in your head, and the more prospects you have the harder it gets. You need to keep track of these details accurately to get the most out of each contact with the prospect. Otherwise you will miss opportunities to make upsells and cross sells, not to mention the primary sale.
4. Arm yourself and your sales reps with an arsenal of specific information that can be sent to prospects upon request. These different marketing tools should be designed to educate the prospect as to how you do business and what sets you apart from your competitors. It should also move the prospect along through the sales process and help them in making a buying decision.
5. Track the progress of each lead through the sales pipeline, so you always know where every lead stands. This way you will know which prospects to focus the most time and attention on and you will also be able to spot holes in your sales process where prospects may be falling out.
The good news is that it’s actually very easy to do all of this automatically. There are several good customer relationship management systems available that will make many of these steps a breeze.
Technorati Tags: crm, customer relationship management system, sales automation