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

The second common failure is in handling lead management.  Company owners often have no idea what is happening to leads they distribute to their sales force.  They don’t know if anyone is calling them, or if the sales person is just “skimming the cream” or “cherry picking”—which by the way, you can’t blame them: they have a limited amount of time and get paid commissions to close sales, so they spend time with the hot leads, not the ones that are tough to get a hold of or the ones where the timing isn’t exactly right.  The problem here is that no one knows what is happening to the rest of the leads that come in the door.

This is where a Customer Relationship Management Program can help.  Not only in can it help your sales force use their time more effectively but it can also help managers do a better job.

A good CRM Program will have the following benefits:

1. Marketing Automation & Communication.  Automatically execute multi-step, multi-media marketing campaigns to prospects, partners, clients, past customers, friends, and anyone else you want; track responses to marketing campaigns and report the effectiveness of marketing pieces and campaigns

2. Sales tracking that allows sales people to manage prospects and customers through various stages of the sale; know exactly what to do with a lead and when to do it; automate the process.

3. Central Contact Management Database: Store prospect and customer data in a central system; manage tasks;     store documents electronically; keep customer’s communications logs; group contacts for organization and efficient communications; import & export data from virtually any source.

4. Management Tracking to assign leads to sales people and keep tabs on the progress of those leads; customize the sales pipeline to reflect the sales stages used in your company; identify bottlenecks in the sales process (bad leads, bad lead sources, bad sales people?)

Technorati Tags: contact management, crm, marketing automation, sales tracking

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