Winning New Business and Retaining Customers
Winning and Retaining customers is the key to your business growth. Winning and retaining customers,this sounds like and easy process. The process is anything but, and in is just as complex as the procurement process, the manufacturing process and other critical building blocks which make your business successful.
Sales Tools are Available to Help
There are tools available to help. Tools to aggregate and syndicate sales leads to the right sales person. Good sales lead tools will route and track the lead as the lead is matured to opportunity and to closed business. These sales tools, like the one http://www.onlinesalessoftware.net is providing, will route and track lead data and will report campaign and sales process effectiveness.
CRM Deployment May Create another Data Silo
The lead tools focus on closing leads. A follow on app is full CRM or customer relationship management. These tools, commercial and expensive like Salesforce. com are big tool which try to be all to all and are hard to use and hard to adopt. CRM, customer relationship management tools which are online and provided ondemand are static can not be customized to business needs.
Business needs may be to syndicate customer data to ERP to Accounting, to ecommerce servers like Microsoft commerce server, to business users across the globe. Static deployments of CRM can create a bigger island of customer data. Customer data which is used for sales yet is not used for order management, and for inventory management and for accounting and for vendor management and for supplier management.
You may ask what good is it? I can track call backs in Outlookand contacts in Outlook. I use Zimbra for mail and this is a knockout app. Now use yahoo or gmail and you can do magic with these collaborative communication tools. And they can preclude the need for heavy crm unless other needs are present.
CRM Applications Need to be Friendlier
Other needs include reporting, aggregation of pipeline data from disparate sales teams both direct and indirect, desire to report forecast, report campaign efficiency and more if I would think of some. But now again we are ship wrecked on our island of sales data.
Customer Data Integration
A CRM essential is called customer data integration. Sure put data in one place, accurize the data. Now go further, now syndicate data to erp, accounting, vendors, customers. This is the path to success this is the path to efficiency, cost cutting and total user adoption.
Fully functional CRM deployed on your own Server. Register here for your FREE TRIAL
One Comment
Great article! In my experience, its as much about the people as it is the technology. Customizing the CRM so that the end user sees it as the perfect “call sheet” or “lead sheet” for each prospect increases adoption significantly.