Archive for the ‘News and announcements’ Category

Today’s CRM systems are such good value that you’d be wise to get one as early as you can. Unfortunately in the real world, people don’t tend to seek a solution until their problem is getting too big to ignore. Here are some of the classic signs that you need a CRM system.

1. Your ability to develop and implement a really good business plan is being held back because you don’t have the data you need to do the job well.
2. You and your team are getting confused about who said what to which customer and who is responsible for doing what and when. You might even be having turf wars among the sales team and customer poaching.
3. Your customer data is unwieldy and increasingly inaccurate because you’re working off multiple databases.
4. Your sales and marketing spend is significant (in terms of time and money), but it feels really ad hoc. You know you need to be more targeted and ensure you’re getting a return on investment, but where do you start?

You are working really hard, but you know that opportunities are slipping by or being overlooked simply because you don’t have time to work on them.

If any of these scenarios sound familiar, be assured that the right CRM system will help you resolve these issues in your business.

You will wonder how you survived so long without one.

Ever wished that your CRM system and Twitter could be completely integrated?  Wouldn’t it be great to track certain tweets and twitter relationships, and then compare that information with some of the other essential data you have in your business?  And how about identifying new people who are tweeting about you or your business?  Shouldn’t they be people you are having conversations with?

Well today we officially announce the launch of Twitter for Results Freak.  The Twitter module was developed in conjunction with Microsoft and is now live and available to all Results Freak clients.  We’re also working on some significant enhancements which will be very powerful for anyone who is serious about using Twitter for business.

So what does the existing Twitter module enable you to do?  For starters …

• Manage your Twitter contacts superbly – even if you have multiple accounts
• Schedule outbound Tweets days in advance
• Track all communications from, to and mentioning your username
• Pass Twitter contacts on to your sales person or sales team, effortlessly
• Track your twitter contacts, right through from “first contact” until they come back for repeat purchases
• Run marketing campaigns and measure the results closely
• Understand key metrics, including your ROI, from Twitter campaigns
• … and much more

We’re looking forward to your feedback …

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that people drive business, and keeping customers happy is what brings them back time after time. So when the Chartered Institute of Marketing recently released the results of this survey stating that money spent on CRM is far more cost effective than advertising, it came as no great surprise to the Results Freak team.

The findings are below, in all of their glory.

… The survey, conducted for The Institute by Ipsos MORI in the Spring, revealed that a quarter of marketers (24%) think the best ROI is delivered by CRM activities, particularly among those working in financial services and other services firms (31%), and those in the technology and telecoms sectors (30%). Second highest in delivering good ROI, with half the number of mentions (12%), is public relations.

Advertising, excluding online, is most widely seen as delivering the worst ROI with nearly a quarter (23%) of marketers rating it as worst. This is higher among those working for technology and telecom companies 38%. Second worst performance is for sponsorship with one in nine (11%) considering it as delivering poor ROI…

- Ray Jones, CIM “Marketers believe that CRM delivers the best ROI …and advertising the worst!” London 06 Aug 2009

Regardless of your industry, having a central, live, fully updated and totally reliable database at your fingertips can save you time, avoid confusion and prevent two people working on the same activity at once.  Great CRM also will allow you to deal with issues as they happen, refer back to past communications immediately and gain vital information to answer queries in just a few clicks.  A no brainer really!

Results Freak is fully scalable so you don’t need to be a huge business to be able to reap the benefits. Very quickly you can have all of your clients and contacts in one central place which means that delivering top-notch customer service is not only possible – it’s quick, painless and will soon become one of the greatest strengths of your business.

Hooray for CRM.  Hooray for Results Freak.  And good on the Chartered Institute of Marketing of confirming all of this for us.

Hot off the press!  There are six new Results Freak videos which are going to be launched in the next few days.

We’ve had feedback from lots of people who don’t know much about CRM that “it’s all a bit of a mystery”.  So we’ve created the first few in a series of videos which will help anyone to get a better understanding of how a good CRM system can really work for your business.

Don’t expect jargon and confusing concepts.  These videos are in plain English, and they are short – so that you can “get it” fast, and then get on with your day.

More soon …

We thought we’d share our new Results Freak promotional video with you.  It’s hot off the press.

And there are pleny more on the way.

Well, after many months of planning and development, we’re ready for the “soft launch” of Results Freak.  Which is ironic really, given that there are already clients using it.

In fact, Results Freak is being accessed by users in:

• the UK
• Sweden
• Germany
• New Zealand

And that’s just for starters.  Very likely to have some users on a tropical atoll shortly.  More about this soon.

In any case, Results Freak is good to go.  And over the next few weeks, we’ll be making some additional enhancements and tweaks.

Watch this space!