Posts Tagged ‘sales’

People who are new to CRM may think it’s just about collecting customer information in the same place. IT’S NOT!

Well, it’s part of it. But what really excites people is how CRM enables them to do their jobs. It’s not a resource, it’s a tool – like email, or a mobile phone.

A CRM system like Results Freak is the system on which you run your sales and marketing.

Whether you are the sales person, sales manager, account manager, marketing director or managing director, a CRM system will give you greater insight into what’s happening with the customers in your business day to day.

It will automate run-of-the mill tasks and make sure all those small but important jobs get done.

And the data that accumulates over time is invaluable when it comes to reviewing performance and planning for the future. Simply brilliant for your business.

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.

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.