Read some really good articles on CRM recently. Not necessarily CRM as a piece of software, but CRM as a concept.
What could CRM mean to your business?
For this article I decided to concentrate on CRM in it’s pure form – Customer Relationship Management. I say this because over the last couple of years the concept of xRM or Anything Relationship Management has become more accepted – Student Relationship Management, Guest Relationship Management etc, and Microsoft I feel have been at the forefront of this change by allowing Dynamics CRM to be built on, more like a platform than a boxed product to fit this concept.
So, back to our original question, ‘What does CRM mean to your business?’
Sweeping generalisation coming up now – pretty well all business, irrespective of their type, do the same thing:
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So how will CRM make your business better?
I have encountered lots of businesses that seem to do very well, but still feel they could do better. They sell, but could sell a bit more. They could perhaps offer more, or different services to their customers, but fail to up sell. I often find that this is mainly because of how their data and sales information is stored and used – for example:
You know you’ve sold to a customer, but do you know when you sold to them, and what they bought? Well you may say ‘yes’.
Do you however know the customers that haven’t bought anything from you in the last 3 months? Or can you easily find customers who have bought in the last 12 months, but not in the last 3 months and are from a particular industry? Can you dynamically create a list when a customer falls in to that category so that they won’t go under the wire and then market to them? When a new product or service is introduced, can you immediately see who you could up sell to based on their previous purchases?
If you didn’t have a Customer Relationship Management solution where would this information be? In reality it would probably be spread between your email client, spreadsheets, documents and probably the odd post-it.
CRM will bring all that information together. The power of Microsoft Dynamics CRM is in the ability to change to fit your business process. Some CRM solutions offer you an ‘off the shelf’ solution - ‘This is it, this is what you get, so change your way of doing things!’ Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows you to customise a solution to fulfil YOUR business process not the process other people feel you should have. So, although the over simplified images above broadly cover most businesses, the Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution can perfectly fit your needs.
I haven’t even touched on the advantages of the pre-sales processes available in CRM, such as lead management, opportunity management along with post sales support – all to give you a 360° view of your business, but already it’s apparent that a CRM system will help you sell and then sell more.
Check out some of the links embedded in this article and below to see how CRM could help your business.
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