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White Paper: Gain
Business Insight and Achieve Sales Success with CRM
Gain Business Insight and Achieve Sales Success with CRM
PDF:
Gain Business Insight and Achieve Sales Success with CRM
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2. Business Challenge
One of the biggest challenges that face companies when attempting to generate larger revenues is discovering what tools they can actually use in order to achieve greater sales success. There have been and are today many tools on the market designed to increase sales productivity and up customer retention, the best of these business tools is customer relationship management software. In order to achieve the best possible sales success businesses need a way to manage their customer data in a useful manner to allow for an easy understanding of customer wants and sales trends. This need for a customer relationship management (CRM) solution has posed problems for small and medium sized businesses for many years, implementing a CRM solution of this magnitude resulted in great expenses typically out of reach of small and medium sized enterprises. When rolling out new CRM Software solutions enterprises require a solution that can be customized to fit their specific needs as well as the ability to integrate the new system with other platforms currently running, these aspects are key to driving user adoption of the new system and has been the largest reason for software implementation failure. Even after a new CRM Software solution has been successfully implemented, to achieve the greatest sales success the solution must provide a business with a complete 360 degree view across all departments to ensure all staff is working in the same direction.
2.1 The Cost of CRM Software Solutions
In the beginning of CRM Software solutions many small and medium sized enterprises were simply not able to locate the resources needed to implement CRM Software; this was due to the fact that originally these solutions were only available through traditional means. When an enterprise implemented a CRM solution they were required to incur large costs associated with physically networking their entire office, very large upfront annual software costs, housing a database center and the upkeep of their own servers as well as difficulty integrating with existing systems.
The costs mentioned thus far have only covered the purchase and installation of a CRM Software solution, there are many more costs associated in purchasing a CRM solution. Once the system is in place administrators and users must be trained on how to perform each of their duties within the new system and how to properly leverage it in order to increase successful sales. There must also be an IT department and procedures to solve technical issues with the system as they arise to allow for sales to successfully operate within the system continuously. These costs have caused enterprises to abandon entire software projects in the past as costs continually add up.
2.2 Implementation, Customization and Integration of CRM
Implementing any new business software solution can result in many headaches and problems often times leading to failure. No business operates exactly like any other and this is why purchasing business management software can present a great problem. Once a company decides what their business requires to up sales success and achieve improved customer retention they may begin evaluating the CRM market or developing their own in house solution. Hiring a development team to design a highly specific customer relationship management solution is not in the budget for most companies, especially small to medium sized enterprises. When a company decides to develop their own CRM Software solution this also requires networking their office and housing a database center which requires a large amount of maintenance.
If a business decides to purchase a CRM solution that is closest to fitting their needs off the shelf many difficulties can arise. First this solution was not designed for this particular company and is not designed to integrate with any existing systems resulting in large costs and often times a long drawn out process that interrupts business processes. This off the shelf solution will also need to be customized to fit the needs of particular business processes and information, this part is essential in order for sales staff to adopt the new system and view it as a useful tool.
2.3 Providing 360 Degree Company Wide View
A customer relationship management software solution is designed to present and organize data in a useful manner to allow the sales department among other departments to increase their productivity. This posed one of the greatest issues for businesses and to the day continues to plague companies. With traditional CRM solutions each department is unable to view data in other departments, for example, sales and marketing, or sales and billing or shipping. This lack of communication prevents businesses from achieving greater sales success since sales does not have a complete up to date view of the clients they approach. If all departments had a complete 360 degree view of each client in the system sales could save time by focusing on the particular needs of each customer, marketing could view trends in the market and target the market most likely to purchase and billing and shipping could provide highly accurate and seamless services to complete a smooth transaction.
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PDF:
Gain Business Insight and Achieve Sales Success with CRM
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