Module6Lesson2.docx

Why CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications allow companies to store important sales and company data to share among its employees. The information stored and shared becomes an invaluable tool to the sales team in every phase of the sales process. The information may include insights on target customers, knowledge about industries and even simple information as to the buyer’s college. A CRM is the best way to manage your customers’ information for the benefit of sales.

Implementation and Integration are two important steps in the building of a great CRM delivery for a company. Top managers recognize the importance of a CRM system being effectively integrated in the company and will look for leaders within the organization to ensure its success. If you are senior-level sales manager or a field sales representative you may be asked to be part of the team or task force that works on implementation and integration.

Implementation and Integration

A CRM’s benefit to the sales team is that it aids in gaining access to information about prospects and customers. But how does it all get created?
Again, envision you are part of the task force for implementing and integrating CRM at your company. A key aspect for successful implementation and integration would be to look at where customer information is collected. Commonly, data can come from the prospect themselves, the marketing team or someone from the sales team.

Sales Team

· By their very nature and job description, a salesperson must manage the information they have about a prospective or current customer. Depending on how large your sales organization is or how many customers you have, this information needs to be stored in one, central system so that it can be accessible when a salesperson needs it. Imagine that you are the Northwest Territory Manager for a box company, and you are reassigned to the Southeast region. The sales organization wants the transition to be as easy as possible. If all the key customer data is in the cloud for the Southeast region, that new sales assignment will be more likely to succeed if the information about the customers is at your fingertips. With the prospects’ information stored, the Sales Team can build and enhance long-term relationship as you store and recall important information about each prospect.

Prospect

· A prospective customer may visit your company website as they are searching for a product or service. The “contact us” section of a corporate website is a tool to connect the buyer with the seller. If your company has a CRM system in place, the data collected would “enter” the system and could generate a sales lead for a sales manager. Depending on what information (data) is collected on the website form, the sales manager will know the name, location, contact information and basic needs of the prospect.

Marketing Team

· Connecting sales and marketing is a great benefit of CRM. The marketing team, through its plan, has already identified customers (target market) and may possibly have a list of top customers it wishes sales to sell to. The marketing team’s data may also include the contact person(s) at an organization, competitor information, as well as important marketing data that can be accessed as and when the salespersons might need to. For example, the marketing department may have Point of Sale data (that is information collected at cash registered across the nation) for a particular target customer and the salesperson can access that via their mobile phone while having a business lunch with that same target customer.

More Than Just a One Time Approach

Having the understanding of where information comes from and where it needs to go to is an important step in the implementation and integration process for a company using a CRM system. As a sales professional, formally or informally, you play an important role as well. Even when a system is in place, sales can influence future enhancements and troubleshoot problem areas. CRM systems also reinforce communication with senior management and technical management to make sure the organization is getting the most value from their CRM approach.