An effective CRM should offer a business the functionality to grow and change with their changing business needs. Having the facility to constantly iterate the CRM around the changing processes of your business is critical. In this post we look at some of the key ingredients that effective CRM’s should offer.
Effective CRM – A lead generation module
Maximizer can help you deliver and manage leads for you organisation by building mailing lists, creating and sending HTML emails, tracking leads and opportunity conversion. This will allow you to reduce the amount of time that sales people are spending sending individual emails to suspect organisations and create a process to maximise the return on the amount of money you spend on marketing activities.
Effective CRM – Salesforce Automation
Here is where many of our customers derive the greatest return on their CRM are investment – having a clear idea of what opportunities are in what stage of the sales cycle and managing the deal in detail brings enormous clarity to your business.
It helps salespeople manage their prospects, understand their customers better and share information about opportunity influencers and competitors. It also allows contacts to be related to organisations even though they may not be employed by them.
This information sharing is extremely valuable – as an example Maximizer can help a salesperson understand which deals have been won against the same competitor that he is up against in a current deal. Using this information wisely will help him close more deals and further strengthen the company’s competitive advantage.
Effective CRM – Quotation and Invoice Generation functionality
Salespeople have the capability to create quotations from within Maximizer CRM – Customer upload price books allow accurate pricing and restricted discounting if required. These quotations are saved within the application and can be automatically converted to .pdf files to be emailed to prospects.
Effective CRM – Document Management functionality
Documents can be stored centrally and linked to multiple people and organisations, which can reduce the amount of out-of-date documents attached to emails. More importantly documents are managed effortlessly with older documents, such as expired contracts, easily identified.
Effective CRM – Pipeline Management functionality
CRM should allow sales managers to set quotas for each of their salespeople on either a monthly or quarterly basis. Reports and dashboards can be created to show performance against that quota.
In addition to the normal opportunity management capability there is an additional forecasting feature that allows opportunities to be tagged as “committed” or “best case” against a forecast figure. This facility is very useful to companies that are involved in larger, longer-term, deals that may stretch over multiple quarters.
Pipeline management and forecasting will keep your “finger on the pulse” and will help in organising individual territory reviews with your sales people. It also improves planning of installation engineers, timely purchase order requisitions and greater service to your customers.
Pipeline management can benefit your company in so many ways but knowing what deals are in the pipeline and when they will close will enable you to plan manufacturing better, optimise cash flow and simply know when deals are going “off the boil”.
Effective CRM – A Customer Support Module
In order to future proof your business, you need to consider a CRM solution that deliver a full function customer service solution which can monitor, issue and prioritise support tickets. This functionality enables support teams to ensure customer and prospect problems are handled quickly and efficiently.
Effective CRM – Dashboards and Reporting
The real benefit of a CRM solution over a contact management system is providing accurate up-to-date information about what is happening within the business. CRM’s should have a full reporting and dashboard engine with pre-designed and custom created reports. You have the flexibility to report on any contact, organisation, lead, opportunity, activity, or any combination of these and export to Excel or.csv if required.
Effective CRM – think Maximizer CRM!
Try to utilise the benefits of the Maximizer CRM is an extremely function rich application which can deliver a host of benefits to your company from lead generation through to service management. It is wise to investigate each of the features below and understand how you can adopt them within your business.
Effective CRM – Remember Garbage in Garbage out
With any computerised system it is important to ensure that the information contained in it is as accurate as possible. With CRM it is even more
important as the information contained within it soon becomes out of date. It is good business practice to manage mass data input through a trained
administrator but for day-to-day input of new opportunities or adding new contacts make the person who is responsible for the account (usually the salesperson) responsible for the accuracy of the data for his or her accounts.
Effective CRM – a journey not a destination
An effective CRM solution is the “Holy Grail” of many organisations. Having an effective CRM is not a goal but an on-going journey as the adoption and
utilisation of the CRM system is the key to making it effective.
Make sure that you know what you want your CRM system to do – how will it help your business to be more efficient, drive more revenue or increase market
penetration? Without clear goals, any CRM system will be only a partial success
How a CRM can help
ProAptivity are an independent CRM solutions provider. We focus on the implementation, training, and support of highly customised CRM software solutions. Our CRM software supported by our sales training provide customers with the tools needed to deliver successful sales process management.
Fundamentally, we help organisations embed CRM best practice throughout their organisation. This helps organisations become more competitive, customer focused and ultimately more profitable.
If you need help in understanding why my business needs CRM, maybe some of our eBooks could help! Alternatively visit Maximizer CRM for more information. Contact us today in Belfast on 028 9099 6388 or at our Bedford office on 01234 214004. Alternatively email us on info@proaptivity.com. Contact us today for a free CRM consultation that will assess if your business is CRM ready.
