With the potential growth for any business through online Marketing the ability to manage your customers as become much more critical irrespective of business size.  A professional, up-to-date, complete and well managed website, the right products and services, good use of SEO to draw traffic to your site, focussed sales and customer service staff, well-functioning accounts staff all allow any business to compete with major players in the market.

Through previous blogs we have talked about the potential growth from overseas markets as well as due to changing ethnicity demographics in local markets, use of social media marketing, the importance of Google to any business, the positive impact to any business by marketing to Gen Y’s and why competitive customer service is so important to businesses.  We have also discussed how important relationship building is to drive future growth for your business.

Any one of these factors done well can have a positive effect – the cumulative effect of getting several or all of them done well can have a massive positive effect on a business.

One of the problems we have observed though is that not all businesses have the back end of their business functioning well.  In particular we are talking about customer relationship management.

It’s amazing how many businesses have grown so quickly that they have lost track of how many customers they actually have:

• Do all sales reps have an equivalent number of accounts, or account dollar value
• Can you tell what a particular industry category or sub-category is worth to your business (i.e., if a legislation change affected one of these, how quickly could you segment that group and contact them)
• The combined account value for all or individual companies making up one group (i.e., Wesfarmers Insurance as a parent company owns Bunnings, Coles, Liquorland, Vintage Cellars, Myer, Coles Express, Officeworks, Target, and many others).  You may sell to one or more of these entities and need that sales info by individual entity as well as the combined account dollar value for the entire group.
• Can you split account value by regions as well as by sales reps (i.e., a total for Queensland, then totals for Far North Queensland, Central Queensland, Sunshine Coast, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Darling Downs, etc).

There are many other categories of data capture and reporting ability that anyone with sales management experience could add to these examples but many companies cannot segment this info quickly.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have been around for many years now.  Initially, due to cost mainly, their purchase tended to limited to large companies – or medium sized businesses with high growth and/or complex customer bases.

This tended to frighten off small and small-to-medium sized businesses who thought the systems would be outside their price range.  Like most things nowadays, cost has reduced significantly as more players have entered the CRM market – making this type of management system affordable to any business.

The scary thing is that there are many businesses out there that are still managing their sales accounts using Call Cards, Manilla folders or by Excel Spread Sheet.

Set up time can be another factor that puts business off setting up such a system – “how will we ever find the time”, “our sales teams are too busy now to take them off the road to work on the set up”, etc. Think laterally about it – you could hire a temp for a week, month, whatever at minimal cost and interruption to your business, or use one or more work experience students for even less financial outlay.  One of the reasons your sales team may be so busy is because the current account management system is so cumbersome they waste time calculating data, planning sales visits, recording sales visit info, etc.

CRM systems nowadays are set up with a generic set of data fields and reporting options however usually they can be modified so that they can be tailor made for your specific business needs.  Examples of how data fields could be modified include:

• The position of data fields can be modified if you want data to appear in reports in a specific order, i.e., to match those in another system that you use, such as an ordering system.  That allows you to compare data reports quickly between the two systems.
• Additional data fields can be added. I gave the earlier example of Wesfarmers and Coles, Bunnings, etc.  In this case, you could set up fields where Wesfarmers was a Buying Group (Parent) then each business entity they own – Coles, Bunnings, etc. – could be set up as separate Banner Groups (Child).  That way you can filter data by individual Banner Group or the total worth of the customer as a Buying Group.
• Additional data fields could be added for Industry Groups, i.e., by following the Industry Groups listed with the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) – from the Consumer Price Index section – you could monitor and compare the results of your customers from a given Industry Group against national and/or state results. An example would be using Health as an Industry Group and Dental for an Industry Sub-Group for all dental customers you have.
• State borders often cause issues for comparing sales results. You could leave the ‘State’ data field as a part of the address set up – allowing you to compare your results against national results and trends.  In addition, you add a second ‘State’ data field as a part of your Sales Territory data fields.  Once again, this could be done as a Parent/Child Hierarchy format, i.e., State (your Sales State – Parent) may be Queensland for customers in Ballina/Lismore region of New South Wales, an initial Sales Manager data field may be for a Regional Manager (i.e., Gold Coast – Child), then cascade down further to a Sales Rep for Ballina/Lismore.

In addition there are many other features of a good CRM that can really add value to the relationships you have with customers, such as:

• Birthdays can be recorded for your customers; reports run in advance, birthday cards or calls made by an appropriate company contact.
• You can set up the contact data by type such as Prospect, Contact, Customer, Ex-Customer, etc. depending on the relationship they are to your business.
• You can segment out customer groups by whatever data fields you want, i.e., State, Industry Group, etc. – so that tailored mailings, marketing campaigns, price changes etc. can be communicated quickly and effectively.
• PDF’s of correspondence sent or received can be saved against the specific customer so that all relevant info is available from one point.

In summary – use of a CRM system is something that all businesses should be using, particularly if doing business on-line, and if dealing in more than one market. It allows your business to have professional, complete data and reporting abilities across all areas of your business – having huge implications for your business both at an operational and strategic level.

Talk to us at Mindiam if you want to discuss how CRM could be integrated into your business – particularly if you are already doing, or contemplating doing business on-line.

Mindiam is a professional service provider for the following CRM Systems which we recommend:

• VtigerCRM
• Salesforce
• SugarCRM

We have integrated these professional CRM systems into many e-commerce management systems such as Magento, Joomla, Virtuemart and Saasu Accounting Systems.

If you are interested in increasing your business efficiency and profit by implementing a total CRM system you can contact us here.