We are delighted to announce that the year has got off to a successful start with CRM Online ranked as one of the top 3 SageCRM suppliers in Q1 Business Partner League Tables – a national sales league table.

‘This great news is evidence of our expertise developed over the last 20 years as CRM specialists,’ said CRM Online’s Managing Director Peter Sidhu. ‘It also shows our passion for trying to ensure that our clients get the appropriate solution to meet their unique requirements is proving popular with businesses across the country.’

CRM Online focus on having a unique blend of being business consultants and technical experts. Our key strengths are also being specialists in CRM and Business Intelligence and systems integration.

Sage CRM is an award-winning, web-based customer relationship management (CRM) solution with customers in over 70 countries worldwide. It provides all you need in the form of a full-suite CRM solution comprising sales, marketing and customer service automation.

Thousands of customers across the globe use Sage CRM every day to manage and maximize the performance of their business and in particular their sales, marketing and customer service activities.

‘We ensure our clients get the support and results they need with a focus on integrating sales, marketing, support and finance operations,’ added Mr Sidhu.

What makes Sage different is its focus on small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) – with over 6.2 million SMB customers worldwide, we understand what SMBs need to be successful.
We have worked with businesses in Manufacturing, Financial Services (Banks, Brokers, Private Wealth Management), Charities, Education, Property Management and Business Services.
Sage CRM offers:

• Ease of use

• Fast, flexible deployment

• Ease of customisation

• Business integration

Our other specialities are: Client Relationship Management (CRM) Solutions, CRM Requirements & Strategy Planning, CRM implementation & training, CRM Support, Integration, GoldMine, ACT!, Sage CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, BPM Online, Sales Management and Sales Force Automation.

Here at CRM Online we offer CRM trials. Just give us a call and one of our experts will discuss with you the best ways of transforming your business to be the best it can be!

Welcome to this discussion on what CRM can do for a business.

Today we will look at some of the ways CRM can impact marketing in a business.
Marketing is the process by which companies create customer interest in goods or services. Marketing can also be used to keep customers and generate new interests within an existing customer base.

Methods

Marketing can use various methods of getting a message across including;

• Advertising

• Direct Mail

• E-mail

• Brochures

• Web Presence

• Call Centres

amongst others. Some of these methods require the material/information to be targeted to specific people. This is one of the areas where a contact database can help.

Targeting

Ideally marketing information will be aimed specifically at the people who are most likely to be interested in the particular product or service being marketed. This could be broken down by demographic, geographical area, type of business, etc. Using information held in a contact database it is possible to filter out the people who are the best match for the required criteria and send a specifically worded message direct to them. This is much more likely to produce results than taking a ‘shotgun’ approach to who receives the message.

Tracking

Any decent CRM system will allow marketing campaigns to be tracked, including relevant communication with the recipients. This makes it easy to know who has responded and who hasn’t and which campaign or part thereof triggered the response. It should also be possible to link these responses to any subsequent sales that are achieved as a result of this.

Measurement

Using the information captured above and any other information supplied by the system (e.g. campaign costs, how much activity took place to make the sale, etc.) it should be possible to measure both the sales funnel (i.e. the probability of making a sale at any stage in the sales process) and the overall cost of sale, taking into account both the campaign costs and the amount of activity per sale.

Which is probably a whole lot more information than is available now.

Feedback

All of this information can be fed back into the CRM system to improve the reliability of the measurements coming from it and the business to help develop the overall marketing and pricing strategy.
Profiling

Another kind of feedback is what the customer really wants from you. Ostensibly your customer is after a widget or a service which gives them value for money. Deeper investigation could prove that what the customer really wants is somewhat different. Finding out what the customer really wants is crucial to a CRM strategy. A business that can understand the customer’s requirements and fulfil them in a way that not only gives value for money but takes things a step further in resolving an issue or taking a burden from the customer will have a substantial advantage in the marketplace.

Summary

As can be seen CRM can have a significant impact on marketing, but this is only one aspect of a business. We will also show how CRM can impact other areas of the business equally significantly.

Welcome to this discussion on what CRM can do for a business.

We start with the basic question, ‘What is CRM?’

There are any number of definitions out there, we tend to think of it as how to Identify, Acquire and Retain Profitable Customers.

Whatever the definition, and it may depend on the type of business and/or the type of customers, it will almost certainly involve collecting and sharing information on the customers.

So it will involve a database but the next question is likely to be ‘What else do we want it to do for us?’

The key areas normally associated with CRM are Marketing, Sales and Customer Care but we find that all parts of the business can and often, should be affected by CRM.

CRM is all about improving the customer experience and to this end everyone in the business needs to be putting the customer first. Let’s face it, there won’t be a business without them.

So we see CRM as much as a business culture as a set of systems and it only really works if it incorporates both.

So, in summary CRM can be thought of as a culture of putting the customer first, utilising systems and technology to aid the staff in managing this.

Next…

In this series we are going to look at many aspects of CRM and how they can impact the various parts of a business, the next part will look at Marketing.