Business Success with CRM - Why CRM Needs to Be in Your 2014 Strategy

By Dick Wooden on December 12, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Business Success with CRM means developing a customer focused business strategy and fully implementing a helpful CRM system into your business. As you reflect on the 2013 business year, consider your achievements and what you feel you can accomplish in the coming year. Look over how you approach your customer relations and their management. When one bad online review can destroy you, you need to consistently reassess your CRM system and make sure it is above the bar. When an opportunity is lost because of unfocused follow up or the inability to connect with a prospect, its time for a CRM assessment.

Many businesses evaluate software to help them optimize CRM to increase the efficiency of their office. This is due to the increase in a CRM software system to not only organize relationships but actually grow those relations. Instead of simply cutting costs, new CRM systems will grow a business's revenue.

If you haven't visited CRM software in a while, be prepared to be amazed. It has changed phenomenally in only 5 years. You need to let go what you know about it and try to envision its various capabilities. Anyone with CRM software experience will remember the tedious tasks of starting up your laptop and then logging every activity with absolutely no return.

Mobility with smart phones and tablets now allow you to work more effectively and easily capture notes on your communications while noting the next follow up activity. Vast improvements are available from Swiftpage ACT! contact management and Saleslogix CRM:

Today's CRM software systems can grab interactions automatically then help you decide where to focus efforts. It can help you discover what you need to do to turn a profit and where you are losing money unnecessarily.

Let's Move Forward

Let's review some things you can do in 2014 to increase efficiency while maintaining your valued existing customer relationships.

Begin with Rapport

Make sure the first face your customer sees, your sales reps, are presenting your company in the absolute best light possible. Give them a mission statement and make sure they can communicate the culture of the company. Help them reach beyond quality and price to help a potential customer understand why anyone would want to build a relationship with your business.

Review Relationships and Compare to Numbers

You already know that numbers drive sales. Deals are made or broken depending on your ability to meet specified quotas. When sales reps push too much for a sale, the human element leaves the equation, and this leads to lost sales due to broken relationships.

Success in sales means balancing the numbers with the client. Every customer needs to feel a value in the company or they will walk away. The answer to this problem is to provide every sales rep with tools and support to strategically maintain great customer relationships.

Give and Get Loyalty

As in relationships outside the business, your loyalty to a customer will be returned by loyalty from the customer. You want a financial commitment from the customer, so be ready to allow your whole company to invest resources into each client. This can mean regular conversations, lunch meetings, or hand-written correspondence. Whatever the means, make sure the sales reps understand your company's practices for creating a valued customer.

Invest in the Software

Software to help you with your CRM is typically related to the sales reps, but there are tools which reach beyond this department. Marketing needs to interpret what the clients need and want, and customer representatives need to have access to general customer information. You'll need to have some sort of system for every department to have access to customer information.

The leaders of your business need to decide how each department is going to communicate customer information to each other. If this base does not exist in the company, you won't be on the same page with each other. This will lead to confusion, which will not present you as a team. Customers will quickly pick up on this and begin to mistrust the organization.

You need to implement some CRM tools into your organization in 2014. This is more than software; it is a strategic state of mind which will carry your business on its back. It needs to be part of your company's culture.

To talk more about this, or anything else, please Contact Us. Reach me at 268-445-3001. Thanks.