Too many businesses have separated sales, marketing, and service operations. Silos of information cause lack of productivity with your staff and frustrated customers who are waiting for the right answers.
Problems Solved
Often times, many people are frustrated by the lack of integration and automation within the CRM market. Below is a list of major problems that ConvergeHub solves.
Most existing CRMs for SMBs do NOT deliver on the original Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) promise–a single affordable and integrated system for Sales, Marketing, HR and Support…to manage your team, build your business and manage all your customer relationships.
Many are silo, or desktop apps that don’t help all your team, or require too much expense to integrate.
The following is from our friend, Erik Tavenner, Solution Consultant at Infor
The old sales joke is - Everyone’s favorite radio station is WiiFM.
Your Internal Customer has to know “What’s In It For Me” – WiiFM, to Buy-In
The CRM project manager must Tune in to what users want to hear.
Management wants Reports – Users Don’t want to do reports
The mission is to identify how using CRM makes the data for the reports.
WiiFM – manage your time / calendar and sales opportunities in CRM you don’t have to do Trip & Pipeline reports anymore – they become Automatic! And effortless – AND you get those frustrating hours in “Excel Hell” back –you used to “Waste” building reports. To accomplish this you must have and show users bulletproof yet simple Outlook Sync & Mobile platforms.
Unless you have been living on a deserted island you have probably heard Adele's most powerful song "Hello", from her third album that was released last November. Besides breaking all kinds of historical musical sales records, the song resonates in both the strength of Adele's wonderful voice and the powerful meaning of the words.
I must have listened to the CD a hundred times and now I'm going to take some freedom here. I'm going to relate some key phrases to what I have experienced over 30 years of consulting with owners, sales, marketing and customer service people from various types of businesses. When I listen to Adele and hear her Hello song these phrases standout and link me back to a business with or without a successful CRM. Hope this is worthy...
Verse 1: "Hello, it's me. I was wondering if after all these years you'd like to meet, to go over everything."
Now suppose you have been a customer of the person making this statement today. You get an out of the blue phone call or email wanting to reconnect after several years. Without a CRM system this may happen because we all tend to forget what we even had to eat last week. But with a well-used CRM system you should have been getting regularly scheduled 'touch' calls and probably several nurturing emails of helpful information that has kept your business "top of mind" with me.
Are you focusing on the right things with the right tool....
"The most expensive thing you can do in sales is spend your time with the wrong prospect", Jeff Blout from his new book Fanatical Prospecting - the ultimate guide to opening the sales conversations and filling the pipeline by levering social selling, telephone, e-mail, text, and cold calling.
I recently picked up a copy of Jeff's book and went directly to Chapter 11 "Own Your Database: Why the CRM is your most important sales tool" because there are too many books relating to "selling" that leave out the importance of CRM and authors who can't get across the importance of having a well-used CRM system.
It is critical that during the CRM deployment and training process, you carefully engineer the Ah-Ha moments for your user community.
These moments will crystalize the intent and purpose of why the CRM implementation is happening. The key is making the CRM system about the user experience and not about the results of use. All too often CRM deployments are perceived as “Big Brother” monitoring me. While reporting is a capability CRM provides, the project team has to proliferate the message that, CRM is intended to, first and foremost, to give the user Better and More data, to enable outstanding service while interacting with the customer, which builds loyalty. Secondly, the CRM deployment should focus on simplifying workflow through a reduction of the toolsets required to perform in each role.
In planning for a well-used CRM system consider the best ways to educate both the new and experienced CRM users. Get personal and specific- How can it help make life easier?
(Our thanks to Jeff Hanrahan, Infor CRM product manager, assoc., for his input.)
Educating Users
"Education around CRM is a huge thing, especially for people who are using a CRM system for the first time," Hanrahan says. "No one will ever learn CRM overnight — it's a super complex tool that takes years to master and to appreciate what it's capable of. But understanding it so that you know how to function in your role — that's how people should attack it first."
Having an optimal CRM system in place — one that addresses your business needs, serves your customers well and pleases your employees — is a high-stakes proposition. The right solution and partner can bring it all together.
In planning for a well-used CRM system consider the various involvement with your CRM users.
(Our thanks to Jeff Hanrahan, Infor CRM product manager, assoc., for his input.)
Capturing User Feedback
Once a user group is in place, your CRM partner will get his hands dirty. That involves spending some time with members to see how they use the system and how it can be tailored to their needs. The partner can offer insights from a different perspective along with best practices that can be applied. Knowing the CRM system's capabilities will provide the pilot members with better ways of doing things that have occurred in the past.
When you have 3-5 applications always running and going in between, screen real estate is limited. Where does Infor CRM fit in?
The effective use of screen real estate affects user productivity. Excessive information may be poorly organized or confusing, so effective screen layouts must be used with appropriate used with appropriate use of software.
Do you have the space for another monitor?
Would it adversely affect your focus?
Can you integrate two main software applications and only have one displaying.
Recommended Solution:
Wouldn't it be more productive to reduce the number of programs you need to access?
Get more out of the space available on your display by using the Xbar add-in that allows you to operate your CRM with in your MS Outlook application . This Xbar streamlines your Infor CRM (Saleslogix) live data inside Outook, eliminating the need to have the Infor CRM system always showing.
Previously we talked about CRM Implementation being a team effort and to think of the people involved as an opportunity and not a roadblock, read more here.
A CRM system can make or break a growing company. The right one can boost your business development efforts, helping you grow revenue from existing customers while cost-effectively identifying and winning new "ideal" customers. The wrong one? Well, we'd rather not go there …
Having an optimal CRM system in place — one that addresses your business needs, serves your customers well and pleases your employees — is a high-stakes proposition. Unless you have dedicated staff to handle everything from choosing and customizing a solution to implementing the software and training users, you're going to need a qualified partner to do much of the heavy lifting.
Unrealized benefits of using existing CRM functionality...
After implementing and developing tailored Infor CRM business work flow processes over the years, I know that there are tons of features and functionality you consider utilizing in your business. However, here are 3 key 'out of the box' functionality features that have the most effective results:
Benefit Tip #1: Find Trends and Undiscovered Opportunities
Effectively using the smart phone microphone capability to 'speak' to update information in your CRM system is not fully utilized by sales teams. Sales reps using the 'Speech to Text' technology need to quickly identifying key concepts on the CRM record - not to provide a transcript. These quick notes benefit both the sales team and customer service team with something searchable.
Example: Just by using the SpeedSearch tool in Infor CRM for specific key words (ie. water filtration tools), provides you with a list of both prospects and customers that have made inquiries on your services or have spoken with your Customer Service department at one point. Overall it provides you with certain key words that have been spoken frequently that ordinarily don't occur in natural conversations.
