The Road to CRM Success:Choose Your Traveling Partner Wisely

What a family road trip can teach us about choosing a CRM business partner

Summer’s coming. Vacation time. When you travel, especially on a road trip, your traveling companions can make all the difference between a fun, relaxing time and a frayed-nerves experience.

I remember one family vacation when we took along an elderly woman who was visiting relatives where we were going. She was sweet and jolly, but she could not stop talking. Our children rode for two days in quiet desperation. It was a long trip.

Business success – and CRM’s role in it -- is a journey.

You don’t get there overnight.

You’re going to want good traveling companions.

What makes a good traveling partner for your journey to success?

Someone with a good sense of direction and the ability to read a map, sort of like a navigator sitting by a pilot. You don’t want to veer off course. The right consultant is a human GPS for your business. Just make sure both of you agree on the destination and how long it’ll take to get there.

Someone who’s been there before, sort of like the wilderness guide who knows where the rapids are in the river and what time of year you really, really, really need your insect repellent. Someone who knows what pitfalls you might encounter and how to avoid them.

Someone who pitches in, especially to keep the munchkins in the back seat happy. Likewise, your CRM traveling companion can be indispensable to making sure your sales team is happy. (I’m not really calling them children, you understand. Don’t stretch the metaphor that far.)

Someone who doesn’t make the trip all about them. This is your business. You know where you want to end up. Your traveling partner is there to help you, sort of like the guy riding shotgun for the stagecoach driver. What’s more, it’s not even all about you. Your traveling partner helps you keep your focus on your customers. How can you serve them better with your CRM customer knowledge?

Someone you actually like. You’re going to spend time together. Choose your traveling companion wisely to avoid jangled nerves. If you think about it, your customers are also making this journey with you. Ensure the best experience for everyone by choosing whom you work with -- your ideal clients.

Someone who knows when to be quiet. Clear communication is key. It involves listening as well as talking. If your traveling partner doesn’t listen to you, get a different one. Also, sometimes you just need to step back and regroup. You should be able to be left alone when you need it.

Someone who helps you reroute for the detours. On about every journey there is a detour especially if you are traveling in the summer.  Likewise with a CRM implementation.  Often during an implementation there will be new information that is discovered, knowledge that is useful from a newly gained perspective.  It may be a detour or a new high speed highway to get faster to the desired location.

Someone with whom you can agree on a radio station. Talk? Classic rock? Country? We suggest WII-FM -- “What’s In It For Me” – meaning your customer, of course.  When we work with our clients our perspective is helping you maximize the knowledge we bring to our business partnership for success.

Someone with whom a follow up trip can be revised or optimized.  You and the family have made the long trip across the US to a distant vacation point.  You enjoy the vacation and now its time to head back home.  Maybe you'll want a different seating arrangement or a route to take in more sites and optimize the whole experience. Choosing a CRM advisor and partner can make the return leg much more successful and enjoyable.

Related resources:

Tailor-made solutions for Sage SalesLogix and Sage ACT!

18 requirements to business success with CRM

How to be successful with CRM

Articles on Business success with CRM

Reasons to believe from our clients

Start a conversation now with Dick or Julie to discover how to get started on a faster path for business success with CRM...

Serve Your Target Market Better - Sage ACT! for Non-Profit

Non-profit serves housing needs by organizing volunteers and material donations.

 
Skip Brown leads a non-profit organization called Freedom Builders in Traverse City, MI. They’re rebuilding homes from the inside out for people who can’t afford it. As we all know, when there’s a hole in the roof and winter is coming on, you don’t have a lot of time to get it fixed.

This organization uses Sage ACT! to orchestrate volunteer labor. Each person in the database is referenced by the skills they have: from electrical or plumbing down to “can swing a hammer.” They’re also organized by what times they typically are available to help out. It’s fantastic opportunity management.

Freedom Builders also uses Sage ACT! to track donors, send emails out through ACT! E-Marketing, regarding golf outings or other fundraisers and tracks open rates to gage how well those fundraisers will be attended.

The greatest thing is when someone from the board calls with a project. Somebody needs that hole in the roof fixed, and it looks like rain. Can we get shingles and a crew and have it done by this Saturday? Without Sage ACT, you’d think this sort of request would soon overwhelm  him, but within a few seconds, Skip comes back on the phone. “Yes, we can get it done.” And the board member wonders – how did he know so quickly that it was feasible? Remember when he asked the board to approve the purchase of the Sage ACT CRM System!? Well, that’s how. The information is so easy to access that he knows whether he has someone on board to donate shingles or tell him if he can find four roofers to come help on Saturday.

New volunteers coming into the system can be sent a survey to determine what their skills are. Can you install carpet? Can you paint? The survey uploads this information into the system automatically, and the volunteer force grows naturally.

Compelling value: It’s exciting to me to see people getting help this way and to know that someone’s child is warm at night because volunteers can be tapped at a moment’s notice. It helps me sleep at night! What would you like to be able to access at a moment’s notice – something Sage ACT! could do that would help you sleep at night too?

If you're looking to serve YOUR target market better, contact us for help, and perhaps you’d consider making a donation to our friends at Freedom Builders.

Related Articles:

Keeping Your Sales Funnel Filled While on the Road-Sage ACT

15 actions to achieve better CRM user engagement and adoption

Focus on user engagement and adoption for long-term continued success with CRM.

The ability to change in business today is inevitable reality. End-user adoption is key to a successful CRM initiative. Over the years we have found several helpful hints for promoting CRM as a business culture and actions to achieve better user adoption.

Typically, employees feel uncomfortable with the idea of having to change thier routines and adjust to an unfamiliar application such as CRM. Consider how to minimize the risks to end-users.

1. Build a case for change- answer the "What's in it for me" question. Think about the impact of CRM strategy on people - the benefits and consequences of changing or not changing. Demonstrate clearly to those involved that the new system will benefit them.  Spend some time explaining how CRM will benefit them directly and not just the company as a whole.
2. Have the various stakeholders involved in the design and pilot phase. Early participation with feedback is key to long term adoption. Cover how CRM helps in their day-in-life activities. What steps can be eliminated or reduced. Test options during the pilot and make needed adjustments.
3. Communicate project progress.  Hold regular meetings across all departments to communicate how it is going.  How can interactions among various departmental personal be improved and important data captured and shared.
4. Keep employees in the loop by providing information and clarity about what is happening. Pilot team members should share in the progress.
5. Encourage employees to speak up about changes and listen to what they have to say.  For example, discover what sales processes they are already doing in Microsoft Outlook and then see what can be leveraged into the CRM application.
6. Give employees time to make the transition and adjust to the new approach. Find out specific struggles some users are having. CRM is a journey and some people adapt faster than others.
7. Support the managers who are leading the CRM march toward greater success. What activity roll up reporting can be accomplished to eliminate the need for sales call reports. What dashboards can provide snapshots of their department's key performance indicators. 
8. Give them one piece of the pie at a time.  Think baby steps... Understand that effective implementation of CRM is a cultural process: it will take time for everyone to adjust to new ways of doing business. Start with entering sales contact key information, performing lookups and navigating.  Later move into sales opportunity management and business analytics.
9. Inform  and involve customers about the company's vision for a customer-centric organization. As you make changes get their feedback.  We had one client make valuable quotation form changes and lead follow up progress from early feedback from helpful customers.
10. Communicate that growth of the company is enhanced by the users sharing information that they gather about customers: their concerns, needs and wants.  It's about "building" a customer relationship and sharing profile characteristics.
11. Provide useful educational resources that are focused on the desired results for each audience. Have these easily accessible. Web based how-to's in an audio-video format work well and can become quick refreshers.
12. Conduct frequent audits, review progress, make adjustments - this is a discovery learning process.  Continually assess results weighted against the expectations. Invite the sales team to review weekly or monthly reports and share feedback.
13. Reward the adopters, the power users, those who help their associates so the whole ship rises to new levels.  Make part of their pay dependent on activities within the CRM solution. We have had several clients replace sales people with those that became engaged with use of CRM shared knowledge - and sales increased! Get the right people on the bus and go in the right direction.
14. Celebrate the successes, large and small.  Talk about the improved customer experiences, the smarter on-time customer information, and so forth.
15. Use subject matter experts as effectively as possible. Enlist the support of a professional CRM systems architect and implementer.....ideally someone with experience in various business roles: owner/manager/employee in sales, marketing, and customer service.  

Neglecting to change practices and habits that will provide tangible rewards and intangible benefits is a dangerous cow-path that businesses all too often fall into. Yes, innovation can sometimes take a back seat to more pressing issues.

Implementing a quality CRM strategic solution that is practically useful is one of the simplest ways to induce dynamic change in an organization.

For more on "increased user adoption"..... or Results gained from CRM....

What actions have you found helpful to achieve better CRM user adoption?

Your CRM Guide to Business Improvements - Introduction

CRM provides team, shared knowledge

CRM, Customer Relationship Management, and more particularly the technologies involved in delivering it has caused more confusion than any other technology that has been available in the market for so long. Survey after survey shows that for the majority of companies, the awareness of the technology exists but the confusion persists as to how precisely it benefits the user and his or her customer.

But the truth is that the benefits of these solutions are not hard to understand and reasonably easy to realize. Indeed those that have worked with a successful CRM installation are usually converts that find it very difficult to work without one when moving to another company and are keen to bring a solution with them. So what is it that they are so keen to take with them?

This "CRM guide" series is intended to explain the jargon-free business benefits that a modest investment in CRM will bring. And we use the term CRM to describe an umbrella of strategy, processes, tools, techniques and technologies that deal with the interactions of a company and its customers and how these interactions are dealt with internally. For those new to CRM, start with "What is CRM"......

The CRM systems available for the smallest company to the largest are now extremely good, robust, and mature if delivered by the right people with the right skills and with the correct level of engagement by the purchasing company. It is important to point out that not all CRM systems will contain all of the following features; depending on which elements are most important to your situation it is important to engage with a vendor or partner company to get the right system and deploy it the right way.

Our firm is here to help you consider what solution may be right for you and to help you navigate the feature/benefits that are valuable in the way your business operates.  We specialize in Sage ACT contact management and Sage SalesLogix CRM, simply because they work and can also be tailor made to work the way you want to do business.

#1 Working as a Team

The first benefit that many companies realize is the level of coordination that introducing a universal customer management system affords. For managers there is a view of the activity of their whole group and the ability to drill into the activities of teams and individuals. For those individuals there is the ability to view the activities of colleagues. They can see their history with a customer, current deals being worked or a view on any recent service queries, complaints, and resolutions– basically the opportunity to work as a coordinated unit which will result in less wasted effort, better service and happier customers.

In essence there is knowledge capture that provides knowledge transfer among the people within the business resulting in a more valuable business asset of the CRM database.

Our clients find it refreshing to have easily shared information about their prospect and current customers and are relieved by the gains in staff productivity.  Several clients have managed to combine this knowledge from various data sources that was spread out among the organization thus saving time and reducing business complexity.  Instead of silos of disjointed information there is a centralized database that is shared among the team.

Related resources:

• What is CRM and why it is critical to business success
• CRM - considerations before engaging in a CRM initiative
• Business issues solved with CRM
• How to be successful with CRM

Deadly Mistakes to Avoid - where CRM helps

Cost of bad decisions:We were wrong but...

Several years ago my wife and I specifically wanted to visit Tombstone Arizona where Wyatt Earp and his brothers brought law and order to the West.  At Boot Hill is this marker of a deadly mistake made by the people in the community around this time. 

"..Hanged by mistake 1882.  He was right, we was wrong but we strung him up and now he's gone"

What is the cost of a bad business development decision?

• Are the simple things like a list of your customer contact's phone and email addresses holding you back on reaching out regularly?
• Is the prospects contact list full of bullet holes?
• Did a key customer leave and when looking into their contact history you should have known a year before?
• Are you sending out emails and the bounce rate feels like a gun fighter shooting at your feet?
• Is the quality of information about your ideal customer not where it needs to be to make smart marketing decisions?
• Are you making wrong decisions because your information about prospects and customers is not accurate or misinformed like this community was?
• Worse yet - is a quick, bad decision killing your company?

What's the Solution to better Decisions with CRM?

So your community has beeen ran sacked, your family threatened and your way of life totally thrown for a loop. You know this story has to have a happy ending. Your business life has to have a positve message on the grave marker.  It does not take the Earp brothers to make the needed adjustments and definitely not to the extremes they used.

Invite into your business, knowledge about ways to improve the business development process.  Ways to identify ideal customers and then attract and retain profitable customers.

.....An experienced, business development professional consultant who has successfully implemented CRM for multiple years with various types of businesses is a good place to start.

Ok, I'm ready to start this conversation....  The folks in your 'community' of associates will appreciate it. 

Three Pillars of Business Success with CRM

"The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer", Peter F. Drucker. 

That statement from one of my mentors has always stuck with our business focus and links to our core purpose as a business.

Is that why your business exists? Entrepreneurs all have their own reasons, but they all have this in common: To keep existing, they must purposefully do three things, and to keep doing them.

1. Get customers. Without people who want what you’re selling, you’re done. How do you attract people who need your product or service? How are you differentiating your products and services to educate and to beat the "no decision" competition?  Without differentiated value for attracting new customers your business is subject to commodity pricing.

2. Grow customers. Nurture them. Become an expert at their care and feeding. The more you know about them, the more you can expand your relationship with them. Look for ways you can add to their success. This will develop yours.

3. Keep customers. The cost to gain a new customer is something like five times as much as to retain an existing one. When you invest in making your customers happy, their value to you grows. You’ll earn their loyalty, and that’s priceless. Loyal customers buy again and again. They buy additional products or services. They refer people in their network to you.

A Customer Relationship Development Plan:

To achieve the purpose of your business, you need a plan to carry out all three parts of this cycle, continuously and simultaneously. That plan is your Customer relationship management (CRM) strategy. Its foundation is a database that….

….is shared by your whole team. Now is not the time for your right hand to not know what your left hand is doing, metaphorically speaking. You can’t know your customers and therefore make them happy without everyone having all the information about them and your contacts with them.

….contains valuable information. Train everyone to stay on “high receive” when they’re relating to customers. Yes, record the bones of customers’ needs, purchases, and service issues. But also capture frustrations, desires, what pleases them, what else is going on in their lives. Individual information, in the aggregate, can guide you to wise business decisions.

….makes information easy to find. Is it accessible in the field, on the fly? It’d better be, because that’s what a sales force needs today. Does it take a minimum number of keystrokes to get what you want from it? Is the learning curve short to run the reports you need?

….is dynamic and adaptable. As your business grows, you might want to add or change fields. You might need to analyze your data in a different way. For sure you’re going to want to keep up with fast-moving inbound marketing trends.  Make sure you have identified the social media 'handles' for your contacts in your CRM database:  LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter....

Start a Dialog

    As someone who has invested decades of my life helping entrepreneurs achieve business success, let us help you discover better ways to build a stronger foundation with CRM so you can get, grow and keep profitable customers consistently!

Related links:

More ideas and solutions for acquiring, retaining and developing customer relationships

Importance of Foundational CRM and CRM systems

Importance of an Adaptable CRM solution 

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