CRM- Customer Relationship Management
CRM- Customer Relationship Management, as a concept or business philosophy, is really not something new. It has been around since commerce was invented back in who knows when. The terminology, though, became current in the middle 1990s. Today, there are estimates of between 200-400 companies providing some form of CRM products/services.
Imagine trying to get 200 people agreeing on anything, and that’s why you’ll see and hear so many varying definitions.
Here’s the one we use: CRM is a customer-focused business strategy that requires consensus among people, processes and technologies to achieve growth and future profitability.
Tucked away in this tidy definition are several key concepts, unfortunately, often overlooked by many. First, it’s a business strategy—a policy—squarely focused on the customer. It is not just pontificating about “The customer rules. The customer is king.” It is an entire way of doing business, but it must be embraced from the top of the enterprise on down.
Secondly, this business strategy requires consensus, or agreement, among all employees—not just the sales and sales service departments—your business processes must be customer friendly, and the technology that makes doing business with you as easy as can be, as seen from the customer’s point-of-view. No small tasks.
Lastly is growth and future profitability, not just profitability, but future profitability. Why this emphasis? Professor Paul R. Timm, of Brigham Young University, and former chair of the school’s Department of Organizational Leadership, maintains that US companies, on average, will lose half of their customers every five years. He goes further: “It costs five times as much to generate a new customer as it does to keep an existing one.” Yikes.
Sales & Marketing Management magazine publishes a survey of Selling Costs. After all their numbers are sliced and diced, they said: “Field sales people make an average of 15.5 in-person sales calls/week, at $193.54/call (average of all industries).” Yikes. Yikes.
Here’s the math: $193.54x15.5=$2,903.10. Now by 50 weeks of selling: $2,903.10x50=$145,155.00. Now, it’s your turn: multiply $145,155.00 by the number of sales people you employ. Yikes. Yikes. Yikes.
That’s why the focus is on future profitability. Enough said.
What about ROI for CRM?
CRM ROI - This topic creates a lot more smoke than heat. Why? It’s because firms rush off to implement CRM practices with absolutely no thought about how to do before/after metrics. Well, they may know about the after, but the chance of meaningful before is long gone. That’s why you often hear: “I’ve got no way to determine my return on the investment we made in CRM.”
Well, herewith, we humbly submit our approach. We don’t think it should be Return on Investment. Instead, we prefer to call it Return Over Investment. And that’s just what will happen: you’ll have all kinds of return over the cost of Tour de Force. The investment, if you want to call it that, is barely more than the cost of one in-person sales call. In fact, if you’ve got over 50 employees, it is less. And, you’ll probably want to rethink your philosophy of cold calls once you see a demonstration of the power of Tour de Force because for less than the cost of one wasted cold call you could…. Well, you get the picture.
Avoid Costly Mistakes by Choosing Tour de Force™
Tour de Force is a software suite, built on Microsoft® Outlook® and Exchange technologies. Most people think of CRM applications for Tour de Force, but this extremely flexible software can be used well beyond managing CRM activities. Because the Tour de Force Opportunity Management module has eight user-defined fields and associated values, this highly customizable software is finding application outside the normal CRM tasks. Company or process activities, construction or project requirements, even Statistical Process Controls functions, all have been reported.
Yes, Tour de Force is focused mainly on sales activities since that is what makes a customer a customer: something was sold. To support the sales function, the modules, working separately or collaboratively, enable your employees to see the total customer relationship. And, it’s seen in an environment with which they are already familiar, Outlook.
I’ve read that some analysts are saying that for every $1 spent on CRM software, I’ll need to spend $3 more to properly implement it. Why is this so?
Depending on your organization, and on the type CRM software you buy and install, you very well could face this kind of additional cost. With Tour de Force, since it is based on Outlook that most companies are already using, the learning curve is virtually flat. If you know Outlook, you know 98% of Tour de Force. The skinny little 2% is handled with the built-in Help files, web-based or on-site training.
It’s a fact, sadly, that some of these high power/high price CRM packages face nearly insurmountable obstacles to complete implementation. We’ve heard reports that indicate nearly 80% of one big-name CRM package’s functions are never used because they are so complicated. Why spend your precious dollars on functionality too complicated to use? It’s not a stretch to say that if you are currently using Outlook, you’ll be making Tour de Force work for you just minutes after it’s installed. Wouldn’t that be a change in the right direction? |
