CRM & Sales Force Strategy
6 Reasons To Adopt a CRM Adopting Process What is CRM? What is Sales Force? What is ERP? CRM for Industries Enabling Tools for CRM Key Functional Areas of CRM CRM and Sales Force Goal Selecting the Best Solution Guarantee CRM Success
Customer Relationship Management is the strategy that defines how you and your organization will manage the life cycle of a customer relationship.
The key functional areas of CRM to be considered in a strategy is there are the functions in your Business System and the functions of your Sales Force. Combining both functions you are closing the loop that seperates your back-office and your fornt sales force which is very crucial when implementing a successful sales for automation strategy!
The first key functional areas of CRM to be considered in a strategy is there are the functions in your Business System. Most companies already have a quality accounting or enterprise wide business system that is in place to manage the accounting, purchasing/procurement production, receiving, inventory management, order management, and shipping within the organization. Companies have invested over the years at adopting these solutions and maximizing the efficiency of how using the system to impact the customer.
When evaluating a Sales Force Automation Solution you need to make sure the solution provides all the features and functionality necessary for a sales person to manage and perform their job while minimizing the need to jump back and forth between multiple applications day in day out.
Your sales force often utilizes Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, or independent access databases to manage all the different areas of their job that ultimately touched the customer. Whether it's an annual sales planning process, project management, opportunity management, call reporting, email management, support/case management, expense reporting, sales reporting and marketing management. In most companies all of these independent systems are independent applications that the sales person has to access in order to perform their job. They seldom communicate or built off of a centralized database of information.