Recession and CRM

How can using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system help your business in the Recession or difficult trading times?

• Help you identify who your best customers are - who can give you the most revenue? Who has spent the most with you in the past? Who has the biggest potential for future revenue? Identify cross sell and up sell opportunities to get the most revenue out of every customer.
• Improve your marketing and communications. CRM can identify what marketing activities are working and give you better ROI analysis. When new leads come into your company, CRM systems can help you rank them and enable you to allocate resources and prioritise your approach. Reduce your cost-per-lead by delivering highly targeted marketing communications to specific customers or customer segments. Your CRM system may also be able to track instantly responses to your email campaigns - e.g. when a customer receives and e-mail from you and they click on a link, that gets tracked in your CRM system instantly and a salesperson gets an action to call them.
• Improve Customer Service: Our CRM systems enable you to track and proactively keep on top of any problems or issues your customers have. Better customer service = increased customer loyalty. A Harvard Business School survey in 2008 found that by retaining 5% more customers, you can increase revenues by up to 100%. Because your support teams are using the same tool as your sales people, you can improve teamwork and the sharing of information. When service people handle a call from a customer, they can be made aware of any up and coming sales opportunities.
• CRM can help you improve work routines or adhere to a certain way of doing things (a Business Process). e.g. You might have a specific way of handling a sales enquiry - the CRM system can ensure that the new lead is followed up in the right way by the right person. Using a CRM system can reduce paperwork and manual processes to improve productivity and reduce errors.
• Customer Research: You've got that new lead, now use your CRM system to research this potential client - what business are they in, what's their potential, what credit risk are they (you can link CRM to your on line credit checking facility)?
• Keep on top of your sales opportunities: CRM gives everyone visibility of up and coming sales. Sales can be ranked by probability, value, margin etc, so you can concentrate on the best deals for your organisation, to reduce the cost per sale.
• Beat the competition: A company using CRM correctly will ALWAYS be more efficient at following up leads than a company not using CRM. CRM keeps up those frequent customer contact levels to ensure you call them when they're ready to buy!
• Go back through your old sales leads: CRM systems can retain sales notes and prospect data for years -- not just your own old notes, but those of former sales employees as well. These can be mined for old-but-still-promising leads, as well as for prior customers that might be interested in buying again. Searching by location, demographics or marketing campaign themes can net a list of new leads that is specific to your message.
• Use Record Alerts: Record Alerts can be pop-up alarms in CRM that warn you about bad payers or customers on stop.
• Better Management of your Sales Team: Who has the best sales, the highest conversion rates of leads to sale, the most appointments? Dashboards and Reports from CRM can give you answers to all of these and more! Remember, what you can't measure, you CAN'T MANAGE!!!

Invest in CRM. You're in good company. A 2009 survey by Gartner found more than three quarters of businesses in Europe will make a large investment in customer relationship management this year.

The European CRM software market will even experience a growth next year, Gartner says, with a rise of four percent to €2.4 billion. CRM strategists in 90 businesses were interviewed for the survey.

Businesses said their main reasons for CRM investment this year are to enhance cross-selling or upselling of products, followed by increasing customer satisfaction, and thirdly increasing sales revenue.

"These objectives take on added importance in a downturn because the cost and effort needed to sell to existing customers is often less than that for acquiring new ones," says Chris Pang, principal research analyst at Gartner.

It's all about working smart, improving productivity and efficiency with the resources you have right now.

Check out our different CRM products...

GoldMine CRM Software

NetSuite CRM Software

Sage CRM Software