Mold CRM to fit your business

I was reading an article today on itbusiness.ca and the initial situational analysis really captures some key business pains that typical Canadian companies have and it sets up a really good case for implementing a CRM application to improve business processes:

 

“John Brooks Company Ltd. was a mid-sized Canadian supplier with a serious problem: it didn’t really know what its salespeople were up to. To make matters worse, with the technology the company was using, there really wasn’t any way of finding out.

John Brooks, which supplies pumps, spray nozzles, filtration equipment and engineered systems to customers across Canada, tried two customer relationship management (CRM) solutions implementations. They both failed. The company ended up with islands of data across its seven Canadian offices.

Mike Sandor, director of IT for the Toronto company, says the lack of a centralized data store was a major threat to customer intelligence. The company would have situations where a sales rep would leave a territory and his notebook would come back displaying only a command prompt. “Everything’s just gone,” says Sandor. “So the new sales guy would walk in and say, ‘I’m from John Brooks,’ and the guy would just look at him and say, ‘Well, you were just here last month,’ and he’d have to say, ‘Well, I’m starting over.’ It was very embarrassing.”

In addition, every Friday, regional sales managers would get a stack of paper with “spreadsheets and God only knows what else” they had to make sense of, so they could coach and mentor their sales teams. The national quoting system data could not be understood either — a serious problem when you’re dealing with about 20,000 customers. And there was no sales activity management because some salespeople were working with Maximizer, some with Outlook and some with GoldMine.”

 

Here are some of the business pains that I see in this situation and how a CRM solution can easily solve them:

  • “it didn’t really know what its salespeople were up to” and “there really wasn’t any way of finding out”. By implementing a CRM application that is accessible to key personnel throughout your organization it effectively opens communication on all account information. C level managers and sales managers can review accounts online and work with field sales people to close accounts. Open communication leads to great close rates.
  • “The company ended up with islands of data across its seven Canadian offices” and “some salespeople were working with Maximizer, some with Outlook and some with GoldMine.” Consolidating the entire company onto one CRM application platform with one centralized database can negate any threat of salespeople leaving with critical information in their possession, prevent embarrassing situation like starting over with existing accounts and improve accessibility to critical customer intelligence. The more customer information to mine in your company database the better you know your customers, the greater chance of selling and up selling even more. “That’s gold. Jerry! Gold!” 
  • “regional sales managers would get a stack of paper with “spreadsheets and God only knows what else”. After implementing a CRM application the sales reporting process becomes much easier to maintain for everyone involved. Stacks of paper and spreadsheets get replaced with online visibility into sales funnels, opportunity and account management, forecasting, quotes and contracts etc. A truly more efficient way of doing business resulting in more pure selling time and customer service.

 

 

 

Think CRM!

Richard Bolton

Centricity360

 

Source:

Itbusiness.ca

Mold CRM to fit your business Ensure workflow for users is eased, not complicated

 by Adam Pletsch