What is CRM?
Why CRM?
How do we know we need CRM?
Briefly, how does CRM work?
How much does CRM cost?

What is CRM?

The term CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a strategy used to develop stronger relationships with your customers by learning more about their needs and behaviors.

Good customer relationships are crucial to the success of any business. While there is technology involved in CRM, it would be a mistake to focus purely on that aspect. Instead, it is a strategic process that will help you better understand your customers’ needs and how you can meet those needs in a way that is mutually beneficial to you as well as them.

The most successful CRM utilization involves pulling together segments of information from many different sources, including customers and market trends, and leveraging them to more effectively market and sell your products and services.

Why CRM?

Connecting human resources with technology in this process known as CRM seeks to provide insight into customer behavior, while measuring the value of those customers and our relationships with them. The natural results of an effective CRM strategy—providing the ability to offer your clients and prospects exactly the products/services they want—include:

How do we know we need CRM?

You know it’s time to explore your CRM options when you realize that you don’t have a clear picture of who your customers are. Do you know what their needs or desires are? Can you predict how those needs or desires will change at any given stage in their life cycle as your customer?

More urgently, are you losing customers to a competitor? That’s a strong indication that you should improve your understanding of your customers through CRM.

Briefly, how does CRM work?

More than simply buying and installing software, for CRM to truly be effective, your organization must consider all of the many ways information about your customers comes to you. Various departments interact with the same customer, including Sales and Marketing (direct mail campaigns, Web sites, storefronts, telemarketing, mobile sales, etc.), Support (call centers, on-site service), and Accounting. Each of these independent touch points is linked together via CRM. The data collected in this process flows between operational systems (i.e. sales and inventory) and analytical systems that can help sort through these records for patterns. Your company’s management team will have the reporting tools it needs to review the data and obtain an overview of each customer, enabling them to pinpoint areas that need improvement, or to identify cross-selling opportunities.

How long will it take to fully implement a CRM system? How much does CRM cost? What’s the secret to a successful CRM implementation? Who should manage the CRM project? Would a hosted/on-demand CRM work best for us, or would an on-premise solution make more sense?

We’re glad you asked! These questions have vastly different answers for different companies. This is where our relationship with you becomes very important … we need to get to know you and your business well enough to properly answer these questions. Please consider inviting us to provide you with a complimentary needs analysis, or calling us at 800.359.8463, so we can spend some time learning about your business.

Here are some of the cutting edge CRM solutions we’re proud to be able to offer you: