5 Questions CRM Can Help You Answer

5 Questions CRM Can Help You Answer
CRM systems, such as StarterCRM, allow you to store a great deal of customer and prospect information in one location that otherwise might have “lived” in different programs. While the ability to store large quantities of data is useful, combining it to produce reports that give you insight into your business is where CRM systems truly come into their own. StarterCRM is no exception and with just a few clicks of your mouse, you can quickly generate a wide range of reports that will help you address some key questions your business is facing such as:
1. Which of my products and services are my customers purchasing?
You can use the answer to this question to help you:

• Identify products which aren’t selling which may indicate that there’s an underlying issue with the product that you need to address.
• Create cross-selling and up-selling opportunities by identifying customers that are not taking advantage of products that may complement their existing purchases

2. How often are they making those purchases?
This answer will help you:

• Identify patterns in customer purchase behavior which may indicate that there are seasonal influences on demand for your products.
• Adjust your marketing plan to address seasonality in demand.

3. Who’s Buying My Products and Where are my customers located?
Answering this question has a number of benefits and means that you can:

• Identify parts of your sales territory that may need additional sales or customer service support.
• Determine areas where demand for your products is weak and create focused sales and marketing campaigns to spur demand.
• Couple this data with your marketing campaign data to assess the success or failure of previously executed marketing campaigns.

4. What issues or problems are my customers experiencing with my products and services?
Being able to identify customer service issues with individual products and services will help your business in a number of ways:

• You’ll be able to identify recurring problems with your products which in turn will help you to Implement appropriate product “fixes“ in a timely manner.
• You can use the information to drive improvements to future product releases
•  You can build a knowledge-base of issues and create a library of “fixes” to help and guide your existing customers.

5. How long does it take a member of my team to respond to a customer request?
Customer service response time is a key element in your customer retention strategy. Determining response times to your customer’s issues will help you to:

• Identify “bottlenecks” in your existing processes which may be slowing down your customer service response time
• Improve customer service by highlighting and prioritizing critical customer issues 

If you'd like to learn more about how implementing a CRM solution can help your small business, visit www.startercrm.com and sign up for a free 30 day trial. 


Shaun O'Reilly is Director of Marketing for StarterSuccess - a suite of web-based applications designed to help smaller companies more effectively manage and grow their business. Within this suite, StarterCRM provides small businesses with a cost-effective and easy to use customer relationship management system.

3 CRM Technology Options

3 CRM Technology Options

There are 3 fundamental CRM technology options available to your small business:

• PC-Based Software 
• Software that resides on a network
• Web-based applications

Each type of technology has its merit, but for smaller businesses, we feel that a web-based CRM application is the best choice. The reasons for this are as much to do with the downside of software as they are to do with the upside of web-based systems. Specifically:

PC-Based Software

• Difficult to share data between multiple users
• No real-time updating of information means that you may be slow to respond to your customer’s needs
• Need to purchase a copy/user license for every user - this can be an expensive option
• Need to purchase periodic upgrades to ensure you have the latest version
• What happens if your PC goes down?

Networked Software

• Needs technical staff to install/implement and maintain the network
• Requires investment in back-end hosting equipment
• Can be difficult to access if you or your staff are frequently on the move
• Need to purchase periodic upgrades to ensure you have the latest version

Conversely:

Web-Based Applications

• Offer a lower cost of entry and lower total cost of ownership – Systems are often available via a monthly subscription.
• Are quick to implement and allow for rapid transmission of information across your entire organization regardless of location
• Easily accessible so you and your staff can use your CRM solution anywhere provided you have a computer and Internet access.
• Doesn’t require you to purchase costly hardware.
• Software is automatically upgraded and/or debugged 

If you'd like to learn more about how implementing a CRM solution can help your small business, visit www.startercrm.com and sign up for a free 30 day trial. 


Shaun O'Reilly is Director of Marketing for StarterSuccess - a suite of web-based applications designed to help smaller companies more effectively manage and grow their business. Within this suite, StarterCRM provides small businesses with a cost-effective and easy to use customer relationship management system.

13 Questions to Help You Decide if CRM is Right for Your Small Business

13 Questions to Help You Decide if CRM is Right for Your Business

Since you’re reading this blog, adding CRM technology to your business is obviously something you’re considering. You might have read an article on CRM and it piqued your interest, or perhaps you saw an advertisement in a business magazine or online while surfing the ’net. Either way, you’re looking at CRM systems and are wondering if the time is right for your business to implement a CRM solution.

To help you make the initial decision, I’ve developed a short list of questions the answers to which are a simple yes or no. Review each of the questions and mark down the response that best fits your particular situation. Once you've completed answering the questions, I'll use your answers to provide you with some feedback that I believe will be help you make your decision:

1. Do you employ at least one sales person? 
2. Do you or another person in your business spend a lot of their time compiling customer reports or other types of management reporting?
3. Has a salesperson or other key employee ever left your employment?
4. Have you ever missed a customer appointment, missed a proposal deadline or forgotten to respond to a customer email?
5. When asked a question about a customer, do you have to sort through stacks of paper on your desk to find an answer?
6. Do you wish you had a better handle on the types and causes of customer service issues?
7. Are you currently using more than one software program to keep your calendar and track your company’s sales and marketing activities?
8. Do you know who your most profitable customers are?
9. Do you know all the projects that your employees are working on?
10. Do you know the value of all the proposals in your sales pipeline? Do you know what a sales pipeline is?
11. Do you know if there are customer service issues that are common to more than one of your products or services?
12. Do you have a process for tracking customer issues?
13. Are you able to easily track the return on your sales and marketing programs?

 

Now that you’ve completed the quiz, we can use your answers to help you with your decision. This part of the process is very simple:

• If  you checked the “Yes” box for at least one of the questions numbered 1-7, then your business could benefit from implementing CRM technology.
• If you checked the “No” box for at least one of the questions numbered 8-13, then your business could similarly benefit from implementing CRM technology.

This may seem overly simplistic, but CRM technology can help you manage your business more effectively in the following ways:

• Maintain all your customer and prospect data for use by your sales teams (Q. 1)
• Quickly generate a range of management reports thus reducing the need to add support staff (Q. 2)
•  Store complete customer data and a history of customer activity that otherwise might be difficult to find in the event an employee leaves your business (Q. 3)
• Includes calendar functionality that lets you schedule meetings, track sales and marketing campaigns and alerts you to approaching task and proposal deadlines. (Q. 4)
• Gives you electronic access to customer data 24 x 7 from anywhere you have a computer and internet connection (Q. 5)
• Lets you prioritize and track issues and problems that impact your customers (Q. 6)
• Provides you with a single location to store contact data and generate reports. Also allows you to import contact and transaction data from other applications. (Q. 7)
• Offers reporting capabilities that help you to analyze sales and marketing data (Q. 8)
• Allows you to assign customer and prospect-related tasks to your employees and gives you the ability to generate task reports by customer or by employee (Q. 9)
• Lets you assign revenue value and probability of close to each pending deal. This data can then be used to develop reporting that shows the value of deals in your sales pipeline (Q. 10)
• Gives you tools to filter your customer service issues by product or service type (Q. 11)
• Provides customer issue tracking tools that are accessible 24 x 7 through a web-based interface (Q. 12)
• Includes sales and marketing campaign tracking that provides revenue and expense information that can be used to generate ROI for each campaign (Q. 13)

 What's The Bottom Line?
 The simple truth is that it's difficult to find examples of businesses that couldn't benefit from implementing some form of CRM technology. The efficiencies and benefits that the technology can bring should be more than enough to offset any concerns about cost. However, this doesn't mean that any CRM solution will do the job. small businesses should carefully review the range technology options available to them - a subject I'll review in my next article.

If you'd like to learn more about how implementing a CRM solution can help your small business, visit www.startercrm.com and sign up for a free 30 day trial. 

 Shaun O'Reilly is Director of Marketing for StarterSuccess - a suite of web-based applications designed to help smaller companies more effectively manage and grow their business. Within this suite, StarterCRM provides small businesses with a cost-effective and easy to use customer relationship management system.

4 Reasons Your Business Should Care About CRM

4 Reasons Why You Should Care About CRM

There are a number of reasons why you may think CRM is something you shouldn't care about. You may think that your business is too small to implement CRM processes and technology. You might also think that you haven’t been in business long enough or that your customer base isn’t large enough to warrant an investment of time and money in implementing a CRM program. However, regardless of the size or age of your business, there are a number of good reasons why your business should consider implementing some form of customer relationship management process. In this blog, I'm going to identify what I consider to be the top 4 reasons why customer relationship management is absolutely something you should care about:

·         Reason #1 – You Can Improve Customer Retention Rates

It’s a well accepted principle in business that it’s cheaper to keep your existing customers than it is to acquire new ones.  A well thought out and appropriately executed CRM program will help you increase customer retention rates.

·         Reason #2 – You Can Increase Revenues

In addition to it being cheaper to keep existing customers than acquire new ones, consider the following - existing customers tend to spend more than new customers. This means that by retaining customers, not only are you keeping your costs down, you're also helping to increase revenues.

 ·         Reason #3 – You Can Control the Cost of Sales

The cost of sales is frequently one of the larger line items on any company’s P&L. As such, you need to be able to both identify the components of your cost of sales and ensure you’re receiving an appropriate return on that expense. What that means in simple terms is, you need to make sure that your sales reps are performing and that your sales and marketing campaigns are providing a positive return.

·         Reason #4 – You Can Improve your Business

Implementing CRM processes helps you to learn more about your business. Not only that, the information you gather about what’s working and what’s not working in your company will help you to make improvements that yield positive results. These improvements may come in the form of a more streamlined customer service process or perhaps might lead to the introduction of a new product or an improvement to an old one. Either way, the knowledge you gain can help you to make changes within your business that will have a positive impact. 

 There are a number of reasons why CRM is important to businesses, and as such, is something that you should consider for your business.However, there are a number of technology options available and the choices can be overwhelming. Not only that, there are very few CRM solutions that were designed specifically for small businesses and so most contain way more functionality than the average small business would ever need. 

In my next article, I'll look at the different technology options available and provide my thoughts on the most important functionality that a small business CRM system should have. 

If you'd like to learn more about how implementing a CRM solution can help your small business, visit www.startercrm.com and sign up for a free 30 day trial. 

 Shaun O'Reilly is Director of Marketing for StarterSuccess - a suite of web-based applications designed to help smaller companies more effectively manage and grow their business. Within this suite, StarterCRM provides small businesses with a cost-effective and easy to use customer relationship management system.

What is Customer Relationship Management?

Customer Relationship Management or CRM for short, is undoubtedly one of the business "buzz words" of the 21st century. The fundamentally simple idea of implementing processes to help you hold on to your customers and get them to buy more has spawned hundreds of businesses whose sole purpose is to provide companies with applications designed to help them achieve their CRM goals. While I welcome any technology that can help businesses grow their bottom line, I feel that the notion of what CRM actually is has gotten lost in the hype surrounding the proliferation of software applications currently available. Many smaller companies have fallen in to the trap of spending their precious dollars on CRM technology without the slightest clue of what CRM actually is and how it can help them. Therefore, before we discuss whether or not your small business needs to adopt CRM technology, we need to at least discuss what CRM actually is. It's possible that you may decide after reviewing the definition, that your small business has everything it needs to effectively manage your customer base. On the other hand, you may come to the realization that your business is woefully under-prepared to effectively manage and leverage your customer base to help you grow your business. Either way, lets start determining what Customer Relationship Management actually is.

What is CRM?

Let's start our discussion on what CRM is by outlining what it isn't. Despite what you may have read or been led to believe, CRM is not a technology. I say this even though you may have gone online and found that there are hundreds, probably thousands of applications available for purchase that describe themselves as Customer Relationship Management solutions. However, to limit a discussion on CRM to a discussion solely about technology, misses the point of what CRM really is. CRM is a term that actually describes the processes that a business has in place to manage interactions with its customers and prospects. Humans determine what these processes are, while CRM technology merely supports them and makes it easier to implement them.

To clarify this definition, let's use a practical example:

Let's assume that your company makes 4 different kinds of widgets that are purchased and used by customers spread across the country. 80% of your customers use just one of your widgets, while the other 20% use 2 or more. After reviewing your monthly sales data, you discover that revenue per customer is higher for the 20% that use more than one of your widgets than it is for the 80% that use just one. Not only that, you also find that your cost of sales per widget is lower for customers that use more than one. This means that these customers are significantly more profitable - you can drive more revenue at a lower cost. You therefore decide to create a monthly newsletter that you plan to email to all of your customers. The newsletter will discuss the benefits of using more than one widget and will contain coupons that your customers can redeem for the purchase of an additional widget in your online store.

In this example, the decision to create a monthly newsletter is a decision to implement a Customer Relationship Management process - one which is designed to boost the number of customers using more than one widget which in turn will increase your company's revenues and reduce your bottom line cost. You will likely use technology to help you execute this process but the technology in itself is not customer relationship management - it's merely a tool that supports and enables the process.

Saying that the technology is not CRM is not intended to diminish the value of the CRM technology - far from it. The choice of the CRM technology you adopt to execute the newsletter campaign can have a significant impact on the success of the initiative. Let's illustrate that point by elaborating on our original example.

Let's say that we've prepared our first newsletter, downloaded a list of all of our customer emails and sent the newsletter to everyone on the list using a standalone email program. After a few hours, our sales team start getting phone calls from customers who use more than one widget complaining  about the special offers being extended to customers who only use one widget. They're upset that discounts are being offered to other customers that were never offered to them and so they want you to refund to them an amount equal to the discount being offered to other customers. 

In this instance, your CRM initiative has a negative impact on your business - not because it's a bad idea, but because the technology you used to execute it wasn't suited to the task. Even the most basic CRM system would have allowed you to download a list containing only the customers who've purchased one widget. More advanced systems would also have allowed you to send the newsletter through the CRM system without using a standalone email program at all AND would have allowed you to see who responded to the offers, how much revenue was generated by the newsletter and calculate the return on the newsletter initiative.

In discussing the power of CRM technology and how it can support your Customer Relationship Management processes, these examples just scratch the surface. How CRM technology can be used to grow your business is the subject of another article, but I hope the point is made. Don't confuse customer relationship management with technology. In the examples above, the capabilities of the technology didn't dictate that you implement a newsletter program - it just made it easier to do so. If you don't have any CRM processes in place in your company, purchasing a CRM system will be of little or no value. But if you do, investing in CRM technology could be one of the best decisions you make for your business.

In my next blog I'm going to address another question relating to CRM - Specifically, "Should Your Business Care About Customer Relationship Management?" In the interim, I welcome your comments and feedback on this posting.

If you'd like to learn more about how implementing a CRM solution can help your small business, visit www.startercrm.com and sign up for a free 30 day trial.
Shaun O'Reilly is Director of Marketing for StarterSuccess - a suite of web-based applications designed to help smaller companies more effectively manage and grow their business. Within this suite, StarterCRM provides small businesses with a cost-effective and easy to use customer relationship management system.