In my prior post, I noted four areas of most businesses that could benefit quickly and significantly from a CRM investment.
Well, one of our vendors (give credit to Sage Software for this one), came up with a simple but good list of how companies benefit from implementing CRM in those sales and marketing areas noted earlier. As a marketing piece from SageCRM notes…
The true customer visibility of CRM (and that is what CRM is all about, isn’t it) enables:
1. Sales teams to maximize their revenue potential through the identification of latent cross-sell and up-sell opportunities within their customer base.
2. Sales representatives to book orders correctly, first time, every time, by providing them with access to the account, pricing, and stock information they need to do their jobs effectively.
3. Customer service representatives to address customer queries with confidence by providing them with the shipping, invoicing, and returns information that they need to do their jobs effectively.
4. Customer service managers to ensure that their customers are current on maintenance and service contracts, and that their service level agreements are delivered on a profitable basis.
5. Marketing executives to carry out detailed financial segmentation on their customer base to support highly targeted and effective go-to-market programs.
6. Marketing managers to calculate “real-world” return-on-investment from their marketing programs.
In short, visibility over customer purchase history, invoice history and shipping history are a window into improved customer knowledge, better customer service, and improved upsell opportunities – all shared by your team across one, company-wide, mission critical tool: CRM.
This front-to-back office integration of CRM to the business management tool you employ is not quick and simple. It all requires a strategy, a plan, and training. We’ll start to cover some of those in our next post.
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