I’m a small company, I haven’t got time for CRM

Well maybe that’s why you’re small !!

To successfully implement a CRM solution into your Company you need a customer-centric focus which permeates it’s culture and you’re too wrapped up with your day to day trade to ask what your customer might actually want.

This sounds tough but two thirds of all CRM implementation projects either fail or fail to live up to expectations.

What are the goals of your organisation and how can CRM fulfil those goals?

Have you ever reviewed your customer facing business processes?

This is all big picture stuff but after reading or seeing for yourself the enormous benefits that derive from implementing a Customer Relationship Management System you need to take a step back and look at the problems you might incur when you try and implement CRM into your Company.

Top management, sales staff and customer facing employees all need to buy into the benefits of implementing CRM into your day to day business process.This takes communication skills. Imposing a CRM onto the above will result in a total impasse.

It has to be a usable system and it has to have usable output (usable output can be valuable weekly reports from your CRM produced at sales meetings to drive the agenda and create action points)

Also you will need to consistently give positive feed back of the benefits of the system to all stakeholders going forward.

Giving the implementation project to your I.T department will lessen your chances of success. Software is the enabler not the be all and end all. End users have to be engaged from the start and have some choice over the software solution you choose.

The benefits of CRM are well documented:-

CRM is an approach to managing a company’s interaction with current and future customers. The CRM approach tries to analyze data about customers’ history with a company, in order to better improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on retaining customers, in order to drive sales growth.(Wikipedia)

It tracks sales opportunities and projects and all correspondence surrounding them.

It places all e-mails relating to customers into a central database and drags them out of personal mailboxes.

It protects your customer relationship by keeping all historical details of sales enquiries, e-mails, relevant telephone conversations, meetings and positive or negative feedback on your performance. So that when your top salesman, who refused to help implement CRM, leaves and takes all that info with him in his head, you’ll be able to pick up the relationship with your customer in a professional and informed manner.

It’s well known that keeping customers is alot cheaper than acquiring new ones so maintaining strong and loyal relationships with customers and prospects is vital for sales growth as well as the bottom line.

The same passion that the entrepreneur needed to start and grow his business will be called upon again to take the business to the next level.