BOOK MONDAY: Customer Information Management

All good things come to an end. So does the coverage of my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ).

The chapter “Customer Information Management” is the last one in the book and so we will close this reoccurring series with this one as well:

Information management has always been crucial to business strategy and learning to determine its value always underestimated.

One of these things constantly neglected is customer relationship management (CRM) and the information included therein.

The information has always been around and has been taken more of less seriously by the company owners even though it is very important to the success of a business.

This is immediate information and its value lies within the possibility of increasing sales simply by utilizing the information we hold about our customers.

The first and foremost important information are their contact details with which we can establish points of contact. These contact details would be – in order of costs involved in contacting – postal address, phone, and email.

Email, as pointed out above, will be the cheapest and thus most effective form of contact. Yet mailings are always a hard way to go because your customers have to opt-in or give their permission to be mailed.

The emails you send them should not consist of direct sales pitches, but rather of sales pitches hidden inside seemingly valuable information you give them for free.

You have to gain their trust on the signup page for the newsletter, and you have to explicitly point out that you will not spam, harass, or otherwise misuse their email address. Plus of course, you have to mention what differentiates YOUR newsletter from all the other ones, of which most are “evil”.

This will increase your chances that they will send this email they got from you to a friend who will then again sign up for your newsletter because it’s information their being fed with instead of sales pitches (of which they probably get hundreds a week).

Although I very well know the power of conventional mailings and phone acquisitions, I will not go into further detail because these topics are not really web related and go too far off topic.

Down the line, and if your business is ever up for sale in case of a merger or acquisition, the amount of information you hold about your customers and competitors will significantly improve the position you will be negotiating from.

The reason for this is that buyer of your company will be able to get business started immediately instead of having to search for new prospects, buy new leads lists, etc.

Another important thing to mention is that measures like these will significantly increase customer loyalty to your brand.

This will make sales way easier to begin with because if your sales staff can prepare themselves for a sales talk by reading the customer’s purchase history, maybe even preferences, chances of closing the sale will skyrocket simply because the customer has a better feeling.

The reason I asked the question when your customer’s daughter is turning 18 in the tag-line is because of an assignment I had a while back.

A car dealership for luxury automobiles wanted to increase sales.

It’s not like they were struggling but the CRM (customer relationship management system) they had in place was not really able to handle all the information they needed to increase sales.

Amongst others, I had them add fields to their customer database, which would capture the names and birthdays of their customer’s kids because of an experience I had while on the contract.

The daughter of a loyal customer came waltzing in one day as we were in a meeting. She was the typical spoiled brat yet her father was a wealthy personality, as most of their customers were.

As she started to look around the most prized models this dealership had to offer, it struck me…

“Since most of their customers were of that social class, and it is fairly easy to get your hands on the information of their kids names and birthdays during a sales talk, why not use this opportunity, save this information in the CRM and do a follow up with a presents basket and the offer for a free test drive around the time the kid turns 18 and get their drivers license?”

And this is only one of the things I worked out for them with the consequence that they not only drastically increased sales but also went way up in terms of customer satisfaction, which made them the number one dealership in that country.

So you see that the customer relationship management is a very important aspect of generating (e-) business and can be integrated into simple and easy to use web platforms.

Of course, everyone would be doing it if it were that simple. And like almost everywhere, we have a bottleneck. In this case we have the problem of convincing the sales staff to feed the CRM with the information you need to get this whole system off the ground because there is no immediate increase of profit for them.

I hope that you’ve not only learned a lot and gotten the chance to obtain a copy of my book but also had some fun reading through the lines I put together.

I don’t want to conclude this post without mentioning again that you please don’t hastily try to put together a web campaign by yourself. The reason is obvious as it is simple: there are professionals like myself you have a profound amount of knowledge about the topics we have touched in the last couple of weeks and who can help you to achieve leadership or polepositions on the web.

It would take years for someone to acquire this knowledge and a few more years to figure out which instruments work together how.

This brings be to the closing words for this post: if you intend to start an eBusiness campaign keep in mind that the instruments we have learned about are only successful if they are fitted together properly. No one instrument is going to significantly boost your business.

In that context – and if you haven’t done so – please buy my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) and read it closely to boost your business.

Lars

5 Factors To Significantly Increase The Success Of Your CRM Campaign

In my fairly short time as a consultant I have seen about 2 dozen CRM campaigns fail because of a variety of factors which I found to be “common sense” not being implied.

Here are some of the most crucial mistakes being made:

1 DON’T start with Step 2!
Step ONE of every successful CRM campaign is determining and documenting the business processes inside your organization. Although you are one of several dealerships in the USA, your business and the things taking place are unique. And this since the first hour! The processes you have developed have to be figured out and have to be brought to paper.
This could include the “free oil change coupon” your customers get for their birthday, the special newsletters they receive if you have sales on vehicles or units they prefer or whatever else is going on.
Thinking about changing something in your work-flow to improve customer satisfaction, etc.? The time is NOW! Because after the CRM is in place the effort to do so will be incomparably higher and more costly. So things you my consider are, whether you also want to include the next generation of customers. See 5. about what I mean.

2. Choosing the right CRM system AND! vendor
Now, that we’ve invested this considerable amount of time into jotting down how our business works and interviewed every staff member about what they do all day long, it’s time to interview even more people. The CRM vendors. Each and everyone will promise you heaven on earth. So you have to evaluate which product suits your business best. Talk to colleagues and which system they have and then place your decision wisely. Why is the vendor more important than the system you’re going to install? Simple: the vendor offers you the support you need if you don’t have the tech-staff in-house to solve immediate problems.

3. Fill the empty shell
Sitting in front of a system with no content is depressing. And has other downsides like the question you’re going to get from your employees:”How does this thing work?”.
Since you have already invested a lot of money into the system the best way to go is to drop the change to have someone import or manually create the existing customers your company has. This will most likely lead to a higher acceptance of the system by your staff and thus to a higher ROI. Trust me, if your staff is motivated they will figure out how the system works.

4. Motivate the team to contribute
Now that we have filled the shell with information about customers we have to convince our team to continuously contribute to the system get them to understand the value of information.

5. What information is valuable – or: See the customer behind the customer
Birthrates are rising again. So a constantly growing amount of households you call your customers has kids. Seriously: do you know when they turn 16 and get their drivers licenses? Why not make the information available with a follow up. Even if it’s not for you it’s for the success of the sales person which follows in your footsteps. And of course mandatory for the success of the whole organization.
Another example would be customer’s birthdays and using this opportunity to generate business. This could very well a coupon for discounted or complementary oil-change or whatever you prefer to give away to loyal customers. Have a customer with a special birthday? Give them a special present.
And why not write down which type of vehicle your customer prefers? Whether it’s a sedan, suburban/truck, sporty limousine. You thus generate tons of opportunities to re-establish post-sales contact opportunities to these people!
Bottom line: the more valuable information you have about your most valuable assets, your customers, AND! the people they know, the more likely it is that you generate business out of it.

Thank you and I hope to see you here again soon

Lars Hilse (download full resume here)
Web Strategist | Speaker | Social Media Expert | Entrepreneur
USA +1 206-203-5212 | UK +44 (0)870 9749050 | Germany +49 (0)1801 5557775788 |
For other contact methods please click here.

What are the key success factors for the implementation of a CRM system?

The key factor EVERYONE! forgets (especially the sales people you’re going to have in the door after asking this question) is the one that has solved all my CRM problems in the past.

That being said…
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Enterprise 2.0 – Community V/S Control?

no, I don’t. A lot of enterprises don’t see the value of mass collaboration and which benefits it brings along. And if they do, they deploy a platform but do not encourage their employees to use it adequatly. 
Now, I know that the hardest task in implementing an E 2.0 solution inside an organization is to get the people to contribute but there are simple measures I have worked out to do so. And the whole organization profits from these because of the high amount of information flow taking place. 

What would people say is the top CRM system?

I have handled a few projects regarding CRM and must say there are quite a lot of them out there. Yet the “true” CRM which matches the companies needs 1:1 hasn’t been born yet (I’m working on it though ) 
But seriously – CRMs are highly individualized solutions that require a long pre-run analysis of what the organization wants to achieve with it in the first place. The bottom line being that knowing a lot about your customer is worth a hell of a lot of money. But on the other hand maintaining that data in the system with all the follow ups etc. can either cause your typists fingers to bleed on a regular basis or cost you money on the other hand. 
Once that is leveraged you go to stage 2, which is: how the heck do we get that into our existing workflow?.. What you don’t want to happen is to get too far away from what is currently going on inside your organization because it will slow you down dramatically and lead to disturbances you do not want to occur. 
Step 3 is finding the right product that will match your need. Now this is where it gets nifty… there are a few CRMs out there (even open source) that do a good job. Yet the thing I emphisize every time is that you have map your existing processes upon the CRM and not vice versa. A CRM which you can’t individualize/customize is worthless because you’ll end up with a rebellion in your company which will not bring you any benefits what so ever. 
Now, this is just a rough outline of the battleplan I have utilized successfully on a few assignments.  Contact me for further details. 

Customer Relationship Management systems are NOT new!

Yes, CRMs can raise the value of your company… As basically every effort to gain and maintain data does.

So HOW does a CRM raise your business’ value?

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Can anyone recommend an online Project Tracking and CRM application?

Asked by Mike Ogilvie | February 27, 2007 in Project Management, Business Development | Closed

Alternatives to SalesForce?

What has to be done in any case is the customization of the CRM and that’s where it hits you back because that’s a rather complicated thing to take care of. So even the setup of an opensource solution has to be done by a pro. Another one with rudementally works with outlook is VTiger, a project funded upon SugarCRM. It has tons of bugs but if you get it up and working it’s THE most inexpensive solution. We have and I am very satisfied.