Contact M WHITE PAPER. September Workbooks Online 400 Thames Valley Park Drive Reading Berkshire RG6 1PT

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1 Contact M Management WHITE PAPER September 2009 Workbooks Online 400 Thames Valley Park Drive Reading Berkshire RG6 1PT

2 What is an effective CRM solution and what should it deliver? CRM or Customer Relationship Management seems to be the buzz technology of today, but why is there so much attention given to this relative New kid on the block, after all we have had contact management systems around for many years? The purpose of this white paper is to outline what an effective CRM solution can do for your business not simply a list of features you should look for, but what benefits those features will deliver. So before we go and explore what makes up an effective CRM solution, it may be beneficial to take a step backwards and appreciate the differences between CRM and Contact Management solutions. Contact Management vs. CRM A Contact Management System is an integrated office solution that allows organisations and individuals to record relationships and interactions with customers and suppliers. (Wikipedia) Contact management could also be described as an electronic rolodex allowing people to share contact information, record when someone last called or is to be contacted again and provide basic functionality. Whilst Contact Management may seem to be all that s required to manage the day-to-day customer facing activities of a business, it is only part of a much more complicated relationship between customers, prospects, suppliers and competitors. Companies such as ACT and Goldmine were once the leaders in contact management systems but as the demands to track other activities within the business grew they soon became overtaken by dedicated CRM solutions. Even now, many companies today are still using spreadsheets as their only form of contact management. Whilst better than paper, spreadsheets are extremely limited to do this task as the information contained within them is difficult to share and is quickly out of date.

3 A CRM solution delivers substantially more functionality than any Contact Management system and is more business centric - that is, it becomes an integral part of the overall running of the business and soon develops into the structure on which the business is managed. To help you compare functionality, figure 1 provides some comparisons between the two types of solutions. Functionality Contacts Contact Management CRM Contact details Ability to send Create activities Sales Force Automation Track opportunities by stage Limited Create quotes from within system Create invoices and orders from within system Marketing Campaign management Lead management marketing Limited Pipeline Management Set quotas Forecasting Bookings Billings Dashboards & Reporting Sales Marketing Figure 1 Management Mailing lists Limited So it is clear that CRM extends basic contact management functionality into a more comprehensive record of the interactions between people, organisations, activities and opportunities. This helps deliver a more holistic view of the business, covering all aspects of the company from lead through invoicing to customer support.

4 So what does an effective CRM need to have? In this section we are going to cover off what makes an effective CRM system. This is not going to detail how to implement a CRM solution (see our White paper Implementing a CRM Solution), but assumes that you are still thinking about whether a CRM system will benefit your organisation. Whilst CRM offers a great leap forward from content management systems its introduction to the business should be planned very carefully as it should become the underlying basis of your company s infrastructure. So here are some areas that you should be thinking about to make CRM effective in your business. CRM Adoption CRM solutions only work when everybody uses it. There will be only a few occasions where data will uploaded by the CRM administrator, all the rest will be done through the normal day-to-day activities of salespeople, support operators or accounts people. CRM adoption is a key requirement at the outset - it is always good practice to get a senior management sponsor to drive the implementation and the rest of the users to buy-in to it at the planning stages and not to have them forced into using it later. Nearly every CRM system that fails is down to poor user adoption. That is, the users simply do not use the system because it does not work the way they want it to work or that it is too cumbersome. Some of these challenges can be easily overcome by having a familiar and intuitive interface and by having a flexible configuration capability to work in harmony with your business. Try to utilise the benefits of the application to the full Workbooks CRM is an extremely function rich application which can deliver a host of benefits to your company from lead generation through opportunity management and invoice creation. It is wise to investigate each of the features below and understand how

5 you can adopt them within your business. All of the functionality highlighted is included in Workbooks CRM without the need for costly add-ons. Lead Generation Workbooks can help you deliver and manage leads for you organisation by building mailing lists, creating and sending HTML s, tracking leads and opportunity conversion. This will allow you to reduce the amount of time that sales people are spending sending individual s to suspect organisations and create a process to maximise the return on the amount of money you spend on marketing activities. Sales Force Automation Here is where many of our customers derive the greatest return on their CRM investment - having a clear idea of what opportunities are in what stage of the sales cycle and managing the deal in detail brings enormous clarity to your business. It helps salespeople manage their prospects, understand their customers better and share information about opportunity influencers and competitors. It also allows contacts to be related to organisations even though they may not be employed by them. This information sharing is extremely valuable- as an example Workbooks can help a salesperson understand which deals have been won against the same competitor that he is up against in a current deal. Using this information wisely will help him close more deals and further strengthen the company s competitive advantage. Workbooks CRM is unique in providing a lead-to-invoice view of your deals, which, unlike many CRM solutions, has the ability to create quotations, track profitability, and produce invoices.

6 Quotation and Invoice Generation Salespeople have the capability to create quotations from within Workbooks CRM Customer uploaded price books allow accurate pricing and restricted discounting if required. These quotations are saved within the application and can be automatically converted to.pdf files to be ed to prospects. Once accepted these same quotations can be converted into invoices i at the click of a mouse. This allows invoices to be created in minutes and more importantly the information on the invoice will be exactly the same as that on the quotation, leading to fewer mistakes and faster payments. Document Management Documents can be stored centrally and linked to multiple people and organisations, which can reduce the amount of out-of-date documents attached to s. More importantly documents are managed effortlessly with older documents, such as expired contracts, easily identified. Pipeline Management Workbooks CRM allows sales managers to set quotas for each of their salespeople on either a monthly or quarterly basis. Reports and dashboards can be created to show performance against that quota. In addition to the normal opportunity management capability there is an additional forecasting feature that allows opportunities to be tagged as committed or best case against a forecast figure. This facility is very useful to companies that are involved in larger, longer-term, deals that may stretch over multiple quarters.

7 Pipeline management and forecasting will keep your finger on the pulse and will help in organising individual territory reviews with your sales people. It also improves planning of installation engineers, timely purchase order requisitions and greater service to your customers. Pipeline management can benefit your company in so many ways but knowing what deals are in the pipeline and when they will close will enable you to plan manufacturing better, optimise cash flow and simply know when deals are going off the boil. Unlike many of our competitors Workbooks can also track orders that have been invoiced as well as booked. This helps with commission payments to salespeople who are paid on invoiced business. Customer Support Workbooks is one of the few CRM solutions that deliver a full function customer service solution which can monitor, issue and prioritise support tickets. This functionality enables support teams to ensure customer and prospect problems are handled quickly and efficiently. Dashboards and Reporting The real benefit of a CRM solution over a contact management system is providing accurate up-to-date information about what is happening within the business. Workbooks CRM has a full reporting and dashboard engine with predesigned and custom created reports. You have the flexibility to report on any contact, organisation, lead, opportunity, activity, or any combination of these and export to Excel or.csv if required.

8 24x7x365 Access Sales teams and customer support engineers need access to their data so to be fully effective the CRM solution must be allow access twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. Increasingly sales teams are on the road or dispersed across the country and you may have others working from home. This geographic freedom delivers significant benefits to the business but is a concern when sharing information using a traditional server-based CRM solution. Mobile or home-based workers would need to wait until they were either connected via a VPN or back in the office to update the database. This could take days and would therefore mean the database would rarely be up to date. Choosing an on-line CRM system means that wherever there is an Internet connection you have access to all of your data whatever time of the day and wherever you are in the World. This means that information can be updated after each sales call and accurate up- to-date information is always in your database. CRM soon becomes a critical business solution and therefore keeping the system available at all times is imperative. Under traditional server-based solutions this would mean duplicating the hardware (and often software) in case the primary server fails and having the on-site technical support to maintain them. With Workbooks on-line CRM there is no hardware to purchase and the solution is fully fault tolerant with 99.5% availability even during system stem backups, ensuring that you can rely on your CRM solution being there whenever you need it. Garbage in Garbage out With any computerised system it is important to ensure that the information contained in it is as accurate as possible. With CRM systems it is even more important as the information contained within it soon becomes out of date. It is good business practice to manage mass data input through a trained administrator but for day-to-day input of new opportunities or adding new contacts make the person who is responsible for the account (usually the salesperson) responsible for the accuracy of the data for his or her accounts.

9 Conclusion An effective CRM solution is the Holy Grail of many organisations. Having an effective CRM is not a goal but an ongoing journey as the adoption and utilisation of the CRM system is the key to making it effective. Make sure that you know what you want your CRM system to do how will it help your business to be more efficient, drive more revenue or increase market penetration? Without clear goals, any CRM system will be only a partial success. If you are thinking of moving from a contact management system to CRM then we would be happy to talk to you. We have the ability to export and re-import into our CRM solution from most of the well-known content management systems. Implementing a CRM solution has much more impact on your business than you may think; it is miles away from just downloading an application. To get help on how to design and implement a CRM system, you can download the next white paper in the series Twelve steps to effective CRM implementation from our website. Workbooks is a UK based business focused on the UK SME market, we have over 20 manyears of delivering on-line software solutions and have extensive experience of using competitors CRM solutions. We understand the needs and the pains of running a small to medium sized business and wrote Workbooks CRM and Workbooks Business with you in mind.