BEAT THE ELITE HOW TO USE CRM TO OUT COMPETE YOUR RIVALS.

BEAT THE ELITE HOW TO USE CRM TO OUT COMPETE YOUR RIVALS.

1 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 2 ACHIEVE TARGETED MARKETING 6 CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SATISFACTION 3 EMPOWER STAFF WITH MOBILE CRM 7 DON T RELY ON SPREAD SHEETS 4 PUNCH ABOVE YOUR WEIGHT 8 EMPOWER THE SALES TEAM 5

INTRODUCTION 2 SMALL BUSINESSES ARE THE BACKBONE OF THE UK ECONOMY. RANGING FROM THE TRADITIONAL FAMILY BUSINESS TO THE INNOVATIVE START UP, MANY ARE INCREDIBLY AGILE, EXPLOITING SOCIAL MEDIA AND ONLINE BUSINESS MODELS TO ACHIEVE RAPID EXPANSION. MOST HAVE BUILT UP A SOLID CUSTOMER BASE, WITH A STRONG FOCUS ON CUSTOMER RETENTION THAT TYPICALLY FALLS BY THE WAYSIDE IN LARGER BUSINESSES. In an era of strong global competition and high levels of employment there are challenges. Does the business have the required economies of scale to compete? How easy is it to employ good quality staff with the right skills? And how can the company grow without compromising that essential customer relationship that has underpinned success to date? The customer is at the heart of any successful business. This ebook will explain how smaller businesses can use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to punch above their weight to: Transform customer service and satisfaction Gain ROI by ditching the spread sheets and attaining immediate access to accurate information Improve sales to realise growth targets Create agile marketing to support business direction Empower remote and flexible employees with fully featured mobile CRM ARE YOU READY TO TAKE THE NEXT STEP TO BEAT THE ELITE?

CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SATISFACTION 3 Smaller businesses typically concentrate harder on customer retention than larger organisations. These businesses know the retention versus acquisition argument: The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20% The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%¹ But if poorly handled, customer services issues can spiral out of control and lead to business failure it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience.² Customer service can be tough for a small business - it is simply not an option to throw bodies at the problem. What happens when a customer complains? How is the complaint received by phone or email? Is the customer complaining on social media, rather than direct? How is the complaint managed? Who handles the complaint; what escalation processes are in place; is there a follow up to check the customer is happy? WHAT TYPES OF COMPLAINT DOES THE BUSINESS RECEIVE AND HOW SHOULD THIS INFORM ON-GOING STRATEGY? Using CRM a company can create a set of rigorous customer service processes that automate complaints management or any customer service issue improving the customer experience whilst also reducing admininistration time and costs. The Outlook mailbox is monitored so that any emails received into, for example, support@ will generate a case number and a customer response. Any customer activity on social media is automatically tracked and responded to immediately to provide better customer service. Complaints are always allocated to the right person immediately. Issues are escalated if unresolved within a set timeframe. Customers can be prioritised based on importance, seriousness of event, or in line with SLAs for example using gold, silver and bronze categories. Everyone in the business has full visibility of the complaint status. Inbuilt CRM reports provide in depth insight into both customer issues and employee response, identify training requirements, for example, or the need to discuss the terms of the SLA with the customer. WITH GREAT SERVICE SMALL COMPANIES CAN DIFFERENTIATE THEMSELVES FROM LARGE COMPETITORS AND WIN OVER NEW CUSTOMERS. ¹ Marketing Metrics 2 Understanding Customers by Ruby Newell-Legner

DON T RELY ON SPREAD SHEETS 4 How many people in your business are still using spread sheets? They hold essential customer and prospect information and yet are distributed across shared drives, individual laptops and PCs, creating islands of data that are compromising business success and responsiveness: Almost one in five large businesses have suffered financial losses as a result of errors in spread sheets 88% of all spread sheets include errors³ Mistakes are not just costly in terms of time and money but also lead to damaged reputations, lost jobs and disrupted careers Productivity: With no central place to store information, individuals or teams report information separately or base their reports on out-of-date information; managers spend far too long consolidating and updating spread sheets to get a complete business overview. Collaboration: Spread sheets limit real-time information sharing and limit the ability of sales and marketing teams to work together effectively. HOW MUCH TIME IS BEING WASTED CONSOLIDATING MULTIPLE SPREAD SHEETS AND HOW MUCH BUSINESS AGILITY IS BEING LOST? Replacing spread sheets with a single source of customer information within the CRM can improve every aspect of the business. Providing a single, accurate source of information enables a company to become far more productive and responsive: Transform collaboration, especially valuable for complex sales that involve both sales and technical advisors. Avoid missing opportunities because a sales person is unavailable all sales activity, including current status and next action, is held centrally, enabling rapid response by anyone with the right information. Provide a single source of all potential leads, enabling the Sales Manager to prioritise activity. Reduce costs organisations can gain upwards of 15 days each month currently spent compiling reports from multiple spread sheets. For those committed to the spread sheet format, the CRM can act as a central hub providing a single source of spread sheet information which is automatically updated. By removing the multiple instances of spread sheets the benefits of productivity and collaboration are easily achieved. DITCHING SPREAD SHEETS FOR CRM IMPROVES PERFORMANCE, DELIVERS ACCURATE, REAL TIME INFORMATION AND FREES UP STAFF AT EVERY LEVEL TO WORK TOGETHER QUICKLY AND EFFECTIVELY. 3 F1F9 net/hub/233102/file-2227633942-pdf/docs/f1f9_dirty-dozen_e-book_01a.pdf

EMPOWER THE SALES TEAM 5 The SME outlook is positive with 43 per cent of small companies in the UK looking to grow in the next three months. 4 However, growth depends on one key factor successful sales. A market that is full of new opportunities can be almost as challenging as one that is static. How should the sales team focus activity? What are the key areas of priority? Where are the quick wins? For a small sales team, there is a huge risk of being pulled from pillar to post and failing to maximise the opportunities. With many sales people working remotely, information is often held on individual laptops and not shared. The Sales Manager struggles to gain a central overview and as a result: Has no idea of where sales are in the pipeline. Does not know if the sales team is working on the right leads, at the right time. Is unable to feed information back to Marketing about lead value and quality. WITHOUT TRUSTED, REAL TIME INFORMATION A SALES TEAM CANNOT OPERATE EFFECTIVELY TO REALISE BUSINESS GROWTH. In a small business, selling is not only the responsibility of the sales team anyone with any customer interaction, from engineers to customer services and credit control, has an influence on the customer relationship. CRM can empower everyone in the business to support the sales effort by providing a single source of customer information: With real time business information, sales people can be confident they have up to date customer details. Powerful out of the box sales reports enable more informed business decisions, faster. Accurate forecasting and opportunity management reveals the stage of each deal in the sales pipeline. Sales opportunity tracking enables a Sales Manager to convert leads to opportunities and allocate them to the right sales person or team. Sales dashboards provide real time insight into sales performance. Attribution management reporting helps guide the Marketing focus for lead generation. Sales can be linked directly to customer service and marketing with a central information hub sales people have full visibility of all client related activity. In addition, with CRM linked to social media sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter, sales people can automatically track client and prospect activity to support the sales process as well as raising their own profiles. WITH CRM EVERY CUSTOMER FACING INDIVIDUAL CAN DELIVER BETTER DAY TO DAY CUSTOMER INTERACTIONS AND UPDATE CUSTOMER RECORDS WITH ESSENTIAL AND INVALUABLE INFORMATION. 4 Hitachi Capital s quarterly British Business Barometer in May 2015 http://www.smallbusiness.co.uk/news/outlook/2485791/smes-optimistic-of-return-to-boom-years.thtml

ACHIEVE TARGETED MARKETING 6 Few small businesses have excessive marketing budgets; indeed, most have just one or two people managing the increasingly complex mix of traditional event, advertising and PR activity, alongside social, inbound and outbound digital marketing. Knowing where best to focus both activity and budget is a huge challenge. Without rapid insight into the quality of lead generation it is impossible to successfully refine strategies. Furthermore, in a time of business growth, organisations need to focus on key areas of expansion and that means the ability to effectively target prospects. Too many marketing teams are operating blind. Budgets and campaigns are set in stone at the beginning of the year and there is little opportunity to make changes in response to sales feedback or market change. SUCCESSFUL MARKETING NEEDS TO BE BOTH REACTIVE AND PROACTIVE AND THAT REQUIRES ACCURATE, UP TO DATE INFORMATION AND COLLABORATION. CRM helps marketing teams identify leads, opportunities and closed sales. It can be used to plan targeted campaigns and track results in real-time, enabling that essential business agility. Segmentation marketing can rapidly create customer segments by purchase history, location, market area, and so on to support targeted campaigns. Combining segmentation with integration with email marketing tools such as MailChimp makes it incredibly easy to keep customers informed of new offers and promotions. ROI linking sales (both leads and closed deals) to specific campaigns or events improves attribution tracking, enabling marketing to continually refine activity. Reporting can also highlight which marketing activity generated the most profitable or easy to close sales leads. Social CRM is becoming increasingly important, with 67% of small businesses citing social media as important and 44% of SMB decision-makers using social media. Integration between CRM and social media enables companies to: Generate leads by searching for prospects on LinkedIn Gain business insight through customer research on Facebook Link activity such as a retweet or follow - to specific customers Track market trends to inform ongoing strategy CRM TRANSFORMS THE WAY MARKETING CAN RESPOND TO NEW OPPORTUNITIES AND SUPPORT BUSINESS GROWTH.

EMPOWER STAFF WITH MOBILE CRM 7 Empowering flexible and remote staff - especially sales teams with mobile technology is often the top priority for management looking for CRM. In an era where mobile commerce now outstrips desktop and more than 1.6 billion smart phones will be purchased globally by 2016, this is a technology that has huge user acceptance. By 2016: Two-thirds of the mobile workforce will own a smartphone, and 40% of the workforce will be mobile. 20% of sales organisations will use tablets as the primary mobile platform for their field sales force 5 With a transient sales force that is rarely in the office as well as engineering and services staff, and highly mobile senior management - it is now essential to provide simple to use tools to access and capture essential customer information. WITH FAST, ANYTIME ACCESS TO INFORMATION, COMPANIES CAN SPEND MORE PRODUCTIVE TIME WITH CLIENTS AND LESS UNPRODUCTIVE TIME IN THE OFFICE. Mobile CRM provides anytime, anywhere customer information. The benefits are not only in providing up to date information for anyone on their way to a customer visit; but in transforming the speed and timeliness of capturing information generated during that visit. Rapidly updated customer information enables everyone in the company to respond fast from embracing new customer opportunities to addressing customer service issues. With mobile CRM, a company can: Respond faster: With immediate access to customer information, sales people can close sales on the road or at customer sites. Sales staff can respond to customer requests, manage appointments and update opportunities at any time. Information captured during a customer visit is visible to everyone in the company, offering the chance to improve responsiveness in other areas including customer services. Spending more time with the customer helps to build stronger relationships. Gain business insight: Recording information directly into CRM on a tablet or other mobile device reduces errors and boosts productivity. Everyone has real time access to all new information - avoiding any surprises when a customer makes contact. Sales dashboards provide a real time overview of performance to incentivise the team. Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dashboards provide management with a one glance view of current activity. A MOBILE EMPOWERED BUSINESS HAS THE ABILITY TO RESPOND FAST TO NEW OPPORTUNITIES. 5 http://www.slideshare.net/sagecrmofficial/how-to-increase-productivity-with-mobile-crm

PUNCH ABOVE YOUR WEIGHT 8 In many ways, 21st century business models provide smaller organisations with unprecedented opportunities to compete against much larger competitors not least leveraging online business to achieve low cost expansion, flexible remote working and easy access to new markets. But one essential aspect of business success remains unchanged knowing, understanding and responding fast to the customer. And it is in this area that small companies really have the chance to steal a march on their bigger competitors. From mobile enabled sales teams to improving the collaboration between sales and marketing, those companies that ditch the spread sheets and invest in CRM will be well placed to take on and beat their much larger competitors. CRM DELIVERS THE BUSINESS AGILITY REQUIRED TO ENABLE SMALL COMPANIES TO BEAT THE ELITE. FIND OUT MORE GET IN TOUCH TO FIND OUT HOW CPIO CAN SUPPORT YOU IN GETTING MORE FROM YOUR TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY. Telephone 0344 880 6140 Email marketing@cpio.co.uk