CRM Integration & Customization (Vtiger CRM, Sugar CRM, Zurmo CRM, Suite CRM, EPESI CRM)
What is CRM? Introduction CRM Integration & Customization CRM is an enterprise wide business strategy designed to learn about customer s needs and behaviors to organize and manage Customer relationships to maximize profitability and minimize expenses. A well planned CRM can be viewed as a strategic process merging strategy and system to amalgamate information from across the company (sales, marketing, finance, accounting, etc.) to offer a complete view of the customer and develop stronger relationships with them. Information gained from all internal and in some cases, external, sources allows the company to complete a full 360 degree view of their customer in real time. CRM allows customer facing representatives of the company to have all the information they require to ensure the best customer experience in interactions with your company and opportunities to increase revenues through increased cross and up selling opportunities to competitive positioning tactics. CRM is focused on the customer from first contact to continued interaction, to gain insight with which to learn their needs and behaviors to ensure revenue maximization through relationship selling (upsell opportunities, customer ranking, etc.). CRM helps the marketing departments identify and target their best customers and best prospects by sharing information throughout the system with all branches of the organization. Marketing can use CRM to manage campaigns with clear objectives and goals for sales lead generation. Through sharing information across departments, the organization can improve all aspects of sales and marketing by optimizing shared information amongst employees and streamlining processes. The end benefit is a closer, individualized, relationship with customers: improving customer satisfaction and profitability. By offering your most profitable customers the highest levels of service, CRM helps maximize profitability. Additionally, CRM provides employees with the information and processes they require to know their customers and understand their needs to build a relationship between the company, it s front line people and their customers and partners. A CRM system requires a team from all functional areas of the business to map out the business process and re-define the existing business process. CRM isn t about installing new software; it s a better way of doing business. One has to look at the customer interactions and information obtained from start to finish creating a system that can detect patterns and help the company act upon these. CRM must be considered a customer-centric philosophy. CRM can be considered the heart of the company that allows customer relationships to grow and thrive. True CRM is a continuously updated system focused on furthering your companies understanding of your customer needs and behavior and refining it s own best practices. The goal of CRM: This goal can be reached and CRM made effective by starting with the business first understanding who its customers are and what their value is over a lifetime. The company must then determine what the needs of its customers are and how best to meet those needs. For example, many companies keep track of customer's life stages to offer products to fit their needs as they reach milestones in their lives.
Do you need CRM? CRM Integration & Customization You need CRM when it is clear you don t have an accurate view of who your customers are and what their needs or desires are or will be at any given stage in their lives. If you are losing customers to a competitor, that s a clear indication that you should improve your understanding of your customers. Cost and integration time vary by project. How does it do this? CRM amalgamates information across your departments into one central system. CRM is NOT just technology and software, it is a process and way of doing business that goes beyond the tools you use. CRM is a new way of doing business. A CRM system begins with a thorough process review of how your company presently does business and how it would like to do business. Which service levels it would like to reach, which information it would like to collect on it's clients, and where the business wants to go. In plain words, CRM allows you to get to know your customer extremely well and be able to capitalize upon this knowledge. Through the collection of information during routine transactions, you will be able to get to know buying patterns and collect information on your customer that helps both sides of the relationship. For example: For many companies this is their present situation: Imagine a system in place where the lines of communication and information requests are somewhat scrambled. Issues: Each area has their own system, tracking and keeping records on different software Management does not have real time performance information Customer Service does not have marketing information for cross sell opportunities. Sales does not have easy access to client records Customer calls, old system doesn't tie into account, so don't know past order
A CRM system has one central system where all the information is collected and stored in one location. Everyone is connected into one system People have the information they need to do their jobs Sales and Customer Service have a deeper knowledge of the customers. Data duplication is eliminated Data security is strongly enhanced
Providing promotions, services and products that are exactly what your customers are looking for Offering better customer service Cross selling products more effectively and quickly Helping sales staff close deals faster Retaining existing customers and discovering new ones Building a relationship with your customer history What are the benefits of CRM? Using this CRM strategy, a business can increase revenues by: Providing promotions, services and products that are exactly what your customers are looking for Offering better customer service Cross selling products more effectively and quickly Helping sales staff close deals faster Retaining existing customers and discovering new ones Building a relationship with your customer CRM involves three overall parts: people, process and technology and sews these parts together in an unobtrusive and harmonious manner. Technology can help automate sales and marketing flow, so that more menial tasks are done by the technology, freeing your people to better do their jobs. CRM helps your people by enabling them to do their jobs even more effectively. CRM helps your company by automating many processes, which helps to retain knowledge in the company and enhance the customer experience. A customer who makes daily or weekly orders will be treated like a person, not a number. Any special promotions or marketing packages relating to their buying habits can be promoted to them in an unobtrusive manner. The key to successful CRM is to woo your customer, not stalk them.
1) Sales Force Automation Components of CRM CRM Integration & Customization Sales force automation automates business tasks such as inventory control, sales processing, and tracking of customer interactions, as well as analyzing sales forecasts and performance. Please review the following components of sales force automation to gain some insight as to how CRM can benefit your organization. Lead Management CRM assures the leads acquired from your marketing initiatives are distributed and handled immediately, with the system providing alerts; follow up tasks and territory assignment through lead workflow guaranteeing your prospects do not fall through the cracks. Account Management CRM maintains a company summary page, allowing you to quickly and easily review basic client, prospect or partner information This allows you and others within your organization can quickly view the latest communications, sales opportunities and support activities. The CRM system allows for easy reviewing and sharing data across the enterprise with comprehensive account management by tracking the unique communication, marketing, opportunity, support cases and detailed company information, even tracking all contact specific documents in the company level library. Opportunity Management CRM enables the tracking of sales from lead acquisition to post-sales care and every stage in between. A well developed CRM System can be customized to fit internal sales procedures and processes, making it easier to monitor sales pipelines. CRM has implemented systems with built in Quote, Order Entry, and Product inventory capabilities - making it easy for sales professionals to create, contain, and progress opportunities within CRM. With standard templates all proposals and quotes can be delivered to prospects in your preferred corporate format.
Forecasting CRM allows for Sales Forecasting which helps sales users to provide forecasts to their managers on an as-needed basis. Forecasts roll up throughout the organization and managers have the ability to add their own assessments to the forecasts of their direct reports. Pipeline Analysis CRM provides users the ability to view, filter and analyze individual sales at each stage of the sales cycle. Real-time sales statistics such as Weighted Forecast, Average Certainty to Close and Value are available on the fly. This allows for the ability to assign a probability of closing the sale at each stage of the business cycle; providing management with real-time rolling forecasts and pipeline analysis. Contact Management CRM provides comprehensive contact management by tracking the unique communication, marketing, opportunity, support cases, and detailed contact information and related documents.
Activity Management CRM provides users comprehensive calendaring capabilities to track all tasks and appointments. With CRM, the calendar conveniently integrates to your Microsoft Outlook calendars. Which allows tasks, meetings and appointments to be easy to schedule and monitor throughout the company. This allows users to set appointments and centralize all company communications and employee interactions with every one of your customers. Email Management Enhanced Outbound e-mail processing allows users to send e-mails from multiple areas in CRM and create standard, re-usable e-mail templates. These e-mails can be sent using CRM's built-in email manager, using Microsoft Outlook or other SMTP email clients and are stored for reference within the CRM system. Outlook Integration Bi-directional synchronization of contacts, tasks, and appointments between your CRM and Microsoft Outlook ensures that the information you need is always close at hand. You choose which contacts and calendar items flow between applications, allowing you to work the way you want to. Reporting A well built CRM system will have a multitude of standard and custom reports, along with an easy to use report writer. The ability to drill down on sales wins and losses, marketing efforts or customer care issues is critical for analyzing a company's sales successes and failures. With CRM sales reporting, sales users can focus on the business most likely to close, and therefore shorten sales cycles.
2) Marketing Automation Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration, CDI, and campaign management. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise have been performed manually much more efficient, and makes some new processes possible. Marketing automation is an integral component of customer relationship management. Some aspects of marketing automation include: List Management Our CRM includes an advanced target lists feature: The ability to create and update company, person and lead contact lists to any marketing department. CRM can help accomplish this quickly and easily through simple point-and-click list management. Campaign Management Use CRM to design, budget, modify, track and analyze your marketing activities. CRM provides the groundwork for an easy-to-use marketing automation system that helps you track the effectiveness of all of your marketing programs. Activity Management CRM supports multi-media, multi-phase, marketing campaign management. Mailers, e-mail, telemarketing, tradeshows, advertising, press releases and more can be organized, tracked and delivered through CRM Campaign Activity management Document Management The CRM document library stores far more than just documents. It can be used to link all the files your company must maintain within a transaction to make your audit trail complete. Any materials (.doc,.cad,.pdf,.wav,.xls and more) you need to store internally as part of communications, tasks, companies, persons, opportunities and support cases are conveniently maintained within the CRM Library and are available to whomever may need access to them.
The CRM Global Library provides a repository for all documents that CRM users need day to day, such as sales templates, price guides, and more. This ensures that everyone has access to the 'right version of the right documents' every time. Custom Data There are many reasons that you may need to track additional data in your CRM system. Client surveys, extended customer profiles, or outbound call activities may require additional data capture. In CRM, Key Attribute Data can be gathered and subsequently reported on. Key Attribute Profiling includes supporting screens for data capture and easy set up and maintenance. This information is maintained in the CRM system, allowing your company to analyze historical data on many past profiles Call Management Telemarketing or conducting follow-up calls in sales or support is easy. Target lists of prospects or customers can be allocated in such a way that calls are scheduled as a telesales or support representatives become available. CRM even integrates with your TAPI compliant phone system to manage the routing of inbound calls and auto-dialing for outbound calls. Mass Emails CRM supports targeted e-mail marketing campaigns by providing an easy way to create and manage target lists as well as the ability to create e-mail templates, send HTML e-mail, or e-mail attachments for bulk distribution Reporting Budget vs. cost analysis can easily be created through CRM's built-in reporting engine. You can view the sales produced from particular marketing activities in real-time to easily monitor the effectiveness of all your marketing initiatives.
3) System Administration With CRM, workflow is quickly and easily designed to automate your company's unique business processes. Alert Sales staff when opportunities reach a certain stage Create thank you letters for customers who purchase your products Send e-mails when marketing activities reach a pre-defined response rate Send SMS or page customer service staff when your best customers call CRM's flexible customization engine allows you to easily edit and extend your system fields, screens, lists and tabs. User profiles enable CRM administrators to design the system s overall security model, allowing users access to only the information that is pertinent to them in their organizational roles (sales, marketing, and more). And much, much more
Advantages of CRM CRM Integration & Customization Advantages to sales people Proponents claim that sales force automation systems can improve the productivity of sales personnel. Here are some examples: Rather than write-out sales orders, reports, activity reports, and/or call sheets, sales people can fill-in prepared e-forms. This saves time. Rather than printing out reports and taking them to the sales manager, sales people can use the company intranet to transmit the information. This saves time. Rather than waiting for paper based product inventory data, sales prospect lists, and sales support information, they will have access to the information when they need it. This could be useful in the field when answering prospects questions and objections. The additional tools could help improve sales staff morale if they reduce the amount of record keeping and/or increase the rate of closing. This could contribute to a virtuous spiral of beneficial and cumulative effects. These sales force systems can be used as an effective and efficient training device. They provide sales staff with product information and sales technique training without them having to waste time at seminars. Better communication and co-operation between sales personnel facilitates successful team selling. More and better qualified sales leads could be automatically generated by the software. This technology increases the sales person s ratio of selling time to non-selling time. Non-selling time includes activities like report writing, travel time, internal meetings, training, and seminars. Advantages to the sales manager Sales force automation systems can also affect sales management. Here are some examples: The sales manager, rather than gathering all the call sheets from various sales people and tabulating the results, will have the results automatically presented in easy to understand tables, charts, or graphs. This saves time for the manager. Activity reports, information requests, orders booked, and other sales information will be sent to the sales manager more frequently, allowing him/her to respond more directly with advice, product in-stock verifications, and price discount authorizations. This gives management more hands-on control of the sales process if they wish to use it. The sales manager can configure the system so as to automatically analyze the information using sophisticated statistical techniques, and present the results in a user-friendly way. This gives the sales manager information that is more useful information Providing current and useful sales support materials to their sales staff
Providing marketing research data : demographic, psychographic, behavioral, product acceptance, product problems, detecting trends Providing market research data : industry dynamics, new competitors, new products from competitors, new promotional campaigns from competitors, macroenvironmental scanning, detecting trends Co-ordinate with other parts of the firm, particularly marketing, production, and finance Identifying your most profitable customers, and your problem customers Advantages to the marketing manager It is also claimed to be useful for the marketing manager. It gives the marketing manager information that is useful in: Understanding the economic structure of your industry Identifying segments within your market Identifying your target market Identifying your best customers in place Doing marketing research to develop profiles (demographic, psychographic, and behavioral) of your core customers Understanding your competitors and their products Developing new products Establish environmental scanning mechanisms to detect opportunities and threats Understanding your company's strengths and weaknesses Auditing your customers' experience of your brand in full Developing marketing strategies for each of your products using the marketing mix variables of price, product, distribution, and promotion Coordinating the sales function with other parts of the promotional mix (such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and publicity) Creating a sustainable competitive advantage Understanding where you want your brands to be in the future, and providing an empirical basis for writing marketing plans on a regular basis to help you get there Providing input into feedback systems to help you monitor and adjust the process Strategic advantages Sales force automation systems can also create competitive advantage. Here are some examples: As mentioned above, productivity will increase. Sales staff will use their time more efficiently and more effectively. The sales manager will also become more efficient and more effective. (see above) This increased Productivity can create a competitive advantage in three ways: it can reduce costs, it can increase sales revenue, and it can increase market share.
Field sales staff will send their information more frequently. Typically information will be sent to management after every sales call (rather than once a week). This provides management with current information, information that they will be able to use while it is still valuable. Management response time will be greatly reduced. The company will become more alert and more agile. These systems could increase customer satisfaction if they are used with wisdom. If the information obtained and analyzed with the system is used to create a product that matches or exceeds customer expectations, and the sales staff uses the system to service customers more expertly and diligently, then customers should be satisfied with the company. This will provide a competitive advantage because customer satisfaction leads to increased customer loyalty, reduced customer acquisition costs, reduced price elasticity of demand, and increased profit margins. Marketing Marketing sub module primarily deals with providing functionalities of Long-term planning and Short-term execution of marketing related Activities within an organization. Planning Long-term Market Plans can be made and Quantitative as well as Qualitative measures (targets) can be set for a defined period and for different product groups, geographies etc. These are then monitored based on the actual performance throughout the defined period. Campaign management Short-Term execution includes running Marketing campaigns via different communication channels targeting a predefined group of potential buyers with a specific message referring to a product or a group of products. Lead management One key objective of the Marketing function is to generate sales related leads, which finally get converted into Sales Revenues for the company. Marketing campaigns with the specific objective of generating leads (Prospective customers who may be interested in a product). Lead management deals with processing these Leads, carrying out a sanity check, evaluating the genuineness of the information (Since, there is a lot of information that is gathered during Marketing Campaigns it becomes necessary to screen these leads), and finally converting them to Hot Leads or Cold Leads.
Sales Sales functionalities are focused on helping the Sales team to execute and manage the presales process better and in an organized manner. Sales team is responsible for regularly capturing key customer interactions, any leads or opportunities they are working on etc, in CRM system. The system helps by processing this data, monitoring against the targets and proactively alerting the sales person with recommended further actions based on company's sales policy. Opportunity Management Opportunities help the sales team by organizing all the relevant data regarding a prospective deal into one place. It is characterized by the details such as Prospective customer, expected budget, total spending, products interested in, expected closing date, key players in the deal and their key characteristics, important dates and milestones, etc. The opportunity has several phases, e.g. initiation, identification, qualification, RFP received, quotation sent, final stage, won or lost. Of course these phases can be defined based on individual company needs. A CRM system helps in each phase by "guiding" the sales representative to carry out certain suggested activities as defined by the company's sales policy. It creates reminders and planned activities within the system. For example, if the opportunity has reached "RFP received" stage, and the deal size is more than, say US$50,000, the system can prompt the representative to hold a review discussion with a senior manager. This is often referred as Guided Sales Methodology. Opportunities can be directly converted into quotations or sales orders. Quotation and sales order management Opportunities, if they reach a quotation phase, can be converted to a quotation, and if one gets converted to a Sales order. Standard features of creating a "linked" Quotation or sales order from opportunities are provided. These Sales orders then flow to the Back-End (ERP) system for further execution and Delivery. Activity management Activities represent various Sales or Service related interactions with the customer (meetings, discussions, telephone calls, emails). Activity management provides a platform to consolidate all the interactions with customer into a single platform, helping to build a 360 degree view of customer. Activities can be synchronized to Microsoft Outlook Notes Calendar items (Meetings and Tasks).
How can CRM benefit your industry? Which industry are you in? CRM and your Industry CRM Integration & Customization The decision to select the right CRM solution for you business begins with a careful analysis of why and what you are trying to change. This page presents a list of issues relating to the core business, sales, marketing and customer service of most companies. You will see in these questions (and concise solutions that follow) that most of these issues relate to all companies. The following questions and answers can give some insight into how a proper CRM system can enhance your business, no matter which industry you are in. As mentioned elsewhere in this website, a CRM system begins with the people. If the process and/or technology are difficult to use and the staff feel like it has been put in without their investment of knowledge and time, it may most likely fail. A successful CRM system is a consolidation of people, process and technology, with people leading. A solution must work the way you have planned on it working, a thoughtful; detailed analysis of the present system to weed out inefficiencies and look for opportunities must be completed prior to the first piece of software being installed. Information must flow freely to those who require it to perform their jobs as stars. This collective real time intelligence network will not only benefit your company, your people, but most importantly: your customers. A proper system will enhance your ability to sell, service and market to your customers, and analyze that information to find new customers and better service your present customers in real time. Please review the following lists of industries, and see how each solution can relate to issues common to your business: Real Estate Financial Services Manufacturing Transportation Service Industries Consulting Insurance Non-Profit Specialized Retail Automotive Agriculture Newspapers and Magazines Others
Is your company ready for CRM? Ready for CRM? CRM Integration & Customization Ask yourself and your company the following questions to help determine how CRM could benefit you. Do you know your customers? Do you have one central system running your business? Do you have separate systems for sales, marketing, etc? Do you answer yes to many of the following questions? Do those answers impact your bottom line? Corporate Does your company have separate accounting, sales, marketing and customer support databases? Do many people in your company use paper-based calendars/day timers or stand alone calendaring tools like Outlook? Does your company have limited ability to track e-mails sent to prospects/customers etc? Does your organization have a high percentage of sales and general administrative expense? Is there a feeling that no one really knows what anyone else is doing, or where the team is in sales, and quota? If the company has a database are there issues with users not capturing the appropriate information? Sales Are forecasts done on paper/excel Friday afternoons so that the manager can compile them manually? Do managers or sales operations have to compile all the Excel spreadsheets to create a report, which is only a snapshot of the past weeks activities, not the current picture? Do remote sales people have their own databases that their manager or other team members cannot see? When salespeople leave or are terminated do they take their entire set of prospects, leads, and referrals with them so that new sales people have no information and have to start from the beginning? Does your sales team have any access to vital accounting data like accounts receivable, credit limits, balances? If they don t, do they have to contact your accounting finance department in order to access this information? How long does this take? Does your organization have a sales process that your sales teams are supposed to follow but you have no way to enforce it? Does your sales management team have issues with proactively managing your sales pipeline and producing timely and accurate, forecasts?
Do managers have sales reps completing call reports on paper, taking them out of the field? Are a large percentage of sales brought in late in the quarter and many at a significant discount? Does management spend substantial amounts of time fighting fires and little time mentoring, training and coaching their teams? Marketing Are there issues with branding/consistent messaging occurring because everyone has their own style of writing company letters, with their own letterhead and signature files? Are mailings done through the accounting database and most of that costly marketing material is being sent to, and thrown away by, purchasing agents and accounts receivable people? Does marketing have problems segmenting or targeting their prospects effectively? Does marketing have issues with accurately measuring ROI on their programs? Does it take several days or even weeks for trade show leads get into the system? Are there concerns that those costly leads are adequately followed up and marketed? Are visitors on the company web site quickly responded to or followed up on? Customer Service/Support Do customer service reps have any idea how much business the client does when they take their calls? Are customer issues and complaints getting resolved adequately and in a rapid timeline? Are complaining and angry customers the ones that escalate issues to senior management? Do clients often complain about poor levels of service/attentiveness? Executive Management Does management spend inordinate amounts of time trying to get reports on the status of the business? Are poor decisions made based on old or inadequate data? Does your management team know who your best customers are? Does the company have little or no insight to the current status of business? Is information hoarded and kept secret by different departments in the organization?
We have an experienced development team; we can develop CRM application from scratch or customize the available open source CRM applications according to your business need. Some open source CRM Systems (which we can customize): Vtiger CRM Sugar CRM EPESI CRM Suite CRM Zurmo CRM
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