How to make a CRM system really work for you as an IT reseller

How to make a CRM system really work for you as an IT reseller You already have a CRM system, but is it really delivering value to you business? IAN MOYSE UK Sales Director, Workbooks.com

Does your current customer approach and system really help you: Increase your sales? Reduce your operational cost? Streamline your business processes? Deliver management KPIs you need? Align and maximise sales, marketing and finance together? Benchmark studies reveal that CRM applications account for: Revenue increases of up to 41% per sales person Decreased sales cycles of over 24% Lead conversion rate improvements of over 300% Customer Retention improvements of 27% Decreased sales and marketing costs of 23% Improved profit margins of over 2%

Table of contents Introduction... 4 Marketing that works... 5 Sales acceleration... 7 Order management made easy... 9 Contract renewals... 10 Delightful customer support... 10 Show me the money... 11 Love your vendor... 12 How Workbooks can help... 13

Introduction The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. Peter Drucker In this competitive world, hanging onto customers is critical and a key factor is recognising that intelligence about the customer and how to leverage it is king. For any organisation that resells products or services it s important to maximise your gross margins and ensure cash flow is healthy, particularly in today s competitive market. At the same time however, you need to deliver the highest quality service possible to your customers at the lowest cost to your business whilst differentiating yourselves in a positive manner. Get this mix right and you have a highly successful company with happy clients, growing sales, healthy profits and happy staff that are able to take customer development and loyalty to a whole new level. In this competitive world, hanging onto customers is critical and a key factor is recognising that intelligence about the customer and how to leverage it is king. Being able to make the right, timely decisions about new business ventures, promotions, campaigns and sales focus are only possible when quick-to-access and detailed insight into your business metrics are available. CRM done right can transform your performance and play a vital role in successful and profitable revenue generation. So how can you really make CRM work for you as a reseller? 4

Marketing that works As a reseller you need your marketing spend to meet some key criteria; 1. Help you sell new products to existing customers 2. Find new customers 3. Allow you to report back to a vendor on the outcome of a funded activity 4. Provide you ammunition to leverage more marketing funds and support from your vendors You can automatically populate leads directly from your website into your CRM system and if implemented correctly you can capture how the visitor found you. However it s notoriously difficult to understand if your new sales really resulted from marketing or from some other route. Creative marketing campaigns are great, but you need to get the fundamental marketing processes in place to ensure your marketing investment pays off and is delivering a clear and measurable return on investment. Let s examine how a well implemented CRM platform can help you quantify your marketing spend and results, in a simple and manageable fashion. Lead capture & rating 80% of tradeshow leads are never followed up. Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) 40% of qualified telemarketing leads only have marginal follow-up: 50% are never called LeadMaster You spent good money on your website and you might also be investing in PPC (Pay Per Click) and Search Engine Optimisation. You might (if you are lucky) also get the odd lead from a vendor, and don t forget the trade shows you attend. It is essential that you make sure all leads are captured in the CRM solution and then followed-up promptly. You can automatically populate leads directly from your website into your CRM system and if implemented correctly you can capture how the visitor found you. Did they find you via PPC or a search engine? and which key words did they enter? Capturing this type of information gives the sales team context when they follow-up, providing a more personalised and informed approach. This enables you to easily measure and rate different lead sources against each other, therefore allowing you to amend your marketing spend accordingly to ensure maximum ROI on future campaigns. 5

Help your sales team by rating the leads so they can prioritise which ones to follow-up. A good CRM platform can help with this, by allowing you to sort and group your leads. Don t distribute leads by email, they will get lost amongst the hundreds of other emails sales people are inundated with and you can t track or report on the outcomes. Use predefined rules to assign leads in your CRM automatically and create dashboards so your sales team can see, in real time, exactly what they need to action. Robust lead-follow-up Remember that delivering clear, relevant information to someone in a simple to understand manner prompts action. Organizations with a structured lead nurturing process average & maintain the highest ROI on their sales leads : 163% ROI vs an industry average of 35%. Source : Marketing Sherpe 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey It s a common disagreement amongst Sales & Marketing; marketing do not provide enough leads, and sales do not follow up on them well enough. Use your CRM solution to provide clarity and hold your sales team accountable. Create reports and dashboards which show which leads haven t been called, or which leads don t have follow-up activities scheduled. Remember that delivering clear, relevant information to someone in a simple to understand manner prompts action. If your sales team qualify-out of a lead, make it easy to record why? in the CRM platform, so you can understand which types & sources of leads deliver real results. For instance, what if you knew that 10% of all lost deals could be recovered through management intervention, using more experience and oversight of the sales teams actions and decisions? What would this be worth to your business? Ensure your CRM system enables you to track details of all customer order history and which people were involved in previous sales. This will allow you to quickly and easily create targeted marketing campaigns to existing customers when you want to update them on product enhancements or remind them of upcoming renewals. 6

Sales acceleration The average time a sales representative spends on sales: 47%; on administrative tasks; 39%. Selling power magazine Successful selling is a combination of art and science; as such no two sales engagements are ever exactly the same. However the most successful sales people understand that a good quality sales process can provide a framework for managing opportunities and can significantly improve conversation rates. A good sales process: Being informed can really make the difference. Whether it be sales, management, marketing, finance or technical, having one consistent view of the customer and aligning all interaction in the same direction can bring fundamental benefits to the customer as well as your own team. LORRAINE BLACKWELL CUSTOMER SERVICES MANAGER, NORTHDOOR Since we moved from Salesforce.com to Workbooks. com we now have a single unified system for sales, marketing and sales order processing and can now process orders in half the time. Provides a framework and common language to manage and review sales across the business. Allows sales people to clearly understand where they (and their prospects) are in the sales cycle. Ensure sales and marketing people are aligned with the necessary messaging and tools to move prospects efficiently through the cycle. Ensures you systematically cover the bases and don t drop the ball. Allows the business to measure success at each stage and drive improvements as required. Your CRM system should underpin your process and enable you to quickly classify deals by stage and type and identify key people in each opportunity and the roles they play. CRM as a sales tool Use your CRM system to conduct deal reviews to help you improve sales outcomes rather than a tool just for reporting; after all reporting is only as good as the data you can report on. Used correctly your CRM system should also enable you to track competitive wins/losses, helping your sales team to compete better on future opportunities. 7

Maximizing gross margins is always key for you as a reseller. Your CRM system should track the gross margin of each deal, enabling sales people to know how much they might earn, leaving nothing to chance. The key to CRM is driving profitable behaviour and providing management with the visibility to know when intervention is required. It s a numbers game The best sales leaders understand that working the pipeline delivers results. Therefore visibility into key metrics, in real time, is essential: How many leads convert into opportunities? How much coverage do I need in my pipeline to deliver the target? What s the gross margin going to be? Which of my sales team are over/under performing? And identifying reasons why! NICK SCOTT DIRECTOR AT NORTHDOOR We have benefited from Workbooks across our customer facing teams and recovered the cost of our subscription through improvements in our order management alone. Why are we losing deal(s)? Which products are selling and which are not? Which customers have stopped buying from us? Which renewals are at risk? At what stage of sales do we let ourselves down? Answers to these questions enable sales leaders to run more effective teams. If your CRM system can t answer these questions and more, it s not effective and will never deliver the desired impact on your business. 8

Order management made easy You ve won the deal, now you need to buy the goods from your suppliers and deliver against your customers expectations. A good CRM system can make this easy, streamlining your processes and giving you the management data you need. Use your CRM system to create and track Sales Orders, including cost and sale prices. Convert your sales orders into Supplier Purchase Orders and store these alongside the supplier details. When you are ready to bill, convert your Order into an Invoice again inside the CRM platform, ensuring all data is consistent, automatic and recorded inline with other customer details. Need to part ship an order or record special pricing on a deal? Maybe you need to track warrantee information or serial numbers for support purposes. Again all this can be stored in the CRM system. BILL STRAIN CTO IOMART We found Workbooks more intuitive and usable than others and most importantly it offered a solution aligned with the way channels do business Most organisations use spread sheets for this part of the business process. But spread sheets are prone to manual error, are difficult to share across multiple people and don t provide the management reporting really needed. They also introduce the syndrome of you don t know what you don t know. If I couldn t see some details stored on some spreadsheet and wasn t aware of them how can I act and behave in the correct manner? A well implemented CRM system, enables business leaders to track key metrics such as: New bookings in a given week / month New billings in a given week / month What s left to ship this month? What s our gross margin going to be? It further enables sales people to track their orders as they are being fulfilled to make sure your customer s expectations are being reached. In addition it should provide the right tools for the order processing teams to make their job easy. 9

Contract renewals Increasing customer retention by just 5 % can increase profits by 25 % to 95 %. Bain & Company Renewal revenues are increasingly important to businesses that resell. With competition for new business so strong, retaining existing customer revenues is critical. Support contracts, subscription licenses or warrantee agreements all need renewing on a regular basis. Storing this data in your CRM system where you can easily report and track renewals makes managing this process more effective and increases visibility of any negatives or trends before they have a surprise impact. CARL BURMAN CO-FOUNDER, LUCID IT We knew that we needed to implement a new system and make use of Workbooks sales order processing capabilities to make our lives easier and to be more responsive to our customers and prospects. We re already finding that Workbooks is helping us to be more productive - having all the data in one place means that we now have a single view of our customers and prospects. We can see clearly how our opportunities are progressing too. Implemented well, you can automate much of the process around renewals, including sending email reminders to the relevant contacts or even automating the delivery of renewal orders for customers to sign. Support Contracts stored in your CRM system are also accessible to your support teams. So when customers are calling in for help, you can ensure they are under contract and entitled to that support and you are therefore not missing a revenue opportunity. Delightful customer support Your customers buy from you because of your expertise and product knowledge and this extends to ongoing support. You want to delight your customers with exceptional support and you want your support team to be cost effective. Support is an area that done well can increase your renewals and customer receptiveness to do more business with you. However if you slip up, you often find sales reps, and others, dragged back onto deals already closed, reducing the opportunity for more business and what seemed a profitable and reference-able customer can be quickly lost. Your CRM platform should be at the heart of your Helpdesk. It should be easy for your customers to raise support calls, automatically turning emails into support cases and enabling your customers to log support tickets directly from your website. Transaction history will also help your team understand if they are dealing with one of your major accounts, so they can go the extra mile to delight your biggest customers. 10

Recent research showed that: 55% of consumers would pay extra to guarantee better service 52% have experienced poor service from a big name in the last year Ill-informed staff is the biggest customer service bugbear Used effectively your CRM system can join-up sales, order processing and finance. Enabling you to streamline your business process and move from prospect to cash much more quickly If you are committed to responding to your customers within a specific period make sure your CRM system makes it easy to check you are hitting your targets. Use data from your support cases to find new opportunities, for instance if a customer is logging a lot of support calls, consider up-selling them a training course or some additional consultancy. Of course it also enables your sales team to see the full 360 of the customer and know of a support issue as they make that all important customer call. Show me the money Cash is king, every small (and even large) business owner knows this is true. Yet for most organisations cash collection and chasing aged debts is seen as the responsibility of the finance department. However, finance departments often have no first-hand knowledge of your customer, they haven t met the people paying the bills and they weren t involved in negotiating the deal. They also have no visibility of any support or project issues which would indicate why a customer isn t making payment. CRM systems aren t just for sales folks, get your finance team involved and use the CRM system to track down payment. At the very least they can see which people at the customer were involved in the purchase and who can sign-off payment. Financials remain in the finance system, but a simple connection between the two is all it requires to deliver some powerful benefits to all concerned, not least the customer and your bottom line. Used effectively your CRM system can join-up sales, order processing and finance. Enabling you to streamline your business process and move from prospect to cash much more quickly. 11

Love your vendor Not only do your vendors expect you to make sales, but they also want visibility of your sales pipeline and forecasts on a regular basis. Being tied to one vendor can be bad enough, but when you have multiple vendors on your back it can become a job in itself to keep track of the information they expect, and often requires your input or a Market Development Funds program. If you set your system up correctly, it should be easy for you to create reports for your vendors. It then becomes essential to ensure that your CRM solution has the ability to categorise opportunities and orders by product vendor. Ideally, this should be done at a line item level, so when you are selling multiple products to a customer, you can extract the relevant information without having to share all of the opportunity data with each participating vendor. Being a reseller is not just about the customer downstream, but also critically, how you manage your supplier and vendor relationships upstream Are you agreeing special pricing on a deal? Make sure the costs prices are correctly reflected on the opportunity and attach the vendor s email authorisation to the record, so when you convert the opportunity into an order on the CRM system, all the correct cost prices are in place and you have an audit trail just in case you need it. Are you selling lots of one particular product? Maybe it s time to renegotiate the discount you re getting from the vendor / distributor, or your credit terms with the supplier. Create dashboards in the system so you can quickly and easily see the volume of business you re doing by product vendor and distributor at any given time. Being a reseller is not just about the customer downstream, but also, critically, how you manage your supplier and vendor relationships upstream, and tie the two ends together. Understanding how to manage, measure and leverage these are key in today s competitive reseller landscape. Understanding, and being able to use the data to negotiate well with your supplier in terms of marketing funds, campaigns, resource investment and lead flow over that of other competing resellers can be a strong USP for your business. 12

How Workbooks can help 60% of Small businesses attribute lower expense rates and increases in productivity as driving factors for adopting software-as-a-service CRM solutions Yankee Group Workbooks has a proven track record of delivering all of the above to IT resellers. With over 30 reseller implementations and growing, we have moved resellers from legacy in house customer database systems such as ACT!, Maximiser, spreadsheets and other CRM solutions such as Salesforce. com onto the Workbooks platform. These implementations have all been done in a timely and affordable manner, resulting in reduced internal overheads and costs, faster and heightened sales processes and vastly improved vendor management. Treat your customers as individuals who are understood throughout your business Our service enables your entire company to move in an effective, customer-focused direction that enables you to treat your customers as individuals who are understood throughout your business. You are able to shift from being driven by the products and services you sell to being driven by the needs of your customers. Within the CRM industry, only 25 to 30 percent of companies implementing CRM initiatives feel that they are getting the return they expected. Workbooks understands why most companies are disappointed in the results of their CRM investments and that the investment is not in shiny new technology, but in a service that will empower you to attract and retain profitable customers and enthuse your staff to be references for the outcome we deliver. We deliver a cloud-based service that is UK founded and hosted, and that has, crucially, been developed with the founder s prior experience of running small businesses themselves, ensuring that what we have delivered is relevant and aligned with the needs of our clients in a real world scenario. We work with you in partnership to ensure a successful and reference-able outcome. Your on-going success is our success. 13

About Workbooks Founded in 2007 in the UK by a successful team of entrepreneurs, Workbooks.com has rapidly become one of the fastest growing providers of web-based CRM and Business Applications and with over 30 UK resellers already using its services it has a proven close alignment to the workings of channel businesses. Our suite of Business Applications are specifically designed for small and mid-size organisations and are delivered via Software-asa-Service, therefore removing the traditional requirements of having hardware to maintain and software to install and support. Our joined-up approach to business means Workbooks CRM and Workbooks Business can help to streamline your whole business, increasing productivity and performance through efficiency gains. Not only can our suite of applications help you to increase sales and track key business information but they ll help improve your quality of service and help to reduce your operational costs. Our customer base spans many industry sectors including Finance, Professional Services, Insurance, Not-for-profit organisations, IT, Telecommunications, Construction, Transport & Logistics and Manufacturing. We pride ourselves on providing outstanding levels of customer commitment and customer service to all our customers. As a UK based company, with our engineering team working alongside our support team, we are on hand to respond quickly and efficiently to any questions that may arise. 14

About the author Ian Moyse is UK Sales Director for Workbooks and has over 25 years of experience in the IT Sector, with 23 being held in sales/marketing management roles. Over 23 years of channel experience Ian has had nine years specialising in security and over 23 years of channel experience Starting as a Systems Programmer at IBM in the mainframe environment, he has held senior positions in both large and smaller organisations including Senior Vice President for EMEA at CA and Managing Director of several UK companies. For the last 7 years he has been focused on Security in Cloud Computing and has become a thought leader in this arena. Moyse has been keynote speaker at many events and runs one of the largest Channel Groups worldwide on LinkedIn. He sits on the board of Eurocloud UK and the Governance Board of the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) and in early 2012 was appointed to the advisory board of SaaSMax. Moyse was recently awarded global AllBusiness Sales AllStar Award for 2010 and The European Channel Personality of the Year Award for 2011 and was named by TalkinCloud as one of the global top 200 cloud channel experts in 2011 and listed on the MSPMentor top 250 list for 2011 which tracks the world s top managed services experts, entrepreneurs and executives. He has also recently been awarded the accolade of Channelnomics 2011 Influencer of the year for Europe. Workbooks Online Limited Unit 9, Suttons Park Avenue, Reading, RG6 1AZ UK T: +44 (0)118 3030 100 F: +44 (0)118 919 7805 E: sales@workbooks.com W: www.workbooks.com VAT Number: GB 925 5677 91 Company Registration: 6393851 Code: WP0212_CRMreseller_0.1 Copyright Workbooks Online Limited