CRM for all... 2nd part

I had mention that it really does not matter what kind of business we are, CRM is always an important tool.

Understanding the transactional data is important and we do this through analytic report, but also we need to understand not only this transactional information, but also we need to understand and measure how our customers behave when facing sales campaigns. We need to understand how our respond rate is in the different kind of campaigns and communications we present to the different customer’s segment.

Knowing the respond rate of our customers will help us to project the revenue we may achieve when we run a campaign. Different kind of campaign will have different response rates and different customer segments will have different response rates too. This correlation is key for us to understand to be able to project the potential revenue. Now, another piece of information is how much cost us to reach directly an specific customers, in other words, we need to know the know how much we will invest depending on how we will reach the customers, phone, text message, direct mail, email, or any other media or combination. We also need to decide how many times we need to touch the customer to get the best return on marketing investment or ROMI. This part is important so we can decide on the campaign to run maximizing the revenue and minimizing the cost and this will have a direct impact in the gross margin of the business.

How do we select the best customers to run a sales action?

CRM for all!

Many businesses may thing that the CRM initiatives may not apply to them because they are home base or small businesses, but, is it true?

the answer is definitely no, it really does not matter the size of your business, in fact, we need to remember that doing business started just like that many many years ago.

I had mentioned that the most important thing in business is not only to know our products or services, but to know our customers. This is the key that will open many many doors.

What kind of data do we need? now this is a question with different answers depending on the nature of the business and the segment we are.

the basic data will be having contact information and transactional information: Who bought? What the customer bought? how many? at which price? when?

This basic data will start opening our eyes as we start transforming the data into valuable and mostly actionable information. Also to start seeing valuable information we must have historical data to be able to see clearly trends and customer behavior along time.

It may seem to be very basic, but regardless of the size of the business, there are many companies that are not able to correlate efficiently their transactional information with the contact information and this correlation will deliver us with a better knowledge of our customers. 

In fact, data collection starts when acquiring new customers with a good customer registration process that will give us the information we need. From there, sales information will interact adding another dimension to the data.

What kind of data can we add? it really depends on the nature of your business, a good CRM strategy will use all the data available to better select the target customer segment for a sales action.

I mention that we need to have three key components for a good CRM implementation: Process, People and Technology. Well, we are still in  the 1st stage and there are still many ground to be covered here.

where are we?

There are many definitions of CRM, even different explanations of the letters in CRM, but is it really a mere business strategy, is it more than that? is it about profitability and sales increase or is it about customer loyalty? or is it about customer needs?

Some experts mention that there are 3 key elements to a successful CRM implementation: Technology, People and process. if we have a customer focus organization, this may be true, but what if we don´t? how can we change if our processes are aiming towards product excellence? Do we really know our customers and the value of them for our business?

Knowing the customer is key, but how to get to know them so we can better serve them?

is the CRM approach valid to all kind of businesses from Home based business to large corporations? are there differences in the CRM concepts depending on the customer segment we work with?

Do we know today how many customer we have? what are they buying? why? when or with what frequency?

do we group our customer in value groups? Do we understand our current processes and identify which ones do not add value to the customers? and what about our employees? do they care about the customer or do they care about their own pockets only?

These are more questions than answers or concepts, but we really need to think about it deeply before thinking moving forward.

The Begining...

Almost all of us had heard about Customer Relationship Management or CRM and tools, processes and concepts around it, but what it really is?
Long, long time ago when man kind started to have sales transactions, every sales person made an effort not only to bring good products to the market, but to bring those ones that their customers wanted.
but along the way we lost that customer centric focus and maybe the industrial revolution had must to do with it:  bringing large amount of products into the market that sometimes the product developers were not sure if the product had a market... and there are some good examples of odd products that hit the market with no apparent reason. And this deviate us from looking at our customer's needs...
so, isn't CRM a back to basics, sales 101?