|
Opportunity Management (continued)
In most businesses a sales opportunity will have several stages. For example prospecting, qualification, quotation, negotiation and closed (won) or closed (lost). The opportunity stages can be customized to match your company’s sales process. A CRM system helps improve the efficiency of your Sales team as well as relations with your customers during each phase by providing functions to assist the Sales representative in performing suggested sales-related activities and / or using suggested sales-related communication templates, all of which can be predefined by your company's sales policy/process or business model. Many of these can be automated by the CRM Administrator via liaison with the Business Development/Sales Managers, thus structuring the process further, helping to reduce ramp time and saving on Sales Admin time. Here are a few examples of how you might use a CRM in your organisation:
Your Sales person has just had an initial meeting with a new prospect – he/she can use the CRM to send a polite ‘thank you’ email, stored in the CRM, which pulls all relevant information and can be sent in one or two clicks as opposed to thirty minutes of typing. Sales admin time is greatly reduced and your customer receives a courteous and personalised follow up.
An large sales deal has been quoted by one of your Sales team. The CRM can be customized to send automated alerts to the Sales Manager to get involved as well as (for example) an automatic notification with all relevant details to stock control personnel to prepare for production.
Or, for example, if an Opportunity is lost, the CRM system can automatically notify the Sales person to enter details of why the deal was lost so your company builds up a ‘Lessons Learned’ database. These approaches are known as "Guided Sales Methodology" and this is where companies benefit from working with a CRM Administrator / Consultant to assist in making suggestion to improve their business workflow by using the CRM tool.
Quotation and Sales Order Management
Once opportunities reach a Quotation stage, they can be converted to a quotation and, if they are set to the Closed Won stage, a Sales order. Most CRMs have standard functionality which allow your Sales team to quickly and easily create Quotation or Sales Order from an opportunity and this is then stored against the sales deal for easy reference. Most CRMs, especially those such as Salesforce.com can be integrated to ERP systems if required.
Activity Management
Activities are such things as Sales calls, meetings, discussions, internal notes, emails). Activity Management allows you to log all of your sales activities in one centralised platform, helping you to build a 360 degree view of customer communications. Most CRms will allow you to synchronise these activities with MS Outlook/Lotus Notes.
Customer Service
A CRM allows you to effectively manage your company’s customer support capability. This too can be customized to suit your business process and help you to provide what is stated in your Warranty based services, thus avoiding SLA (Service Level Agreement) non conformance issues. In addition, they can drastically reduce your support team admin time by building a company knowledgebase which can be used by the support team and even accessed by your customers in a ‘self service portal’. CRMs usually include the following customer support functionality:
|
 |
SLA/Warranty Management |
|
|
Resource Planning and Scheduling |
|
|
Solution Management - answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) |
|
|
Call Center Management |
|
|
Collaborative customer support resource management |
A CRM can substantially improve your business processes, provide visibility into critical business intelligence and make your teams more efficient.
If you are interested in learning more about how a CRM could benefit your business, please send us your information here and we will be happy to give you a FREE analysis and personalised recommendation.
Back
|
