CRM Software-reviews

Your website exists either to sell products or generate leads that can be later converted into paying customers. In the former case, unless you sell inexpensive commoditized widgets, it takes several interactions with a prospective customer before you can close the sale. Therefore, a top priority of almost every online business is to gather, organize, and convert website leads to sales.

1. Gather leads

Most of website visitors who are interested in your products or services aren’t ready to buy just yet, but they sure have some questions and would like additional information (if it’s not too hard to obtain). Don’t make them search for it — put your contact information right in front of them. Every page of your website must have call for action and contact options that are impossible to miss. Some examples include:

- Ask a question via email

- Call your sales phone number
- Request an instant call-back
- Sign up for special offers
- Contact for a price quote
- Download product brochure
- Submit an inquiry form
- Chat live with a sales representative
- Subscribe for a newsletter

When gathering leads, stick to the KISS principle. Don’t ask for more information than absolutely necessary. For example, if you only need to know your potential customer’s state of residence, don’t ask for a full mailing address. If you do all your sales via email, don’t require a phone number, or at least make it optional.

Be sure to provide a clear, concise statement about how the information you collect will be used. Assure your prospects that their contact data will not be shared with other parties and they can stop receiving communications from you at any time.

2. Organize leads and prospects

Leads are useless unless they are properly organized. First, you must establish the systems and processes for recording all pertinent information for leads collected via different channels, such as website, incoming phone calls, trade shows and so on. Aside from the contact information, each prospective customer record should date and source, products and services of interest, subscription and contact preferences, and any other relevant data.

Your lead management system must also be able to record the history of all communications with a lead, such as incoming and outgoing emails, phone calls, voice mails, faxes, and items sent via postal mail. Each lead must be assigned to a sales representative, and categorized by the level of interest, size of opportunity, and sales pipeline status (more on that later). Sales reps should also be able to enter internal notes and comments about the prospect, and set reminders for the future follow ups.

Last, but not least, your lead system must be centralized. Every person involved in a sales process should have the ability to instantly access and update the information, without the need to upload, download, and synchronize the data. This is especially critical if members of your team are geographically dispersed or telecommuting.

3. Convert leads to prospects to customers

This is where the rubber hits the road. There is a number of distinct steps in any sales process. Below is a typical example of a sales process. You can easily adopt its stages and definitions to your situation:

Lead - a contact that has expressed an interest in your product or fits the target profile of a potential customer.

Prospect - a lead that continues to express interest in your product or service after a two-way information exchange.

Qualified prospect - a prospect that has participated in a discussion with a sales representative and confirmed their need.

Confirmed prospect - a qualified prospect who has the info they need to make a decision and budget to go with it.

Committed prospect - a qualified prospect who has reviewed your price quote or proposal and has indicated that she is ready to move forward with you - but haven’t yet.

Customer - ka-ching!

You can use your sales pipeline status report to not only organize and monitor the effectiveness of your overall sales process and individual sales representatives, but to forecast sales as well. To estimate the dollar value of your entire prospect base, multiple the average probability of closing the sale at every stage of the pipeline by the number of prospects currently assigned to that stage.

Establishing and managing your lead conversion process is all but impossible without proper customer relationship management (CRM) tools. You will need a system that captures lead information from your website and other channels, and integrates it with email, contact manager, calendar, and sales force automation software.

The companies that have established the systems and processes for converting leads to sales are already reaping the rewards.

Relenta is a web-based CRM, email marketing, contact manager, calendar, and sales force automation software for small business.

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If your company is taking the step to buy a third party CRM software it will face a lot of challenges. These challenges are not more or less when you decide to make the software yourself. They are just different.

There are software vendors that provide a best-practice CRM-solution. And why should you not choose one of them? There are pro’s and con’s for each way you may decide. But if you decide to buy a CRM solution, this article provides a additional vision on how to select the package. Additional and embracing other methods, because this approach is solving only a small, yet important part.

In this approach you start at the top. You are not addressing the details, but you focus on the main characteristics of the CRM package (which you match with your company profile).

When in-sourcing a “foreign” solution you might want to know about the origin of solution. What is the architecture behind the solution and is it the same architectural approach of the suppliers that is made concrete in the package? In that sense you are selecting the supplier more than the package.

The approach focuses on de similarities between the way you would solve a CRM approach and the way the supplier did this for many other clients.

Different suppliers will have made different solutions according to their preferences and style. This variation of approaches will result in different CRM solutions. To give some examples:

• Is the CRM solution providing broad functionality for all range of companies or only for specific companies in specific sectors for in which it serves a profound functionality? (did the supplier want to serve the whole market or only a segment)
• How open is the package. Does it easily integrate with other solutions?
• Is it providing a technical superior solution or is it focused on commercial practice?
• What is the usability level of the system and how long is the learning curve?
• How is the balance between innovation and conservation (is the system upwards compatible)?

This last issue is important for you buy not only a package for not using your own resources today, but you also will make yourself dependent on future developments. Can the supplier innovate as swiftly as you would yourself? And where does the supplier get is information from? Does it innovate on basis of requirements that come from your company and others the have sold the package to, or do they have an own line of strategy and expertise which they stick to? Especially when dealing with CRM you should observe the supplier in its Client approach.

When selecting a long-list or even a short-list you should focus on some main architectural characteristics of the solution you are to buy. And check this with your own business profile. It is a simple (and reusable) step that saves you a lot of work in following stages.

© 2006 Hans Bool

Hans Bool is the founder of Astor White a traditional management consulting company that offers online management advice. Astor Online solves issues in hours what normally would take days.
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First, let’s define what a CRM is: The term Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a system that connects different parts of a company through the thread of customer relationships. Sales, Marketing, Accounting and Customer Service can all be tied together with a powerful, centralized CRM software made to retain customer loyalty, increase revenue, deliver consistent and efficient customer service, and finally, evaluate which customers to focus on.

Basically, every company has customers, and every company should maintain some basic information about those customers such as names, addresses, purchases, contracts, invoices, etc. Therefore every company should have at least some basic “CRM Technology” to track and serve their customers. Even small businesses use Outlook, Quicken or other applications for this purpose. If you use Microsoft Outlook for your daily communications, calendaring, tasks and appointments and need a way to track sales leads and opportunities, to share data across sales representatives, to improve the understanding of your sales process, to communicate with a broad groups of people on a one to one basis, to improve your business process in the most important area - sales, and need a reporting system that beats multiple excel spreadsheets, then you need a complete CRM solution.

Why ? Because a CRM software can increase profitability for your business by reducing current operating costs, usually in the call center or distribution system, and by increasing customer value through smarter marketing using customer data to increase customer profitability.
Can you do it without a CRM ? Probably, but not as efficiently because only a CRM is built to take care of Customer personal needs “centrally”, meaning that by using a single software, all the employees of the same company can access an organised database via Internet, where sales, customer service and management have access to the same customer data using tools such as “Sales Force Automation” (provides Lead Management, Opportunity Management, Account & Contact Management, Reports & Dashboards specifically useful for your organization’s sales team), “Customer Support & Services” (provides Ticket Management, Knowledge Base, E-mail Notifications specifically useful for your organization’s customer support team.), “Marketing Automation” (provides Lead Management, Mailing Lists, E-mail/Mail Merge templates, Product Management, specifically useful for your organization’s marketing team.), “Inventory Management” (provides Products, Price Books, Vendors, Quotes, Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, and Invoices specifically useful for integrating your organization’s sales, inventory, and accounting processes and enhance the sales effectiveness.) , providing a complete integration between pre-sales, post-sales, procurement, fulfillment, and other business processes within your organization.

In other words, a good CRM software will help you build customer relationships by setting mutually satisfying goals between organization and customers, establishing and maintaining customer rapport and producing positive feelings in your organization and for the customers.
Organizations that implement CRM and turn their business into e-businesses will find their competitors’ customers ready to welcome them with a “smile”. According to a study by IT Consulting firm Aberdeen - “The winners in this new economy will be those companies that can effectively leverage the Internet to redesign, automate and integrate all business operations”.
Take the plunge!

Either jump on board with CRM and invest, knowing you need it, or get out the calculator and pencil and start adding up what you’re going to lose!
One thing is for certain - a few short months after implementing your CRM solution, you’ll wonder how on earth you ever got by without it!

Dr Sylvain Desforges is the Webmaster and head of Research and Development for Momentus Technologies.
http://www.momentustech.ca

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