Since the Credit Crunch began a year ago, it’s estimated to have wiped around £600bn from the UK’s wealth. As the impact of the credit crunch is expected to last until early 2009, all companies irrespective of size and location are likely to feel the pinch. This makes it imperative to ensure that all of your marketing efforts have maximum impact, and to ensure that you are targeting the right people in order to avoid wasting resources, time and effort.
Concentrix has seen more and more interest in CRM over the past few months. This interest is, somewhat ironically most likely because of the credit crunch and that CRM systems help businesses to improve efficiency. CRM helps you to build relationships with your customers which will keep them returning in the future. Also, having a good relationship with one client can help you to gain new clients through “word of mouth”.
One of the most significant advantages of CRM systems to marketers is easy access to comprehensive customer information and contact history. This can enable you to identify and target the most profitable prospects and track specific marketing campaigns. The impact which a CRM system can have is remarkable and there are a variety of affordable, powerful CRM Software packages available for small and medium enterprises. CRM solutions are invaluable no matter what the economic situation as they provide a centralised source of information across organisations which subsequently improve efficiency and effectiveness.
Here’s an example of how a CRM system typically works in a marketing department of a small to medium sized business:
Within the CRM system you can create marketing campaigns and once set up, you can assign a budget, create a schedule and log hours spent on the project. This is an extremely useful tool as it can allow you to track all effort and expenditure put into a campaign. It also provides a central hub of information which others can access if they need to.
Once a campaign has been created, leads which have been generated can be entered into the CRM system. In order to enter a lead, some of the information created by the campaign, such as company name and address, contact details and web address will need to be utilised. Leads can also be rated according to the viability of the source and also the potential of the lead i.e. how big the potential business is from the company, this can help your Sales teams to prioritise leads accordingly. Once a lead has been input into the CRM system, an email can be sent to the contact informing them about your company. The CRM system will store all communications you have with a lead, subsequently improving efficiency. Having created a lead, you can reassign it to a member of your Sales team, who will automatically receive notification of this.
The CRM system also has the functionality to generate reports which will show you how successful your campaigns have been. The reports can show how many leads have been generated per marketing campaign along with how many of the leads were converted into business, relative to the amount of potential business lost.
However, it is not only within Marketing that CRM systems can have a significant impact, they can improve the quality of leads and the quality of information for sales people, they can also increase the number of closed deals, thus improving the profitability of your business – something everyone wants in a slowing economy.
For more information about CRM, please contact Concentrix on 01509 410500 or email [email protected].
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