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This is the first in a series of tutorials geared towards helping you get the best from your iportinstant Web Based CRM solution. It is designed specifically for iportinstant but the principles contained in the tutorial could easily be applied to other web based CRM solutions.
Basic Requirements for Contact Management
At the heart of every good CRM solution is a powerful relationship management model and iportinstant is no exception.
This relationship management capability goes to the heart of contact management. For the basis of this we mean Contact Management in terms of managing the relationships you have with other organizations/individuals: not tracking telephone calls or emails etc that you send. Those sorts of "contacts" will be dealt with in later tutorials. Contact Management in this sense therefore means how you store and record information about client or prospect organizations and the individuals that work for them.
iportinstant CRM software comes with a basic ability to store a contact organization's name and multiple addresses for that organization.
It is also useful at this time to define relationships with the organization: for example who looks after them for Sales, for Customer Service and for Projects and iportinstant allows you to do this also.
However, you will probably want to store more information about your customers, suppliers, membership etc than a mere name and address and iportinstant has a set of unique tools to allow you to record these additional data. In later tutorials we will look more closely at how you as a user can configure the system but for now we will look at the basics as shipped in the Free Trial system for example.
Within iportinstant, every data set (such as an Organization or an Individual or a Sales Opportunity etc) has a PROFILE. This is a group of data fields (called Classifications) which describe that data set ( i.e. describe the Organization etc) in terms that are meaningful to you and reflect your relationship with that data set (e.g. that describe a customer Organization). This may sound complex initially, but it is a very simple and elegant way of managing the database: each data-set is described exactly the way you want it to be depending on whether it is about a client, an individual, a sales process, a service ticket, a document...whatever!
So for an Organization we need to build a profile that suits how you view them and how you want to interact with them. Some of the more common data stored is:
- Sales Territory – to store the location of the organization in terms of your sales planning etc.
- Main business – a drop down list to describe the business in general terms. You could also use a Standard Industry Code (SIC) here but in our experience these are not accurate enough on their own. Many organizations with a manufacturing SIC code, for example, also distribute and resell.
- Business description – to better describe in free text the organization and what it does.
- Number of employees – in most cases, the number of employees will give an indication of the size (and perhaps suitability as a customer) of the organization as a potential client.
- Revenues – as above.
- ISP.
- Relationship – a way of categorizing the relationship from a selling perspective.
You can add new Classifications and options (and you can see that several additional ones have been added to this Profile such as Data owner and Service Level) to these iportinstant CRM Profiles at any time. You may, for example, want to store and record the products used/bought by an organization: this can easily be added to the Profile and will then be available to all users who have authority to access it and we will show you how to do this in later tutorials.
Once you have crated an Organization you will want to add details of individuals that work for that organization and the relationship that you have with them. In iportinstant there is a series of Tabs at the foot of the organization record that allow you to add Contacts, Sales, Service, Projects and Attachments.
Any Individuals associated with the Organization will show as a default in this panel. To edit the details simply click on their name or to add a new one just click the Add Contact button.
Once again you can see that there is a comprehensive set of Classifications that are grouped together to form a Profile of that Individual and how they relate to you and your organization. Anything within a Profile can be edited by you without the need for expensive and time-consuming programming.
Of course it is crucial that this profile information is updated constantly. Some of it is easy to get -- web addresses and telephone numbers -- but some is not so easy. Things like revenues and number of employees are not always easy to find out as many organizations treat that information as private and sensitive. Large corporations, of course, publish it and it is easier to get hold of.
In our experience, a rolling program of “data cleaning” should be instigated on your contact management system to make sure that you are as up to date as possible. Things change. Stay on top of it.
Also, one of the best sources of information that you have is your customer service and/or sales teams. They are talking to customer and potential customers all the time and collecting information as they go. Make sure that they are primed to ask key questions whilst on the phone or face to face. In fact, getting really sensitive information is extremely easy face to face and is the time to get valuable details on revenues etc.
Once you have built a profile of the Organization you will need to build up profiles for your contacts within that organization and this is done in exactly the same way: by developing a group of classifications organized into a profile of the contact.
One last key point: although this guide focuses on building up Classifications and Profiles within your CRM system, it is also possible to link into your existing finance software. For example, let's say that a key piece of information was a customer's outstanding order value. You should be able to link your CRM software in to your finance software to automatically read that data in and display it when you load the organization's Profile. The same can be said for any of the other data sets: name, address, email details, telephone etc.
The above covers the raw and largely static data that you want to track about your key contacts. But what about the day-to-day interactions that your team have with customers an suppliers? How do you store these? We would strongly recommend that each contact point be associated with a specific activity (and not just "telephone calls" or "emails" i.e. a folder based approach). The logical grouping of these contact points engenders a much more structured approach to managing contacts. For example, sales, service and project related contact points should be stored under the relevant transactions to which they relate. otherwise chaos can ensue. The next sections of this Tutorial series will explore these transaction types starting with the Sales Opportunity Management process.
Chic McSherry
CEO
iport4business.com Inc
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