Many organizations have a need to store information about their contacts and relationships with other organizations and/or individuals. In the software business, this is called Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and can extend into tracking sales and customer service issues.
This is the first in a series of CRM Tutorials to walk you through the main considerations in setting up a CRM solution for your business, either as a web based CRM solution or as an on-premises solution.
There are already a wide range of CRM products on the market but some of the on-premise applications can be rigid to work with and expensive to deploy. In short, you have to adapt your process to suit them or they won't work for you.
Web based or Hosted CRM is the fastest growing online application around at the moment but once again the solutions available can be rigid and impossible to change (simply because all the web users have to share the same codebase meaning that there is effectively only one version of the software). That's what makes iportinstant such a powerful option. Because you can imediately customize the system from your own codebase i.e. it is not shared with anyone else and you don't have to buy hardware or software but can simply sign up and get going, it means that you can get the system to fit exactly to your business needs.
You can set up procedures to manage all your contacts, whether they are linked to an organization or not. You can totally configure the system to store exactly what you need to store about these contacts and organizations too and you can even pull information about these contacts and organizations from other systems such as your finance systems.
Knowledge about contacts: your customers; staff; suppliers and business partners, is critical to every business or organization.
Basic Requirements for Contact Management
For quite some time in the late 90s, the” Next Big Thing” being touted in IT was Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. To read the hype, you had to wonder what organizations did before CRM was coined. Yet every organization, commercial or not for profit, has to manage the relationships it has with other organizations and individuals: be they customers, associates, affiliates, members, employees, consultants etc.
And they had to do it long before CRM software was developed.
But that's not to say that software can't help out and even improve the process.
At the heart of every good CRM solution is a powerful relationship management model. In fact, you can easily say that most of what we do when designing CRM applications revolves around managing relationships between different data sources, no matter the origin, and presenting that data to the user in an easy to use format.
This relationship management capability goes to the heart of contact management. Many contact management systems start with the premise that organizations have relationships with other organizations. That is not strictly true: individuals within organizations have relationships with individuals in other organizations. And it is these individual interactions that need to be tracked and managed as well as the macro relationships of Customer and Supplier.
The organizational relationship management is still important, of course, but the intricacies of the individual relationships cannot be overlooked either.
What do you need to know about organizations?
Let's start then with the most common relationships and contacts of all – those between organizations.
CRM software normally comes with a basic ability to store an organization's name and multiple addresses for that organization. However, most organizations want to store more information about customers, suppliers, membership etc than a mere name and address.
This is where Classifications and Profiles come in: basically you need to be able to group together data (Classifications) into a picture of the organization (Profile) so that information can be shared. Some of the common data stored is:
- URL – to store the web site address of the organization
- 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.
- No 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.
- Free phone/Toll free number.
- Sales relationship – a way of categorizing the relationship from a selling perspective.
You should be able to add new fields and options to these CRM Profiles at any time. You may, for example, want to store and record the products used by an organization: this should easily be added to the profile and will then be available to all users who have authority.
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.
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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