CRM – for whom?

If you ask IT specialists why the CRM system is being introduced in the company, a considerable proportion of the interlocutors will answer, which is mainly for the torment and torture of the system administrator. Someone else will tell that for bullying any full-time IT specialist or at least a miserable advanced geek in the company. This, of course, is all a joke. But seriously, sometimes even the companies that have chosen CRM themselves cannot answer this question. From the popular: “program for sales” and “system that sells.” The question “For whom is CRM implemented?” causes an even greater scatter of opinions, among which the leaders are “for the boss”, “for the sellers” and, we believe, somewhere in the list “for show” and “for show-offs”. Meanwhile, the CRM-system is addressed to very specific employees who can use it to reveal the wonders of professionalism and efficiency – at least in the office, even at a distance. If they want this, of course. So who are these people, for whose sysadmins, programmers and CRM developers themselves are trying?

Who are these three? Are there really three of them?

Why did you get such a question?

CRM in the understanding of the majority is a program for sales. And so many are surprised when they find out how many features and functions are implemented in modern CRM systems: here are business processes, and ABC analysis, and assortment matrices, and telephony, and planners, and anything else. Therefore, it is not surprising that in a small business in CRM the whole company can easily work, and each employee performs his tasks. Nevertheless, there are always active users and there are those who access the system from time to time.

So for whom in the company CRM is introduced and works?

In general, in this place, in the best advertising traditions, we had to use cliches and pathetically reply that CRM in the company is exclusively for the client. But behind these words there is nothing but a marketing ploy, because CRM in a company is an employee tool with which they work with a client and receive revenue for the company. In fact, you can have SAP or Salesforce with omnichannel and at the same time lose customers and catch negative, or you can be a favorite company of customers without CRM (alas, it’s almost impossible – against the background of informational noise about your steepness without CRM, you simply can’t cope with the flow of customers and immediately become bad) CRM is a cool and convenient tool for quickly completing tasks, reducing routine, establishing processes and successful operational work.

For sales department

CRM system – This is not just the right hand of the sales department, it is literally the entire department, since absolutely all the activities of sales managers are tied to CRM. The first information about the lead is received in it, calls are made with it, the client is informed, correspondence is kept, the transaction goes through all stages and successfully closes or, on the contrary, goes to incomplete and then CRM has a new task – to remind about the incomplete transaction so that the manager can return to the discussion of the issue later. In general, everything that a salesperson is used to keeping in mind or sticking to notes and tablets is in CRM, but his head can be freed up to find an adequate sales strategy and detune from the global traditions of steaming, imposing and boosting. (By the way, if you think that in IT there is no place for practically aggressive sales, then you are mistaken: after paying attention to them, some companies will find you on social networks, on Instagram, on YouTube and anywhere. On the one hand, they have good marketing and retargeting, on the other hand, it’s time to learn how to respond to the request “Don’t call me at all, I bought everything from your competitors for a long time, installed and rejoice”)

So, what is the use of CRM sales?

• The main advantage of a CRM system is the centralized and connected storage of all customer information in a single database. Managers do not need to collect information on all kinds of notes, notes, tables and e-mails – everything is available in exactly one click (basic information about clients and deals is available in any, even the youngest and weakest CRM-ke, in serious universal CRM-systems like RegionSoft CRM correspondence with the client, recordings of conversations with him, all the documentation generated by him, warehouse balances, correspondence delivery registry, etc. are also available by click. The information is unified, it is easily collected in the form of reports based on ready-made forms and templates, so the current work with it is sometimes reduced to a few seconds: opened a document template – selected parameters and data with the mouse, checked it, clicked “Finish” and printed or sent an email .
• No less important advantage – the availability of reports sales, customers, goods and services, sales funnel, etc. Thanks to these reports, sales managers can analyze profiles, product assortment, build a strategy, make additional sales, etc. In fact, reports are the blood of the entire sales system, because all the ideas and findings to increase revenue are usually hidden in analytics, rather than in the intuition of the head of the sales department (which he often does not have).
• Sales process – this is not what you saw in the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street”: firstly, because you have a different field of activity and a different time than the stock exchange of the late 80s, and secondly, because there are few who sell this style suitable (especially in IT!), thirdly, this is just a movie. So, the sales process is a routine process with an algorithm at the base and options in the form of experience or charisma of the seller. But the algorithm must be universal so that everything is sold stably and the company does not live from one star transaction to another. CRM helps turn sales into a business process: clear, streamlined, with steps and triggers (lead came – lead qualified – first call – result – follow-up letter – new call – presentation – deal (with a bunch of its components)) This greatly streamlines the work. The existence of a step-by-step sales algorithm built into CRM gives the team the opportunity to work according to a single transaction closing scheme and helps to reduce the length of the sales cycle, and this is the most important operational indicator that is worth fighting for.
• Now imagine the situation. You have three sales people in your company, each with their own tactics, full-time employment and a common Excel spreadsheet with sales data (in which the devil will break his leg, the second will dislocate). You are hiring a fourth employee and you need to bring him up to date. There is no time for everyone, everyone has different techniques, he cannot navigate the data, as a result, the person is idle and loses loyalty to the employer due to the high level of stress. AND CRM is a great tool for beginners. On the first day, he can be given access rights to the knowledge base, an overview of business processes and individual transactions and provide the opportunity to start training, and at the same time get acquainted with the interface of the CRM system in which he will work.

By the way, it is in a crisis period, such as now, that a CRM system acquires additional value, since it safely stores all commercial information, allows a remote and distributed team to work efficiently, and at the same time reliably logs all actions (not everyone logs here , in particular, we are talking about RegionSoft CRM). If one of the employees, under the guise of a home roof, decides to earn extra money to help competitors or carefully prepare for a job change while maintaining a customer base, then these facts will not pass by the attention of CRM and you will save a valuable resource – an actual customer base.

For marketing and PR

When your marketer once again catches your eye or gets in touch at ZOOM, ask him who your target audience is and how it feels right now in connection with the Covido-economic-political-sociocultural crisis. If he gives a clear alignment, love and take care of him, if not, let him sit down at the analytics and look for the answer to the question.

Not a single marketing strategy (even if it’s such content, a blog on Habré, etc.) is built without analytics – even (especially!) In the categories of piece goods, luxury and luxury goods. CRM – gold information vein for a good marketer and PR manager. Having access to a sales profile, to records of negotiations with a client, to questions and complaints of customers, to data on the sales cycle and the period before a decision is made, a marketer can work wonders and prepare successful target strategies, rather than fantasize.

For example, in 2010 there was a small-scale shaving accessories store: Japanese and German T-shaped machines, blades and trifle accessories, a basket from 1000 rubles. Orientation was 100% for men – it’s logical. Until one client asked if they could pack as many as three orders and send them to three addresses: two brothers and a dad. A hypothesis occurred to lightning, a study was conducted. The obvious was clear: girls order supplies to their men much more often than they do it themselves (70/30). Changed mailings, changed advertising, sales grew. The store was closed three years later, the owner went to live in warm countries and do new business on healthy drinks, investing profit from the first. He converted to Buddhism, but did not change his faith in CRM and carefully monitors the data.

CRM helps to conduct mailings to customers and make resales or stimulate the closure of pending transactions. For example, in RegionSoft CRM (as in most top-end CRM systems), you can create selections for mailings: groups of clients for whatever reason receive their own, personalized letters with a relevant offer. This approach is guaranteed to increase conversion and helps to earn on resale.

CRM-systems are able to “pull up” data from email, chat, web forms. This is extremely convenient for collecting various types of marketing information. True, sometimes vendors integrate omnichannelity into the system, which significantly increases the cost of the system, but does not have much sense in particular for the B2B sphere, when clients avoid contact via social networks and numerous messengers. Therefore, the task of the marketer is not only to take this tool, but not to overdo it.

A good marketer will use the sales data in CRM and will be able to draw conclusions about customer satisfaction, their problems and difficulties. Based on this, it will be possible to roll out a product solution that will close these issues.

Cloudswave estimates that using CRM can reduce a company’s marketing costs by 23%, and it’s obvious that the figure is achievable. Meanwhile, in companies that have implemented CRM, there is often a struggle between marketing and sales, and it is important to ensure that everyone has access to the data necessary for work. In no case should a CRM system be usurped by one unit and used as a weapon of internal corporate struggle. These are general data for general labor.

Support service

Providing access to the CRM system for support staff in some companies is a big security risk, as support employees change more often than others and at the entrance to the company they check a little less. Therefore, human-related data leaks can occur. Nevertheless, if you have a “gang” of technical support, and you do not change support, like telecom operators, CRM can become the coolest tool for customer service – much cooler than helpdesk. The reason is the same: a huge layer of information.

That’s what CRM support can do.

• CRM personalizes customer service. And the point is not that the manager on an incoming or outgoing call will be able to contact the client by name – the fact is that knowing the history of previous contacts and appeals to sales and the service will allow you not to waste time figuring out the details, since all the information will be before your eyes . In fact, managers “see” the person who came with the appeal. And if this is a simple technology for us, then for the client it is a show of respect and magic.
• CRM significantly reduces the response time of a support employee: All customer data is available with a single click and there is no need to raise the history in some other file or folder. At the beginning of the conversation, the supportist knows about the products purchased by the client, the history of interaction, issues, and sometimes even the profile of the company’s product use – thanks to this information, support is provided efficiently, quickly and for goals, without translations from specialist to specialist.
• Having CRM in the company, you can build a system of vip managers without inflating the staff – due to access to data and collecting relevant information in the system for each client, each support employee works as a personal manager who knows everything about the client. Well, every client is pleased to be a vip.
• CRM saves all chats and conversations with a client, which means that it can be a quality control tool and help to understand disputed situations by excluding or confirming the manager’s guilt (there was a negative customer reaction – listened to the conversation – made conclusions – analyzed – we work further)

An additional advantage of support work in CRM is that all the information from this interaction channel will all be in the same unified information base and other units will be able to include it in analytics.

Finally, CRM for the Executive

There is nothing strange in the fact that in our article the leader was at the end. The CRM system for him most often is a large, detailed dashboard, an array of numbers that he can look at, form into a report and interpret. If the leader does not sell himself, doesn’t prepare the newsletter, and is not a multi-armed Shiva, CRM is for him a monitoring point for the company’s operational activities (do not confuse this – not for monitoring the work of subordinates!).

If there are KPIs in CRM, this is a great find among business software. If KPI is implemented correctly and correctly, consider the jackpot. I never wrote that our CRM is the best (firstly, the Federal Law “On Advertising”, secondly, in some ways we are good, in some ways competitors), but now I can safely say: from Russian-speaking CRM, the KPI system is RegionSoft CRM implemented just fine. RegionSoft CRM implements a unique powerful KPI system, know-how invented and developed from scratch … A feature of this mechanism is the ability to create profiles based on predefined indicators or indicators calculated based on scripts. This technology allows you to configure KPI as the user without programming, as well as a programmer with advanced skills. As it is implemented, it’s easier to watch the video: