Implementing CRM – Is there Value Addition ?

I started talking to him and looked at the complete business process. He has been reselling a lot of IT-related hardware and software products. Most of the time, he represents a principal like Lenovo and sells their products and support service. In more than 20 years, he has amassed several thousand years’ worth of experience.  However, most of the time, he records his leads and accounts in an Excel sheet and also inputs them into the main CRM system. So, what he realized is that even though he has built a business over the past two decades, he has not maintained a single source of customer information.

Now for this customer, what is the value addition against the cost of implementing CRM? He is losing an opportunity to do business at a much cheaper cost than what he is doing by not implementing CRM. Having your existing customer data in Excel sheets or some age-old internal systems like your billing system, etc. is going to make life difficult for the new salesperson as he has to do business with the current active customers or new leads that are coming through.

Let’s look at the life with CRM Implementation:

1.  Have the company implement a web-based CRM software
2.  Once the software is available, the company can keep one entry level intern to collect all the customer information from multiple sources based on the year of activity. Let us say that they can collect all active customers for the last 3 years and slowly extend to last 10 years.
3. Since all these were an existing customer of this company but not an active customer, the company can keep one resource purely to call these companies and find the latest contact person and latest company information.
4. Give the marketing team these old customer information, and let them utilize the CRM Marketing features to send regular email campaigns.
5. Share the old customer information with the sales representative to re-initiate contact and nurture them into becoming active customers.

The most important value for implementing CRM comes from old or early customers of the company. There is a very high chance that, like your company, some of your successful customer companies might have grown in size. And these customers are easy to acquire through the relationship, and the true value of customer relationship management (CRM) comes from this. Nurturing and bringing the past-grown customers to buy more from your company.

This will be the single most important value that you can generate now or in the future by implementing CRM, as the cost of acquiring a new customer keeps on growing as new players in your field come up with innovative solutions. But a good customer relationship strategy, along with a simple CRM application, can bring a lot more value to the table, which you may not be able to judge and calculate easily.

Bhea Technologies is a SugarCRM Advanced partner with core experience in CRM Implementation. Contact Us if you are considering SugarCRM Implementation for your organization.