Implementing CRM – Is there Value Addition ?

I have been with one of our prospective customer from an SMB. He has been running the organisation for the last 20 years and wants to move ahead implementing CRM. Earlier too he tried CRM implementation but did not succeed due to whatever genuine reasons he has.

I started talking to him and looked at the complete business process. He has been reselling lot of IT and IT related hardware and software products. Most of the times he represents a principal like Lenovo and sells their products and support services. In more than 20 years he has acquired a few thousands of years but most of the time his leads and accounts are captured in an excel sheet and also loaded in the principal CRM system. So what he realised is, even though he has built a business over 2 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 much cheaper cost than what he is doing by not implementing CRM. By 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 sales person as he has to do business with the current active customers or new leads that are coming through.

Let us look at the life with CRM Implementation.

1. Let us have the company implements 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 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, company can keep one resource purely to call these companies and find the latest contact person and latest company information.

4. These old customer information can be given to the marketing team and they can use the CRM Marketing features to send regular email campaigns.

5. The old customer information can be shared with the sales representative to re initiate contact and nurture  them to be 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 successfully customers companies might have grown in size. And these customers are easy to acquire with 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 future by implementing CRM as the cost of acquiring a new customer keeps on growing as new players in your field come with innovative solutions. But a good customer relationship strategy along with a simple crm application can bring lot more value on the table which you may not be able judge and calculate easily.

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