When you buy or use a Contact Relationship Management (CRM) it could be the
wrong decision. I am not saying you should not buy a CRM but that you have
to be very careful on which one you do buy. If you hear that a friend or
another company is using XYZ, that still does not mean it is the right
software for your business.
What do you want to do? If you just want a list of all your contacts and
their email addresses, phones numbers and that kind of thing, any contact
list would do, Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, and Excel spreadsheet. You
have to think beyond that. A CRM is a way to look after your customers as
well as potential customers. Do you send out details about all your products
and services to everyone on your list whether they are interested or not?
Do you want to keep track of anything? Say you network a lot and collect a
lot of business cards. You want a list of all of them but you also want to
know when you talked with them. Then you can look for a CRM that will hold
all of your contacts, but also notes on the contact.
What do you want to do with this information? Do you want to see what you
talked about or just how often you talk with them? CRM programs can give you
reports, or lists, some will show a summary sheet, or the last contact. Do
you want to log calls to and from each person.
Thinking about who you want to log, are they clients? Potential clients?
Business people you meet but may or may not do business with? Clients you
might want to keep track of what emails you send out, or create marketing
emails to promote things they are interested in. A CRM can keep track of
customers' preferences, if you enter the information. You can also add
something called an opportunity.
If your business is selling Art, and you have a client you know is
interested in modern art. You can list on preferences that they like modern
art, and create an "opportunity" to sell them some. The opportunity could be
for one client or everyone in your list that is listed as liking modern art.
Some CRM programs allow you to have one opportunity and associate it with
only one contact or several contacts.
Think of an opportunity as more like target marketing. So if you have that
art business you would probably target everyone who likes modern art by
sending a bulk email to them when you get new stock in.
If your business is legal, you probably would not want to email all your
clients with a deal on mergers. Each contact you have would be a one off
opportunity. You meet a contact at a gathering and hear they are in talks
with another company about merging their businesses. An opportunity can be
added for that one contact and you can be reminded to call, email or write
etc them about the legal ramifications or options.
Two businesses, but they would use opportunities in different ways, so when
looking for a CRM would need to find out which program does what you need.
How do you do this, test them. Don't just read what they say in their
features, take a trial (most software companies provide 30 days) and add
real contacts and how you would like to manage them. Add a few opportunities
and see if you can enhance customer service by sending marketing items such
as emails to a few people rather then your entire list.
Source: Katherine Davidson link
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