There are a wide variety of reasons why companies embark on CRM projects. We've listed some common reasons why companies use CRM, along with some 'pain factors' businesses have given for deploying CRM systems.
- It's difficult to share customer information in a team environment and see a reliable and holistic view of all customer interactions
- It takes a lot of effort to produce or get hold of key management reports
- Tracking leads more efficiently is important to your company
- Revenue may have been lost because of mishandling or losing potential sales opportunities
- You'd like to be able to take advantage of bulk discounts when ordering products for resale, but you're forecasting and pipeline management has let you down in the past.
- You'd like to be sure which of your customers are the most profitable
- There isn't a single, overall view of all customer touch points across your organisation
- You or your staff have lost or can't easily find valuable customer information
- Your company needs to respond faster to enquiries
- Although they were ok for a while, your company is outgrowing applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Excel.
- It's difficult to profile and target customers for marketing campaigns
- There's repetitious, multiple entry of information across different software applications
- You have very little real-time accurate information and data
- You're finding it hard to develop your sales team through lack of accurate, comprehensive and up to dateKPI and analysis
- You find it time consuming to analyse, and may not be convinced of the accuracy of sales team data, such as conversion ratios from lead to opportunity to win or lose
- You're unable to confidently predict cash flow or manufacturing and production requirements because your forecasting and pipeline management isn't always right.
Why do companies use CRM? Because Customer Relationship Management is all about overcoming these problems.
The more you understand your customers, the better you manage your relationships with them and the more efficiently your customer facing staff work, the more competitive your business will be.
A true CRM solution allows management to understand the way the business functions, to measure performance more effectively and to achieve greater profits by better targeting. So if any of the problems listed exist in your company, it could well be time you considered a professionally implemented CRM system.
To learn more about CRM software and options, visit the Oasis Solutions Group website
