First of all what does CRM stand for? CRM = Customer Relationship Management.

The idea of CRM has been around for quite a while. The first type of CRM was a manual card framework kept by a sales person that typically sat on the salesman's work area or close by them in the vehicle. These customer cards sets were entirely profitable to the salesman as this is the place they kept critical client data such client contact subtleties, key contacts in the organization, a running editorial on their exercises, individual and item inclinations, purchasing behaviors, business associations, etc. Each card was a dossier on every customer. To fruitful, very much overseen sales people, their customer cards were gold.

Be that as it may, periodically, this fundamental information dwelled with the sales rep alone. The organization, the salesman worked for, did not have prepared access to this critical data and when the sales rep left the organization as a rule so did the customer data, customer relationship and deals did also.

The 'softwarising' of CRM for organizations is viewed as a noteworthy leap forward in having the capacity to catch critical customer data and better oversee customer connections. Best CRM for small business 2019 guarantees quicker client administration at lower costs, higher consumer loyalty, better client maintenance and eventually client dedication and more deals. Anyway numerous organizations still trust that CRM is essentially programming, or innovation and the full advantages of CRM software free are not being completely acknowledged by business. CRM is significantly more than only an information mining instrument.

CRM is not (just) technology.

CRM is a business strategy!

Your CRM can possibly and ought to be your corporate memory. It very well may be the archeological record of your business. Actually, whenever presented and connected accurately, a standout amongst the most noteworthy advantages of having and utilizing a CRM in your business is having the capacity to completely acknowledge and outline genuine estimation of your customers as organization resources. Other than the undeniable advantages to you and your business, if at any point you sold your business, having a CRM with this profitable data followed and mapped can be esteemed and sold for premium.

What does an effective CRM system look like?

A compelling CRM framework ought to be what your methodology needs and needs it to be. Nowadays you can gain admittance to open source CRM programming where you can design what you need in your CRM so you don't need to be fixing to restrictive CRM's that can't be tweaked to your necessities. Likewise CRM's don't need to be restrictively costly either. Numerous individuals have put off getting CRM's in the past because of their staggering expense and spotlight on enormous organizations. However at this point great CRM's frameworks are accessible for SME's and locally established organizations at very savvy rates. For example we use Variablesoft CRM  which is an open source framework we can arrange to suit our business needs.

This means you need to think carefully about what you want your CRM system to do and be and who you partner with to make it work for you.

A good place to start is to:

1. * Know your business strategy and key outcomes you want to achieve and work backwards from there.



2. * Know your customer, their needs, wants and motives and your path to market



3. * Appreciate the length, width and depth of the relationships between the customer and your organisation



4. * Understand how you properly manage of all interactions with your customer



5. * Know what your sales and service people need to do make sales happen in your business.



6. * Aim to build a business system that manages prospects, clients and projects.

Look at what data, behaviours, and outcomes you want to track:

• * Client data, sales person activity data, product sales data, effectiveness of marketing initiatives including your website, direct mail/email campaigns, etc.


• * What behaviours do you want to encourage and reinforce in your sales and service teams as well as your clients and prospects?


• * What do you want to measure by way of lead and lag sales indicators?


• * How do you want to communicate data internally and externally?

Important point: you do not want you CRM to turn your salespeople into glorified desk jockeys. We need to make sure any CRM is easy to use, doesn't take necessary time away from vital interpersonal sales activities. If you think your CRM can replace your sales team you will fall short in your efforts. If your business needs to be in personal contact in some way with your clients you need your CRM to enhance these relationships not replace them.

Here are some ways a CRM system can serve you well:

• * Provide immediate insight into prospect and customer leads originating from any channel



• * Provide deep visibility into the sales pipeline and opportunity details which quickly produce accurate sales forecasts.



• * Allow for a consistent, informed, and personalised customer communication approach i.e. automated emails relevant to the specific customers



• * Give sales people and everyone in your business access to a consolidated view of the customer across your organisation - this will allow everyone in the organisation to know how they can help play their part in taking control of every opportunity and managing it to a successful conclusion



• * Encourage, enforce and track best-practice sales methodologies you want in your sales teams i.e. logging of Lead Indicator Activities such as: # of prospecting calls made, # of client meetings had; # of real deals in the pipeline, # of sales made: # of cross sales made, # of sales made with new clients, # of sales made with existing clients, # of follow customer service enquiries, # of service calls, etc.



• * Encourage, enforce and track best-practice service methodologies you want in your customer service and support teams i.e. logging of Lead and Lag Indicator Activities such as # of follow customer service calls made post sales, # of service calls made, # of customer service calls and complaints received, etc.



• * Monitor and map effectiveness of have automated sales and marketing activities that are specific to the customers and markets



• * Steamline and automate those customer activities that can go online i.e. confirmation emails, automatic emails sent out at periodic intervals for things like renewals for instance



• * Map work in progress with clients and staff allocated to client projects



• * Have the ability to integrate with your website and keep track of web activity



• * Support your entire frontline sales and sales lead management team with the right information they need to quickly and efficiently fulfill all of their daily requirements.



• * Deliver knowledge at the point of action



• * Keeps vital customer data in the business whether the sales person stays of leaves thus creating a valuable company asset.