Contact Relationship Management Planning

Does  your sales force need help managing their Targeted and Assigned Accounts?  Consider a CRM (Contact Relationship Management) tool. Microsoft Outlook is one example of a CRM tool, and most CRM software (e.g. Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce.com, Prophet21) perform like MS Office on steroids. I’ve led the implementation of these enterprise products for several organizations, and the key to success is adoption of their usage at all levels of sales and marketing as well as a training program.

Here’s an outline of the CRM Best Practices I implemented:

Important: If your organization has geographically disperse locations, form a Panel made up of Power User/CRM Champions  who assist in reinforcing day-to-day training at their locations. This person will also be the voice of users at their location, giving feedback to the committee.

What do you want to know? Sit down with your sales team and ask “what 10 questions about our customers do we want to know?

Task Scheduling: Meet with account representatives and review their Targeted and Assigned Accounts.2.            Agree on 5 Targeted Accounts to be cultivated over the next 3 months. Use CRM Task Scheduling Tools to Assign the Task to the salesperson. This will allow Task Notifications to send updates upon completion of the task (such as an Outbound Call)

Sales Force Automation: Completion of the Outbound activity should trigger marketing communications events. Become an expert at querying the customer database for your outbound marketing initiatives such as personalized email welcome messages, welcome kits and ongoing communications.

Have sufficient resources: Adding more contacts than you can actually follow up on will result in database full of unqualified contacts ! I’ve seen cases where more than 76% of Assigned Contacts had no sales.

Measure the ROI: CRM Task Reports should be linked with sales data (by Contact ID, Ship To ID, etc.) to show growth in revenue. Once you are able to do this, your organization will embrace CRM tools. Without the link to revenue, the perception of the tool over time may be that it is nothing more than MS Outlook with some bells and whistles.

I’ll end here with a graph that summarizes the process with emphasis on the maintenance of your customer database during your CRM implementation:

– Set Benchmarks, define what you want you want to accomplish and what success means

- Data Cleansing: Before you start reaching out to the contacts, do a little housekeeping

- Contact Report: Reach agreement on who the contacts are. Tag them for targeting.

- Customer Maintenance: Hold training on how contacts and company information should be entered

- Integration: Sales and Marketing need to be coordinated in outbound touches using the CRM

- Metrics: First cycle is completed. Measure how things are working. Improve with each cycle.

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