A Short Introduction to CRM

You are now about to use - or at least you are considering using - the ChannelCRM system. We are assuming that you came this far because you are experiencing the need to improve your selling efforts, in order to sell more, better and faster. Maybe you have also experienced a need to offer better service towards your customers and prospects in order to improve customer retention and satisfaction.

If your recognize some of yourself in the above you are on the right track. CRM is the way to achieve better sales and ChannelCRM is the most effective way to CRM. With the manual in front of you, you have a recipe for CRM: How to get started? Not only from a technical perspective in the form of how to install, configure system and network, but also the sales-practitioners perspective: How do I use the system? Where do I get my data from? How do I conduct a campaign? How do I build up the pipeline and forecast? What should I require from the users of the system?

Speaking of users: ChannelCRM is used in organizations from 1 to more than 100 users. Depending on the role and job function of the user, there might be differences in what is important to the user. Regardless of the anything it is crucial that the individual user is experiencing that the system gives him or her clear benefits. If not, the system will not provide you with the optimal results you are looking for.

The writers of this Short Introduction to CRM are actually the partners behind the company ChannelCRM. Therefore you should not expect an unbiased view of CRM here. We obviously believe that the ChannelCRM system represents the best and most effective way to CRM. Before entering the CRM business on the supply side, the partners spent a combined 60 years of sales, sales-management, and executive management experience in some of the most highly competitive sales organizations on the planet. Believe us when we say, that we have experienced almost anything in the world of CRM from the user side. Our experiences led to the simple idea behind ChannelCRM: CRM should benefit the salespeople - if it doesn't, it fails.

To help you do so we have distilled our experiences into ChannelCRM, we hope that you may benefit!

First and foremost CRM is a discipline that helps you work more efficiently with your sales and marketing processes resulting in more sales, more customer satisfaction and more employee motivation. By simply structuring the sales processes and supporting them with the right information you will experience that you:

•	Always have a clear understanding of where you are and where you are going with your sales and marketing process

The Customer is the key focus of CRM. You should calculate on benefiting from better customer retention. In today’s business, a key to success is that you are able to handle your customers as least as good as your best competitor.

An important benefit from CRM to have in mind is the increased valuation of your company. Once CRM is implemented you are able to document not only how well your company has hold of its existing customers, but also how well you have planned for the future activities that will secure more and even happier customers. These are very important parameters for a third party assessing the value of your company.

With CRM you will have much better control and navigation of your company. Almost all companies have to constantly adapt marketing, sales and customer service to changing market conditions. The current financial climate only increases the pressures on companies to remain agile and anticipative. But without a CRM system it is very difficult, since problems do not become visible in your traditional ERP systems before they are a reality. Your CRM solution allows you to detect trends – while they are really still trends. Therefore you can be proactive. You will need that in today’s business climate.

The short answer is - you are. Off course we and our partners would like to participate during the CRM implementation, but the actively you and your employees and colleagues are putting in an effort, the faster you get to the result and the better your result will be. CRM in your organization will be tightly integrated with how you do your business, your visions for your customers, and the how you want your values and culture reflected in your way of doing business. It is not a thing you want to leave in the hands of consultants. You can off course let others handle the trivial tasks of data cleansing, import and data entry, but be 100% on top of the process of developing your way of using CRM.

The short answer is - now. We have yet to witness a company that does not have highly visible, easily identifiable, challenges when it comes to sales and marketing. Aim at the solution for these challenges first and then consider what your next move should be.

Far too many companies fail with CRM by starting, too complex, too expensive analysis projects in situations where the truth about the need for process improvement is so obvious that the final pre-study analysis report could have been made with cut and paste. Most often the projects have a tendency to end out in conclusions showing the need for very significant customer specific adaptations or maybe even bespoke solutions. If your company has the time (and the money) to wait for the result, this method might be the route to take. It is the chosen strategy of Fortune 500 companies. But if you are not a Fortune 500 company, then this manual will show you how to get benefits from CRM quickly and how your company can have CRM that lets you compete with the very best when it comes to sales and customer service.

The manual is composed of general sections (like this one) and sections that are specific to the use of ChannelCRM. Large portions of the manual serves as online help in the ChannelCRM system. But along the specific sections you will find chapters that discusses implementation considerations and issues. When reading from page 1 and down you will be guided through a series of general considerations and gradually led into the practicalities of actually doing them with ChannelCRM.

We are aware that you might not be in need of a general introduction, and you might want to bypass some of the chapters or maybe shift the order of the chapters since you might have a different sequence in your CRM project. This is perfectly ok.

The important thing is that you use the manual here as a guide to getting from a "CRM level zero" to "CRM MasterClass".

When you are introducing CRM in your company it will spur a lot of emotions with the people who is going to work with it. This is not unusual, since getting to CRM requires that each salesperson will have to take a look at his or her own habits, attitudes and ways of working. Please observe that CRM might be something one or more of your employees have failed with (more than once) before. To spur emotions is fundamentally a positive situation because it will bring around energy. The important thing however is to make sure that the emotions surfaces in a way that they can be used constructively. Therefore it is a good idea to prepare yourself for some of the emotions that might be expected from the people around you.

To help you do so we have come with four fictive persons. Four salesperson archetypes. Actually four archetypes of any white collar professional. What we do is that we stereotype each person, their attitude and reaction pattern to the extreme. The persons are:

Kent Fast

Hyacint

Oliver Grumple

Paula Nice

You might get a hint about personality and attitude from the names, and this is also the intention. On the other hand there is no intentional correspondence between the personality/attitude and the age/sex of persons. Whilst our persons here might give you plenty of opportunities to reinforce stereotypes based on age and sex then luckily there are so many real life examples of persons that prove the stereotypes wrong that the stereotypes remain exactly that - stereotypes.

When we are using the persons to show possible reactions, they might come across as overly simplified and too extreme to be true. You are possibly right. In the real world there is more depth to persons than to our four stereotypes. But it is our hope that you will find a little bit of yourself and your colleagues in the stereotypes and that your colleagues can find a bit of themselves and that you all can use this as basis for a proactive and open approach to the changes that CRM is about to bring about.