CRM and Personal Selling
Customer relationship management is a widely used model for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients, and sales prospects.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a widely implemented model for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients, and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, service and retain those the company already has, entice former clients to return, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service. Customer relationship management describes a company-wide business strategy including customer-interface departments as well as other departments. Measuring and valuing customer relationships is critical to implementing this strategy. The rationale behind using the CRM is to improve services provided directly to customers and to use the information in the system for targeted marketing and sales purposes.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Illustrate the rationale and use of customer relations management (CRM) as part of personal selling and sales promotion
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Key Points
- The CRM uses technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes —principally sales activities.
- The goals of CRM are to find and attract new clients, service and retain those the company already has, entice former clients to return, and reduce the costs of marketing and service.
- Information gained through CRM initiatives can support sales development and marketing strategy by growing the organization’s knowledge in customer-oriented areas.
Key Terms
- customer relationship management: A widely implemented model for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients, and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. Also known by the acronym “CRM. “
- stakeholders: A person or organization with a legitimate interest in a given situation, action or enterprise. It can range from employees and investors of a company to the customers purchasing from the company.
- sales force automation: A process using software to streamline all phases of the sales process, minimizing the time that sales representatives need to spend on each phase.
Benefits of Customer Relationship Management
A Customer Relationship Management system may be chosen because it is thought to provide the following advantages:
- Quality and efficiency
- Decrease in overall costs
- Increase Profitability
Challenges
Instances of a CRM attempting to contain a large, complex group of data can become cumbersome and difficult to understand for ill-trained users. The lack of senior management sponsorship can also hinder the success of a new CRM system. Stakeholders must be identified early in the process and a full commitment is needed from all executives before beginning the conversion. But the challenges faced by the company will last longer for the convenience of their customers.
Stakeholders: The picture shows the typical stakeholders of a company. The stakeholders are divided in internal and external stakeholders. All of these stakeholders must be identified and considered, and the ones considered most important to the CRM system must be identified.
Additionally, an interface that is difficult to navigate or understand can hinder the CRM’s effectiveness, causing users to pick and choose which areas of the system to be used, while others may be pushed aside. This fragmented implementation can cause inherent challenges, as only certain parts are used and the system is not fully functional. The increased use of customer relationship management software has also led to an industry-wide shift in evaluating the role of the developer in designing and maintaining its software. Companies are urged to consider the overall impact of a viable CRM software suite and the potential for good or bad in its use.
CRM Uses in Sales & Marketing
Information gained through CRM initiatives can support the development of sales and marketing strategy by developing the organization’s knowledge in areas, such as identifying customer segments, improving customer retention, improving product offerings (by better understanding customer needs), and identifying the organization’s most profitable customers.
Sales Force
Automation
Sales force automation (SFA) involves using software to streamline all phases of the sales process, minimizing the time that sales representatives need to spend on each phase. This allows a business to use fewer sales representatives to manage their clients. At the core of SFA is a contact management system for tracking and recording every stage in the sales process for each prospective client, from initial contact to final disposition. Many SFA applications also include insights into opportunities, territories, sales forecasts, and workflow automation.
Marketing
CRM systems for marketing help the enterprise identify and target potential clients and generate leads for the sales team. A key marketing capability is tracking and measuring multichannel campaigns, including email, search, social media, telephone, and direct mail. Metrics monitored include clicks, responses, leads, deals, and revenue. Alternatively, Prospect Relationship Management (PRM) solutions offer to track customer behavior and nurture them from first contact to sale, often cutting out the active sales process altogether.
In a Web-focused marketing CRM solution, organizations create and track specific web activities that help develop the client relationship. These activities may include such activities as free downloads, online video content, and online web presentations.