A last month I wrote a post explaining about the different types of CRM.  A recent client project made me realize that I had left a few “flavors” off the menu.

This client is a marketing firm that wanted to implement a system that kept track of customer/prospect interactions and  client projects – customer relationship management (CRM) with project management (PM).  This was a new flavor.  They want to track contacts thru the sales cycle to proposal and then when a proposal was won, track the activities required to complete the proposed project.  What businesses would need this functionality?  Any business that performs multi-task activities for a customer – marketing and design firms, architecture and engineering, builders and remodelers, attorneys and CPAs.  The list is quite large and definitely includes technology consultants like myself!  So I updated the graphic from that last post:

Which tools support this kind of functionality?  Definitely the big names do – Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  There are specialty niche products like Clients and Profits which is geared towards marketing agencies.  Then there are applications with broad functionality that can appeal to wide range of small businesses.  These include WorkEtc, Solve360, ZohoCRM and Zoho Project along with a host of others.

What came out of the evaluation I did for this client?  First, we choose Solve360 for their business and we’re implementing it now.  I also now have my eye on WorkEtc. for my next CRM, for when I outgrow Batchbook (which I love).

The price points and functionality vary and the list of companies here is far from exhaustive- it is worth getting some help evaluating these tools to determine which is right for your business.  In this article I talk about some of the success factors.  Get with your technical advisor to find out more.

I have written a few posts about CRM applications in the past but I’ve come to realize that folks are still confused about what CRM is.  I think that is part of the reason there are so many failed CRM implementations – too many people don’t realize how broad the term is and when they choose a tool they do it without evaluating what they need and comparing it to what is available.  Believe me, sometimes more is NOT better.  Worse, CRM is as much a business strategy as a technology – you need both to be successful.
 

So what is CRM then?

According to Wikipedia CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a broad term referring to “a widely-implemented strategy 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.”.  Wow, that is a lot of stuff.

In an attempt to further simplify I’ve come up with an overly simple graphic (so you knowledgeable folks don’t need to tell me what I left out – sock puppet simple, remember?) to help illustrate.

If you think of the three major functions of CRM in a Venn diagram as above you can see that sales, marketing and customer service share a major function which is simply called Contact Management here but is really the information about your customers.  Therein lies the problem.  Some companies want the sales functions and contact management, some want the marketing functions and contact management.  Some companies just want contact management.  Regardless of what you want, if you don’t choose the right application you are likely to get one with all of the functionality.  Anytime you get more than you want to use you are asking for trouble.

So how do you get the right tool?

It pays to think about your strategy first, even a simplified one.  What are you trying to accomplish for your business?  Then, with a bullet list of requirements, look at the functionality of the available tools.  Don’t restrict yourself to the big names or the one your buddy uses – look at all of them.  Make sure you are getting what you really need, not a whole lot else.  Picking something that has just what you need will make installation, training and adoption immeasurably easier.

But what if I need more functionality later?

If you are absolutely, positively certain you will want, say, sales force automation in the next 6-12 months then add it to your requirements.  Otherwise, add a requirement that speaks to the ease of moving data in and out to your list.  Who knows what applications will be available a year from now – make sure you can easily get your data out and worry about what the next right tool is when you are ready.

Get help if you need it

Remember, unless you are an IT professional or CRM expert, choosing a tool and implementing it correctly can be a daunting proposition.  If you had a tax or legal issue you’d get help from your accountant or attorney, right?  Don’t hesitate to get help from your technical advisor if you need it.

Bottom line

There are a lot of CRM applications and most of them are pretty good.  It is a pretty mature technology and there are many happy customers using each and every one.  Unfortunately they almost all have unhappy customers too and many times it is because the wrong tool was chosen.  Take your time, do it right and get help if you need it.

I have spent a number of hours over the past few weeks, bringing air and light to the far recesses of my son’s bedroom and removing a winter’s supply of mud, bugs, dust and pollen from my screen porch.  So that makes it time for my second annual post about spring cleaning your technology.

The Current Clean Up List

To get us started I’ll refer you to my previous posts on the topic – every year you should look at your website to see if needs to be refreshed (and it probably does!).  There are more great tips for cleaning up your website in this post from Moreover Technologies. You should also clean out your old emails or at least archive them out of your mailbox.  Finally, I’ll add here my continued plea to put your fax machine of its misery.

New to the List – Back Up

If you don’t already do it on a regular basis (and you should!) please check to make sure your back ups are happening correctly and on a regular basis.  I would also use this time to test your restore procedures – you can do this by simply renaming a file that should be backed up and trying to restore it.  If you can’t you know you have a problem.  If you are tired to changing tapes or burning cds this is a great time to consider backing up to the cloud.  I have been using Mozy for a number of years and it is quick and painless.  I’ve also, unfortunately, had to restore from them and it has worked great.  Other good back up vendors are Carbonite and Symantec.

Clean Up Your Files and Move to the Cloud

I bet your drives are mess – with old files mixed with new files.  With useful date mixed with junk or, worse, outdated versions of useful files.  Now is the time to organize your files.  Delete stuff you really don’t need and archive (move somewhere else, either on your pc or network or off entirely) old files that you might need but that are mostly in your way.  While you are doing this, think about if you really need to have all those files on your hard drive or network server.  Would they be more accessible and useful if you could access them from anywhere and almost any device?  If so, now is a good time to consider cloud files storage with vendors like Dropbox or Box.net (or a whole host of others).

Another Addition – Antivirus

Another thing to add to your spring cleaning list is to check to make sure your antivirus updates and runs regularly.  You don’t want to be caught without protection for your pc!

Refresh your Technology Plan

Finally, now is a great time to refresh your technology plan, if you have one.  How do you expect to leverage technology in in the coming year to benefit your business?  If you don’t have a technology plan, now is a great time to put one together with the help of your technology advisor.

I hope you all have a happy, sunshiny spring and I’d love to hear about what you did during YOUR technology spring cleaning!

I’m going to show my age here because I remember the work world before email.  Yes indeed, business communication was via snail mail, interoffice mail or the good old telephone. It wasn’t until the late 80s that email became so ubiquitous.   I think email and its importance kind of snuck up on me and went from “hmm, how are we going to use this” to “how can we live without it?” in a blink of an eye.  Today, can you imagine not checking your email a gazillion times a day, using your mailboxes as a data repository or missing out on the latest special at your favorite restaurant?  I can’t.

The Future of Email

Yet this morning I read a recent blog post on Hubspot that really got me thinking.  It had lots of statistics about a variety of things but one stuck out to me - web-based email usage dropped 59% among 12-17 year-olds.  My eleven year-old son is just starting to use email – does it mean he’ll quit before he really gets going?  Here is another statistic from the article – 91% of people have unsubscribed from email lists they formerly subscribed to.

What Does it Mean?

What does this mean to your business?  Your current customers are becoming more fastidious about the email they accept.  It is critical that you provide valuable and interesting content to keep their subscriptions.  And that you avoid scammy content at all costs.  At the same time  your future customers  aren’t on email at all  - they are texting, using IM or are on Facebook.  What is your business doing to reach customers in these areas?  Are you ready for the email-less generation?

I would be interested in your thoughts on the future of email and how your business is moving beyond it today.  There are some other interesting stats in this article, let’s save discussion them for another time, shall we?

Retail and food service businesses probably don’t have this problem but service companies that are growing know exactly what I am talking about.  After identifying a customer, engaging in a protracted sales process, and wrangling over the fine details of the contract you are ready to begin providing services to your new customer, and better yet, start invoicing them.  But when you talk to the various parts of your company you realize it is all a lot harder than you thought.  Why is that and why does it take so long?

To answer that let’s look at a typical set-up a medium-sized company might have:

• Your customer is hopefully already set up in your CRM system, at least as far as your sales folks are concerned.  You will want to make sure your customer service folks have them set up for their needs too.
• You will want the new customer set up in your accounting system…
• And your billing system..
• And in whatever operational system(s) you use (consulting firms might have project management systems, shipping companies might have logistics systems, wireless carriers will have network systems).

Even if you don’t have individual applications for these functions, you still have people who have to know about the new customer and to adapt their internal processes to accommodate them.

So why would doing this take a long time?  If you are a smallish company it might not be too bad – you may have to update your various applications, spreadsheets or lists yourself or holler over to the guy in the next chair.  As your company gets bigger, however, you’ll likely start dividing the work functionally – you may have an accounting group or department, another for billing, another for sales, one for customer service and another one for the operational aspects.  Suddenly getting everyone on the same page, and better yet, with the same information, becomes a challenge.  As you become more successful and grow you may find that your automation has become fractured – some groups have grownup applications, some use spreadsheets or their own databases.  This uneven growth and lack of integration across the organization becomes more and more difficult to manage.  Which leads to increases in your cost to onboard a customer.  And, because every group updated their processes and systems manually you may have played “telephone” with important information like customer name, addresses, contact info, etc.  This in turn will lead to issues down the road doing analytical reporting about things like the profitability of a customer.

The good news is this not a new problem – millions of companies face this all the time.  Think of it as a good sign, a growing pain for a successful company.  It is a legitimate problem though and if left to get out of hand can bog a company down, making your organization a modern day Tower of Babel.  Here are some of the symptoms:

• You have  ”bad data” – which is, generally in this situation, inconsistent data.
• You miss key dates – for example your contact stipulates an SLA period for follow up on issues that never made it to customer service.
• You notice frequent miscommunications with customers.  Or about customers.
• You experience more the than usual instances of over or under billing.
• Or your numbers aren’t what you expect but you don’t know why.

What can you do?  Here are some thoughts:

• When you start to see these symptoms force yourself to take the time to stop and take a look around.  If you are still small you may be able to institute some policies and procedures that govern how new customers are set up.  Something as simple as a check sheet can go a long way to staving off problems.  Collaborating with lists and spreadsheets in the cloud might help as well.  Look at Google Docs, Zoho, Dropbox or the like.
• Listen to your employees carefully for statements that indicate the symptoms such as “We’re doing business with ABC in two different offices and it is so hard to keep it straight.  Sure would help if they were set up the same in both places!”.  When you hear this ask probing questions to figure out why.
• Take the time to document your processes.  Then review them and look for inefficiencies and opportunities to automate processes or integrate processes for which you already have applications.  As a bonus you’ll have training material for onboarding new employees!
• Review the processes regularly, at least annually, as input into your technology plan and budget for next year.

Like I said earlier, this isn’t the sign of a “bad” company, just one that has grown by focusing on getting the job done and not “how” the job gets done.  And as you can see, taking a look at the “how” now and again can help you continue to grow.

Has your company experienced this growing pain?

I have to be perfectly honest, I was an iPad skeptic.  I wasn’t skeptical about the device itself – it has the inherent coolness of all the Apple products – but I was skeptical of its usefulness to me and to my business.  I have and heavily use (and adore) my iPhone and I have one of the smallest and lightest full featured notebook computers on the market.  What would be the benefit of adding a new device to the mix?

In the months since the iPad came out, however, I’ve looked at my business and other businesses with a new eye for iPad opportunities.  Frankly, I’ve been surprised at how many I have found.

Retail

A retail establishment could use the iPad instead of a clipboard for inventory.  They could use it instead of a TV and DVD or VCR for product demos.  They could also use it for customer loyalty club sign-ups.  Of course, they’d probably want to bolt it down or tether it for the latter two tasks.

Any industry – Mobile Sales

Wow, any sales person that is out traveling about would find the iPad useful.  The biggest benefit would be the ability to show a customer or client fabulous online demos, videos, etc. with out using a projection device or having an unwieldy computer between them and the prospect.   Once the impressive demo was over the iPad would be great for creating real-time sales orders.

Any industry – Mobile Service Technicians

Cable people, electricians, plumbers, any sort of home maintenance or repair person – these could all use an iPad.  Service orders could be dispatched to the technicals, notes written up, and invoices created.  Service manuals would be available at the flick of a finger.  Estimates could be created and presented to customers on site.  The time lag between service performance and billing would be almost zero.

Medical

Medical histories could be taken, xrays or other test results shown, records updated – all on a small, inconspicuous device the size of a notebook.

Real Estate

What if you were driving a prospective buyer around town and they wanted to see more homes than you prepared for?  In a flash you could search other listings, show the buyer photos and videos, get directions to other homes.  You could do these on a smartphone but the visual experience would be unappealing and a laptop would be large and unwieldy.

Creatives

Designers of all sorts, craftsmen, architects and other creatives could use the iPad as a portable portfolio.  They could also use it to take notes, show design changes and options during customer consultations.

So where does it leave me?  I don’t fall into these categories as a provider of professional services.  Yet I can see using the iPad to show case studies, websites of interests or videos.  I’ve about talked myself into buying an iPad for the ease of doing email and web searching alone.  Consuming content of any sort is the greatest strength of the iPad.  I’ll still want to use my notebook computer for creating content – such as writing blog posts like this.

I still haven’t bought one yet but I think I see an iPad as my year end bonus to myself.  What other ideas for uses of iPad’s in business do you see?

You have to answer the phone.

It is probably safe me for me to assume that virtually all businesses have a phone.  When possible someone should answer the phone when it rings.  I can understand where some small businesses may have a cell phone as their main business number, say for a solopreneur consultant or the like.  In that case it is ok to let the call go to a professional sounding voicemail during meetings or while driving, etc.  Those voicemails need to be checked regularly and returned promptly.  And promptly means THAT DAY if possible.  I recently called a local dog grooming establishment to make an appointment to get my two labs, Jester and Cimarron, bathed.  I got voicemail or an answering  machine.  The first time I called I just hung up (potential lost customer).  The second time I called I left a message (the dogs were really smelly and it was very cold outside).  My message was returned over 24 hours later, late one evening when I couldn’t take the call.  I had to call a third time to make an appointment.  Turns out when I finally got there that my service was adequate and the cost reasonable but I am not in love with this place.  It seems to me that a service establishment like that thrives by keeping their appointments booked – why do they not have someone dedicated to answering the phone?  Why can they not return calls during business hours?  Or better yet, why don’t they look into allowing clients to book appointments online at their convenience?

You have to have email and check and return it regularly.

It boggles my mind that in 2010 there are still some businesses that don’t have email and or don’t integrate its use regularly into their business processes, yet it is true.  Of course, if you are one of those that doesn’t use email, you probably aren’t reading this article either.  I sure hope you have a friend that prints it out for you and either hands it to you or puts it in an envelope with one of those stampy-things.

I believe that small businesses should embrace email; it is convenient for you and your customer.  It allows your customer to reach you when it suits them, even before or after business hours.  When using email keep the following in mind:

• check it regularly, at least at the beginning and end of each day, more if you can.  Go thru all of it and handle it in some appropriate way. I recently responded to an email I received…later when I saw the sender she claimed not to have seen my response.  When I expressed surprise she admitted that she gets hundreds of emails a day and didn’t always get thru them.  In today’s world not getting thru email (or having someone get thru email) is not an acceptable business practice.  Especially when you send an email and are looking for a response!
• Commit to responding within a certain amount of time.  Consider responding to email with an autoresponder that tells your customer when to expect to hear back from you.  For example, an autoresponder might say “Thank you for your email, it is important to us.  Emails received by close of business will be answered that day, otherwise they will be answered on the next business day.”
• Answer customer questions or concerns politely and completely.  Assume that the sender wants to communicate via email or ask them if you can communicate differently.  Nothing is more annoying than to send someone an email and for them to respond with “call me”.  If you need specific information to interact via email, let the customer know what that is.

I know phone and email are so ubiquitous to barely be considered “technology” but we have to start somewhere.  Next week we’ll take a baby step beyond that.  In the meantime, as always, I’m interested in your opinions on this – how do you use technology to improve customer service?