CRM Challenges - Understanding CRM Maturity 4
This is the final blog in a series that has looked at CRM Maturity as a tool to assist you in designing and implementing a successful CRM solution for your company. I've been involved with CRM over many years, and am convinced that it's an essential tool for modern businesses. Beyond helping you to acquire, retain and develop customers, what else can CRM do?
The final level in the CRM Maturity model is Performance Guidance. This is where data from within your CRM system helps to guide decision making, and may even change the very nature of your business. Before looking at this stage, it's worth checking how far down the path to successful CRM you have travelled. Here's a useful checklist for level 3 and some thoughts for areas to check at level 4.
- Clear Direction:
- Does your company base sales strategy and marketing programs on those designed by successful companies or industry leaders in your field?
- Reproducible:
- Are customer-focused professionals in your organisation able to follow a clear path that defines how they should approach specific customer related tasks?
- Flexibility:
- Can managers implement new tactics as they learn what works and what doesn’t?
- Expertise:
- Do the right people in your organisation take action at the right time to close deals, increase awareness and ensure customer satisfaction?
- Productivity:
- Do new staff hit the ground running with clearly defined, easily understood processes?
- Metrics and Monitoring:
- Can managers access real-time sales, marketing and service KPIs, and other real-time data to make operational adjustments, continuously improving performance and changing tactics quickly?
- Forecasting:
- Can sales managers view sales opportunities and see how much revenue the company should expect in the next quarter(s) or year, consistently?
- Exception Management:
- Do sales managers get notified when anomalies take place – abandoned deals, missed leads, or changed forecasts?
- Are service managers alerted to critical customer situations – overloaded cases, unresolved issues, or key account problems?
- Planning:
- Do executives have to wait until the end of the month to understand how the company has performed?
- Does the system allow them to prepare strategy and operational plans in advance?
Hopefully you will see your business being aligned behind clear goals and strategies; a company where everyone is working together to acquire, develop and retain customers; where information is shared; where the system supports, not hinders, the users in the execution of their role.
Measuring and Managing Performance: Visibility and Guidance
The ability to measure and understand progress towards clear goals is essential in the management of all organisations. With sales and marketing functions, the significance of measurement has long been recognised, resulting in the development of forecasting and remuneration structures based on actual results. Whilst these represent an excellent starting point, it's important that further performance indicators are developed and deployed to guide management and staff in the execution of their tasks.
Modern CRM systems provide essential information based on actual performance across multiple areas. This allows the measurement of all areas of performance within an organisation, leading to reduced costs and improved staff morale, as users are recognised and remunerated for their contribution to the success of the business.
Understand and manage your KPIs
The development of Key Performance Indicators has allowed management to gain insight into the operation of all areas of a business. Hopefully, most managers have a clear set of financial and business objectives. In this phase, it's essential that business goals are translated to manageable KPI measurements.
Within the CRM system it should be possible, through the understanding of sales and marketing processes, to extrapolate performance data to highlight potential issues. By setting the KPI metrics at all levels, changes can be made within the process to address potential issues well in advance. Decisions based on this information can aid resource planning across the organisation.
So our high quality data, improved efficiency and effectiveness, and best practice can all be measured. Based on the measurement of each area and by using KPI’s it should be possible to clearly identify what works and what doesn’t.
Which could be all you need to re-invent your company.
Paul Pitman is a Solutions Architect at Collier Pickard.
