We all agree that, all organisation will be benefited by implementing CRM process. But biggest question is, are you ready or matured enough to implement such process in your organisation ?

Check out the following simple 5 questions.

1. As an Entrepreneur, Do you feel you are missing more business prospect regularly, because you are more concentrated towards Meeting your financial commitments and Operational challenges on day to day basis ?

2.Do you have a desire to lead your organisation in to more structured and process oriented route for growth ?

3.Are your competitors have started implementing some kind of Customer Management process , which will give them the first entry advantage ?

4.Do you have the confidence to make your colleagues understand the importance of a process oriented way to better manage your customers?

5.Do you believe in treating your customers differently ?

If you feel the answer to all the above mentioned questions are YES, it’s the time to get started. Contact some of the vendors who can assist you in building your Customer Relationship strategy.

Return on Relationship (ROR) is a metric and methodology for fostering and measuring successful collaborations. The relevance of ROR started, when in the 1980’s organisation changed focus from Product centric strategy to Customer centric strategy. Its obvious that if one customer buys a product or service from your organisation, he/she may come again and again to you. Here buying is not a single event, but it’s a continues process. When it’s a continues process, you have to start monitoring the way the customer do business with you over a period of time, and nurture the relationship further to increase the profitability of the company as well as to make the customer delighted.

This business model , Return on Relationship is been based on a concept, that Change will be constant. In your organisation, change will come from all the way.

Return on Relationship concept assumes that, to nourish the relationship with customers, organisation have to take huge steps to integrating Brick and mortar systems with New generation business models like E-business model.

Return on Relationship deals with the new type of business behaviours that have become a requirement for success in today’s internet charged economy. If organisations need to implement ROR strategies, they have to look beyond customer satisfaction and foster Customer loyalty by focusing on the relationship, not just the individual sale. Organisation has to be proactive in identifying and full filling the needs and desires of the customers.

What organisation will achieve by instituting Return on Relationship strategies?<
Organisations will be able to understand what their customers are likely to want over time – not just in the context of single transaction.

What constitutes Return on Relationship ( ROR) ?

The heart of the ROR business model is the ability to dazzle customers by

In each and every transaction, customers will reveal more details about them and their purchasing behaviour. ROR strategies capture these information and use it to foster customer loyalty by providing a unique customer experience tailored to each customer’s specific needs.

Wondering what is this KaaS all about ? true, it was really a novel concept introduced in India by a public sector company called HPCL. We all have heard enough about Software as a Service or SaaS, which is nothing but, getting the software to use and pay as we use it. All the software giants are foraying in to this arena by pumping in lot of brain power and money power.
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But KaaS is a novel concept called “Rasoi Ghar” designed and implemented by the state owned Hindustan Petroleum Corporation of India (HPCL) , with the help of Rural marketing agency MART.

The objective was simple.
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To penetrate in to the rural market, where the usage of LPG in household kitchen is relatively very less.
To help the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) community.
To make rural women understand the benefit of LPG usage, and there by increase the usage of LPG.
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The solution

Is it not a wonderful concept, which will empower the deprived community ?

When I read this novel concept in the magazine “4Ps”, November 2009 edition, I thought, I should bring in to the notice of people around me.
To conclude, its been observed that SaaS or KaaS, it helps the community / organisations by brining the best with relatively less cost.

Its evident that, organisations are under pressure from all angles, like, top management , Domestic Competitors , Global competitors.   The pressure is zeroing in to one point – “Deliver more with Less cost”.    Its seen that, IT department has to be more pro-active in innovating different mechanisms to reduce business cost through different mechanism.    Sales and Marketing department has to be more clear on their goals and projected figures, which is imperative to be in the competitive loop.

The challenge is to derive an effective strategy to balance between the organisational priorities and expenditure.     By increasing the efficiency of the information sharing points,  the organisations can increase the productivity and thereby increase the profitability.   Some of the areas to be observed are as follows.

1.   Traditional requirement gathering , planning and approval results in delay.  It also affects by way of broken processes,  manual reworking.

2.    Poor visibility of the business prospect pipeline, will reduce the efficiency of generating new business.

3.    Traditional method of long planning cycle delays the ability to take quick decisions which are critical to business generation.  This will impact by way of loosing millions of opportunities.

4.    If the information tabulated and shared by the customer facing representatives are not accurate, (most of the time it happens like this ) the decision taken with those wrong data may become fatal to the organisation.

5.    Outdated information are another aspect to be considered while improving the efficiency.

6.    De centralised data storage in different departments in an organisation will affect decision making process and its proven to be an in-effective way of handling information.

Business Process Automation – Ensures positive response.

Sales Executives , Managers , Marketing people and Top Executives can all benefit form Automation.  Automation of information gathering and sharing.

Information gathered in a systematic way that it can be used by any persons who has got the right to view.

All your important data will be available on your finger tip.

By automating the business process, we become ECO-Friendly organisation to a certain extend.  Because you reduce the usage of paper.  All documents become digital document.

It brings a systematic process culture in the organisation, which will bring in clarity and visibility to the entire business.

It save lots of time by eliminating repeated work.

Would like to conclude that, irrespective of the size of the organisation,  if you automate your business process,  you can be benefited with reduced business cost and  increased profitability.

I am sure, everybody will agree that, managing customers is one of the important tasks for small and medium organisations. 

If you ask any of the owners or management of an SMEs, this will be a typical answer. 

“ SMEs  usually work on shoe string budget, and doesn’t have the privilege to accommodate any buffer exclusively for Customer management”.

But is it true ?  Not necessarily.   Even though some finance is involved in automating the customers touch points , you doesn’t need much of an escalation in your budget.   Rather “Customer management” should be a strategic initiative irrespective of the size of the organisation.   

Its evident from our day to day interactions that, small players manage their customers more intelligently than a big organisation.  for Eg.,  Even though you use Proctor and Gamble prdoucts, your neighbour hood shop keeper who sells the product of P& G will understand you better than the Proctor and Gamble.

Managing customers is not a one time activity, its an on going process though out the customer lifetime.  In order to serve a customer better,

we need to understand their behaviour better, 

we have to understand their spending power better,

we have to understand their preferences better,

We have to understand the satisfaction level each customer on your products / services better,

Also we need to understand our competitor’s “customer Management” strategy.

All these in a continues manner.   

How to monitor or analyse their behaviour pattern, or spending power or their satisfaction ?  This is the biggest question.   

One of the best option is grab and store each details from all customer touch points.   The resources who are facing the customers should clearly understand the organisation strategy, of how we are planning to treat each of the customers.  By empowering your customer touch point resources, you make sure that, you are getting what you desire.

In order to grab, store and analyse these data, you might need an automation tool, (like Winds CRM, a hosted CRM tool, which can be accessed as a Cloud model ). 

You need the whole process on customer management to be sponsored by the top officials of your organisation like, owner, proprietor, Managing Director, Chairman etc, that the whole mechanism can be practiced through the organisation.

Have an effective mechanism to understand the existing customers satisfaction level, and try to understand the level of advocacy a customer can render to your organisation.

In short, to improve and maintain a high degree of customer satisfaction level, the organisations should build and nurture a culture, which focuses on the customers. Organisations also has to build trust among the customers and maintain them through out the customer lifetime.

World over, organisations are feeling the real heat of the depressed market condition.  One of the hot topic of discussion between the corporate wall are, how to cut down the cost ? how to lower the Capital expenditure, there by reduce the huge burden on the board ?

In the case of IT ( Information technology) investment, more and more organisations are turning towards hosted model, rather than CAPEX model, which was traditionally been the practice for decades.    It’s the realisation that, Hosted model or cloud computing can really bring down the heavy initial investment.  At the same time, the organisations can taste the benefits of high end IT power with a flexible costing which generally in par with the usage.   That means, you pay only for what you use.  You can explore the resources which are almost infinitely scalable with a low cost.

There are 3 different kind of cloud models.

1.     External cloud, which basically utilises the resources which is outside the enterprise.

2.     Internal cloud, which utilises resources with in the organisation in a virtualised data centre

3.     Hybrid cloud, is a combination of external and internal cloud.  IBM recently demonstrated a system, that enables companies to move application processing from an internal cloud to a public cloud facility, while keeping all data stored within the private cloud.

Yes, offcourse, it’s still the early days for cloud computing, but if correctly planned and implemented, the benefit reaped because of the same can be to the tune of 40 percent to 50 percent.   However, less matured technology space and security risk prevail as the real block to a drastic change.

Re-Engineering Customer process may feel as a new terminology for few readers.   In every organisation, there is a process, which deals with their customers.  Usually its not been attended to because of the ignorance of the topic or because there is no enough mechanism to manage it effectively.   

Customer process starts with your first call to a prospective customer and ends till the Customer life time.  It is very critical for every organisation that, it has a right mix of business generated from new customers as well as from the existing customers.

According to the 2008 Executive Survey by Gartner and Forbes.com, retaining and enhancing relationship with current customers is the number one business issue, followed by attracting new customers.    To re-engineer Customer process effectively, you must have a customer Relationship Management  (CRM) strategy in place.   As a business strategy  CRM will help organisation to reengineer the Customer process to improve the customer experiences .

One of the key to Customer process reengineering is “Customer input”, which has to be captured from different touch points.  It should start from the lead generation stage and usually never ends, because, for an organisation, once a customer is always a customer.

Since the customer input is the key, you should have a clear cut mechanism for entering and analysing the same, for which any good CRM application which suites your requirements will be helpful. Implementing and managing the customer input system effectively will lead you to a more clear insight in to the entire process.

Benefits by  RE-engineering the existing Customer process ?

• It helps you to understand your existing customer management process
• It helps you to understand the behaviour of the existing customers
• It helps you to increase the revenue and profitability
• It helps you to increase the Customer satisfaction level.
• It helps the marketing department to plan and implement effective strategy.
• More insight in to the improvements needed in the customer management process.

Its understood that , Usually the prime objective of the Customer process reengineering will be to improve the customer relationship rather than improved efficiency.

Some tips to implement Customer Re-engineering process in your organisation.

1. Define the objective of the process re-engineering

2. Define the methodology on how to achieve the objective. Like implementing on-demand CRM in your organisation

3. Define, how the said methodology will help solve the issues or opportunities facing the organisation.

4. Prepare a document, with what will happen if Customer reengineering is not implemented - (the do-nothing scenario ).

5. Define, what will be the money / People and time involved in the process-reengineering.

6. Present it to the Top Executive and make them sponsor the whole activity.

7. Start implementing step by step

8. Analyse and redefine as per the requirement.

So,  if you feel that you need to re-look your existing Customer process, start today.    You can call us for any professional assistance on Customer Process Re-engineering.  You can also mails us at support@windscrm.com ,  Our team will be there to help you out.

Business leads are always the lifeline of any growing organisations.  Lead lifeline graphs will show you how your organisation is going to perform over the next few months or years, depending on your type of business.

Opportunity is the next step of a lead process, where the organisations can quantify the lead.  Means, when the value of the product or services can be associated with a lead, we can know the potential value of that lead.  In this stage, a lead can be qualified as opportunity.

Lead management seems to be easy task, on the first look, but in actual scenario, it’s the most complex task, especially, if its not managed properly through out the entire organisation.    Leads can be generated from different mediums.  It can be Direct marketing / From news paper advertisements / Trade shows / Existing customers / Website / Email campaign etc.,    If you have a team of sales  / marketing executives working for your organisation, the number of leads generated will be of huge size.    All Growing organisations has to find out a better mechanism to mange those lead effectively.

If you look at the conventional marketing style, leads are generated by individual representatives, and keep all those information with them all through the lead life time.  or they will send the details through email, which is very hard to analyse.    Managing or organising those lead details are a cumbersome tasks for the tope management because of its scattered nature of placement.

A real time perspective of a conventional lead generation process

      a.       Frontline executive will generate a lead

b.      He / she will work on the lead and define it as HOT / WARM / COLD according to the nature of the lead.

c.       He / she will keep the whole lead list in a black and white form or in emails with hem.

d.      Management is usually worried about conversion of lead to sales.

e.      Executives starts to feel the pressure of the targets, and start working only on the HOT leads

f.        Say, only 50% of the hot leads are getting converted in to sale.

g.       Once the monitoring period is over, usually front line executives will start acquiring new leads, and work on  those….

h.      The process repeats  on converting majority of the Hot leads.

      Where is the issue? …… Is it in the process ?  just imagine a few scenarios

1.       What happens,  when the person who has generated leads and leave the company?

a.       The whole data will vanish from the organisation with the person whom left.

2.       What happens to the Warm and cold leads which are not converted in a short period?

3.       Can you know,  product pipeline of  those neglected leads in long run ?

4.       How do you know, if there is any leads, which can be converted in the next 6 months?

5.       Can you know how many quality leads to be generate to achieve your target?

6.        Can you know from where maximum leads are getting generated?

How to effectively manage Leads and opportunities ?

a.      Define the best practice on the lead generation and conversion process

b.      Define an objective for managing those leads , which can be increase the conversion ratio,  increase the number of quality leads etc.,

c.       Implement an effective Lead management tool for the entire organisation

d.      Analyse and manage the entire lead process effectively.

By implimenting a proper mechanism to manage leads, you can have more visiblity in to the entire LEAD life time, and increase the Lead conversion ratio.

Every business organisation will have the process of prospecting the clients.  It may be for finding a new customer, or influencing the existing customers for purchasing more from the organisation.   The outcome of prospecting is usually LEADS.    These leads may have generated by through different medium , like, News paper / Website / Trade shows / Channel partners etc.,  the same is been assaigned the executives to work on the same.   

Unfortunately, most of the sales force is more concentrated on only the hot leads, obviously because of the sales target pressures.  There is high chance that they ignore 80 to 90% of those warm or cold calls, due to its very lengthy lead life time.

That means, those 80 to 90% of the leads will go to the so called, “The black hole”

By proactively managing those long life leads will directly impact your revenue positively.   This can be done only if you have a structured lead processing system.   By enabling a structured lead processing and qualifying system through out your sales process, you can better manage leads, which will increase the chance of more leads converted to sales.

How the visibility in to Opportunity pipeline will impact the revenue generation ?

• More short-term buyers are found during structured lead qualification than when the salesforce cherry picks opportunities.
• Structured lead qualification ensures that long-term buyers are also identified and nurtured, adding to the value of the sales opportunity pipeline.
• Average sale value increases due to enhanced lead qualification.
• More leads are converted to sales because leads are better qualified.
• Overall sales cycle is shortened.
• Will help you to better forecast your sales volume.

A proven Sales  force Automation / CRM system can help you to manage opportunity pipeline better, that it provide data and information to better understand the relationship you have with your customers.

A Well structured, and well updated  opportunity pipeline  will give more insight to the  Marketing team to better understand the buying pattern of the customers.   It will also help them to understand,

• What is the Opportunity to Sales Ratio?
• From where the opportunity is coming from ( source of lead )
• Whats the average lead life time
• How much sales can be generated over the next few months ( forecasting )
• Which opportunity stage holds maximum revenue generation possibility

The Customer Relationship Management, is always thought to be something not reachable to small and medium organisations.  SMEs, or better called as Growing organisations, refuses to use CRM strategies mainly because of the less clarity towards this subject. 

CRM is basically a strategy which can be used regardless of the organisation’s size / Employee’s numbers  / Sales figures etc.,  To manage a growing business effectively, one organisation requires a clear vision in to their entire business process.  Unless and until , the owners  / stake holders of Growing companies have a clear vision on their activities, its hard for them to achieve their goal.  

Small organisations are the best bet for a clear CRM strategy, because of its small size, ease in quantifying the figures ,  flexibility in managing the process etc., etc.,   Unfortunately, when the small organisations grow slowly to a medium or large organisations, it becomes impossible to implement effective strategy which can sustain the complexity of business.

What small organisations should do to implement a successful CRM in their organistion :

1.       Define a small step goal towards CRM.

a.       Go step by step, which will help you to develop a fool proof system as well as decrease your expenditure on the new process.

b.      Set your vision  , say for eg: to increase the Customer satisfaction ratio.  Increase sales turnover, increase lead conversion ratio, etc.,

c.       Determine ways in which  you can achieve those goals.

d.      Use a good automation tool, which can help you to manage your business process easily and effectively.

e.      Review your strategy every 3 month ( minimum), and understand if you are going in right direction

f.        Increase the efficiency or improve the process according to your regular review report.

2.       Start Automating the process of Customer touch points

a.       Front line Sales staff are always the link between the organisation and the customers. If you could start your monitoring and managing from the sales force you will get good quality insight.

3.       Try to start with a  simple self help website which will help your customers to get connected to your customer support department.  This will also help the organisation to eliminate unproductive time spend on general queries of customers.