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.

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