CRMLogic

Having worked out that a CRM is probably a good thing, and then deciding to move forward, what now?

Firstly there are a plethora of CRM systems out there, do a search for the phrase CRM and bewildering array of CRM options, solutions and companies are returned.  Also for that matter Wikipedia gets the first 2 natural search hits – showing that sheer volume of page hits trumps SEO every time!

The question that really needs answering is not what CRM do you need?  Its:

"What do you want out of your CRM ?"

Some of the questions we need to consider here are:

• Do you want a generic CRM with generic titles?
• Do you want a cloud based solution?
• Do you want a solution you can host yourself?
• Does your CRM need to integrate with other systems?
• Do you want a free CRM?
• Is brand name important?

We need to work out the answers to these questions before we go looking for a solution.  If we go looking for a solution without knowing these basic things, we are likely to get lost in a host of features and benefits.  After all, every CRM  (and CRM reseller for that matter) are going to tell you they are the best, that they will solve all your problems, and even make coffee for you when you are not looking!

Of course we are SugarCRM Gold partners, and I am going to tell you to use SugarCRM.  Next time around I will go into why we think it is the best CRM out there.  (For the record though, it doesn’t make coffee)

Tags: SugarCRM | CRM

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So why would I want a CRM system?  What value does this offer us? 

These are questions we often hear when from customers we are beginning our relationship with them.  These are quite frankly great questions.  Before implementing any system you should be asking this.  What am I getting?  Why am I doing this?  If these questions are not asked, then ultimately they are probably never going to be answered.

So what is the value in a CRM system?   In fairness a CRM system brings different things to different people. If we use a Sales organisation as our example customer, then we could answer something like this:

 For the Sales staff it provides a central source of information for tracking and managing customers, opportunities and leads.  For Sales Managers it helps them track Sales, manage pipelines and see how effective their Reps are.  For Marketing it provides a way of tracking campaigns, generating and tracking leads. As we can then see in our example company, the CRM system brings a lot of measureable values.

Of course this is only an example of 1 type of company.  Next week we will start to look further afield, to see where we can really go.

Tags: CRM | Example

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Here at CRMLogic we often get asked a number of questions about CRM’s.  Why would I want a CRM? What value is it to me?  How do I get my staff to use it? 

Over the next couple of weeks we will look at each of these questions in more depth, exploring solutions not CRM features. 

To start the conversation though, the most common phrase we use when describing a CRM is that at its heart, a CRM system is “information about information”.  This can mean information about the opportunities you have for your various customers.  Equally it can mean this is the jobs your technicians are doing for their clients, or even further afield it can mean the assignments students have handed for the subjects they are enrolled in.  In each case we are talking about information, and this information is related to other information. Thus we get information about information.

Having established this relationship, our various pieces of information, we then need a way of managing it.  This is where a CRM system comes into play.  We unashamedly use Sugar CRM. (Being a gold partner and all!).

Next week we will continue to explore these concepts.

Michael

Tags: Information | SugarCRM | CRM

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