Contact Relationship Management
Contact Relationship Management (Customer, Supplier or Partner)
Contact relationship management strategies are as important to business today as they have ever been. We've designed our CRM solutions to help you stay ahead of the curve and successfully meet the challenges that the market brings helping you manage your entire customer lifecycle, from prospect to cash to care effectively, improve operational efficiency and accelerate growth both internally and externally.
ITOKA CRM provides a 360 degree view of the entire customer, supplier or partner relationship regardless of position in the customer lifecycle. ITOKA CRM solutions broaden the scope of customer information to everyone within the organization and to stakeholders beyond, through contextual delivery of essential customer data to information workers, wherever it's needed.
- Providing Solutions to Meet Your Business Goals
- Reach new customers while retaining existing customer communities.
- Enhance internal efficiencies.
- Drive new product introduction.
- Automate marketing activities.
- Improve execution of customer service.
Why is CRM important?
In the world of business, CRM – Contact Relationship Management could easily be one of the most undervalued operational domains. Companies would spend millions of dollars and countless man-years of efforts developing systems and processes on ERP, finance & accounting, logistics and other different systems. But for Sales and Marketing staffs, we would basically just give them an email mailbox, a deck of name cards, motivate them with some sales and lead generation targets, and leave them to work it out by their own talent.
Art vs. Science
Every business needs sales and marketing to generate leads. Some businesses, by nature, are more sales-intensive, while others could be more marketing-intensive. No company can sustain a healthy business with both of these operations missing.
For a company with a team of sales representatives, there is always one or two “super sales” that seems to be able to achieve whatever target you give them; sell whatever product or service to whoever they met. They are like natural born sellers. And this is exactly why people are amazed by their abilities and would label their selling skill as a practice of art. It is true that the personal skills of a sales representative is truly an art, but does it mean that there is no element of science within the domain of sales operation and management?SFA – Sales Force Automation, which is now usually under the bigger umbrella of CRM, is the class of tools that is designed to boost the performance of a sales team and sales individuals. This is achieved by providing easy and all-rounded access to customer information and sales information, comprehensive communication tools, and best practices. At management level, such tools also provide a ground and source of information for visibility, and even operational or directional in-sights. Therefore, even though individual sales reps’ selling and inter-personal skill will remain to be a practice of art, an overall manageability and performance boost of the entire sales team can be achieved through a systematic, scientific approach.
A good SFA tool should even be capable of capturing high performance seller’s practice and procedure to help formulating the company’s selling practice and strategies so that new comers and slower player can follow to enhance their performance.
Similar logic applies to marketing operation. Marketing people use their own primitive ways to track down communications, to-dos, and calendar events. They use spreadsheets to track campaign time, budget, targets, and results. Companies almost hardly ever give these people any tool to do their job. CRM tools help these people not only by improving efficiency, but more importantly, it also provide readily shared and extensive reach of information to Sales and even Customer Service to allow effective intelligence feedback on conversion, closing, and even churn (attrition).
As a practice of art, intellectual decisions and directions like campaign segmentation, market positioning, and even down detailed lines of advertising pitch or choosing a date for an event, still require personal talents of marketing people. However, with proper use of CRM tools, not only would the operational efficiency of marketing staff be increased, the possibility of making business inferences from results generated by campaign after campaign is also improved. This change is even more profound to the business in the long run, and this is exactly the scientific part of CRM system’s help on marketing.
The funnel of business
This is how business runs every day. We started by trying to let a thousand people know our names, our products, our services, and our offerings. Then we manage to get in touch with a hundred out of the thousand. Then we tell, we sell, we demo, we propose. Finally, ten out of the hundred place order. After the customer experience our products or services, one out of the ten will recommend others. A.k.a. Word of mouth.
This is a complete direct selling model. If you are selling through channels, or being a selling channel, you may focus more on some parts more than the others. If you are doing main/sub-contractors, OEM producers/partners, your focus and responsibility may also vary with your business partnership deals. However, your business could never avoid from all of these selling cycle steps.
The problem is: We spent huge amount of money and effort in ERP, logistic, etc. which are all targeted to cover the operation after the “10” customers finally make their order.
CRM, instead, is all about reaching out to more, generating more leads, converting more leads to opportunities, and closing more deals. In short, CRM focus on making the funnel of business larger.
Time to change our focus
Here is not to say operational systems like finance and accounting, ERP, logistic, etc. are not important. But after spending years of effort and money to focus on such systems, we should start to shift our focus to provide the necessary systems and productivity tools for sales and marketing people to accelerate business growth.