Heard of companies who launch a CRM … because they’re supposed to have a CRM. That ever been you?
The CRM is sales, marketing, and service automation. Done right, it becomes fruition of your business objectives, an extension of your corporate strategy. It’s becoming a tactical execution of your plan.
So, if you’re just starting out, and you don’t have a set of strategic objectives for the platform that can be distilled to a set of bullet points on one slide, grab the reins, reserve a conference room and get there.
Here’s a set of examples drawn from for building materials clients we’ve worked with. Which sounds like your business?
General
- We need to establish a shared database of our customers and target prospects – distributors, dealers, contractors, home builders, and architects – appropriately segmented.
- We need a laser focus on relationship management with our channel, with transparent visibility to the calls our sales team is making on them.
- Our sales team needs to be able to be more responsive to sales trends with individual customers and be able to provide immediate answers on the status of orders and shipments when asked.
- We need to provide our customers with login web access to their shipment status, sales history, rebate accruals, and claims status.
Commercial - With our new products providing entry to the commercial market, we need to rapidly gain specifications market share.
- Defending our specifications market leadership is paramount; we need to hold our specs and ensure than our contractors are made aware of every project lead as soon as it emerges.
- We need to ensure our educational spending is optimized, targeting lunch and learns to the most appropriate engineers.
- We want to push high-value content marketing out to the specifying community through digital channels, then track their engagement.
Residential - We need to monetize the impact of our homeowner advertising campaign by capturing leads and directing them promptly to the most appropriate contractors.
- Mobile app access to loyalty program status, with the ability to log invoices on their phones and use points to
- Homeowner warranty registration needs to be pushed online, databases, and tied to the appropriate applicator so we can track our exposure.
