For many sales leader, fueling the next wave of profit growth and revenue is their first priority. To achieve this, they certainly need to know what the customers really want and predict the trend. For example, some customers would like to see / try the product samples, while other modern buyers tend to do basic online research. Sales-operation need to address these issues, some companies even get one-time improvements of 20 % to 30 % in sales productivity.
One of the tools to help with maintaining clients are CRM (Customer Relationship Management). An application used by businesses to keep track of customer contact information, orders, addresses and shipping information. In other words, CRM is here to simplify customer data storage. In Indonesia, the most popular CRM are currently SharePoint, Infor, SAP, and SalesForce. Most of this CRM have a feature such as scheduling, performance tracking, contacts, multiple industry specific / vertical market solutions.
As with every tool, there are ways to improve the usage for your company’s needs. Here’s 3 of the best improvement ideas that we’ve encountered:
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Marketing Automation
Historical sales data are always useful for sales prediction for the coming month. Combine it with data mining and predictive capability of Big Data, you can have a good tool for trend prediction. Email & SMS blast can also be used to target potential customers in certain area using geolocation with targeted audience (gender, age range, etc.).
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Focus on Potential Lead Traffic from Website & Social Media
Most CRM are mainly focused on existing customer than on the acquisition of new ones. CRM system can also be configured so it can also help to search for old & potential lead through website & social media. This is especially true, for companies that has adopted inbound marketing method.
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Go Mobile with Offline Mode & Synchronization
Some CRM application use remote Internet connection to save customer records. When the system has an outage, the company would be unable to retrieve their records. To avoid loss of recorded data, some local backups will be needed. With mobile app, this customization is easier than ever.
From previous experience, we’ve also dealt with utilizing SalesForce.com’s capability with an android app to help Client’s sales team. The application will help in maintaining and further utilize of their SalesForce. We use unique programming logic to enhance application features and usefulness. To overcome the security problems, we also develop a middleware as a bridge to consolidate and distribute the authentication tokens according to the user and timestamp between user and the Salesforce ID.
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As your business grows, CRM alone is not enough to support your business, some automation would be needed to further improve. In summary, CRM is important to boost some business task. It also can help you access some information online such as schedules, performance tracking and contacts. Customizing your CRM can help cut your redundant operational workload which also can reduce your expense and boost your profit growth.