subject: A Customer Relationship Management Process Can Increase Sales [print this page] Are you looking for a way to increase sales? Are you looking to find new sales opportunities? Is maintaining good customer relationships a top priority? Are you looking to improve overall sales effectiveness? If you answered yes to any of those, implementing or improving your customer relationship management process may deliver some significant benefits.
Customer relationship management is the process that companies use to manage the way they interact with customers. There are many formal and elaborate software applications that will help a company to improve their processes in this area. But every company, whether they use software or not, has some sort of customer relationship management process. It may be as simple as a phone, a pad of paper, and a pen because it is simply the tools and processes that a company uses to manage customer information and interactions.
Knowledge is Power
Regardless of the area, knowledge is power. This is especially the case in business where you are trying to find opportunity, build relationships, and close business. The more knowledge you have, the more successful you will be. When it comes to sales, the more information you have of your customer or prospect, the more successful you will be.
When you work with a customer or try to get into an account, you should be researching and gathering a lot of information. What are you doing with this information? Where are you putting it? Are you able to easily access this information and leverage it throughout the sales cycle? If not, implementing a more structured customer relationship management process can help.
By having a formal process, you can ensure that you are gathering the right information and the process should allow you to leverage the information to drive sales effectiveness. This could be something a simple as files, Word documents, spreadsheets, etc. Or is could be more complex with automation provided through some sort of software application.
Effective Customer Relationship Management
An effective customer relationship management process is one that efficient, organized, and easy.
Efficient: The process should be efficient so that it does not slow the sales staff down too much. Time is money and you do not want a process that takes to much time away from selling. Although, the benefits of an effective customer relationship management process are so great that it can be justifiable to sacrifice some selling time for managing any steps in the process. For example, it can take time to enter customer notes into an electronic format. But the value of having good customer notes is tremendous as it can help with sales effectiveness and that can make the time spent managing notes justifiable.
Organized: The process should be organized so that the same steps are consistently used. In addition, the information gathered and managed should be organized so that it is easily accessed throughout the sales cycle.
Easy: The customer relationship management process must be easy on the sales staff. If it is complex, the adoption of the process can be compromised. The more consistently and effectively the sales staff utilizes the process, the better the overall sales effectiveness will be.
