We all need to invest in different ways of and making sure we are keeping up with their needs. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is able to provide you with the tools to do just that.
Ask yourself these questions:
What has changed for your customers? Find out which customers have requirements that are not being met. How can we change our pricing, products, and promotion to meet the new requirements and utilize available technology? This is a banner year for Microsoft with so many new product launches – , , , and Dynamics CRM 5.0 - designed to make our work easier, enhance our insight, and extend connections. We can use Dynamics CRM to monitor our progress in activities, campaigns, cases, and marketing literature, through advanced finds, views, and reports that work out of the box.
What can we change? What do the customer demands mean for our business? Can we meet those needs ourselves? Do we need to partner with others to provide those services? Can we fulfill the needs internally by adding training and adding to our skill sets? Who are our best customers and what are they spending their money on? Are there products that are suddenly more relevant and what pricing promotions can we develop to move those products to the forefront?
Dynamics CRM can be utilized to monitor relationships we have with partners and vendors, not just customers. We can build training entities to track our skill sets in Dynamics CRM instead of a multitude of spreadsheets. Tracking our products in the Dynamics CRM system and linking to Dynamics GP inventory items can help us to assess which products are getting the most sales and which are leading to more service calls and support cases?
What is working now? When we can see all our customer activities in one place, we can segment our customer base to focus on the most profitable customers and devise pricing terms, product mix, and payment data to serve them. Talk to your customers – schedule appointments, phone calls, lunches and send old fashioned letters. Monitor all these activities in Dynamics CRM.
How can we keep up? Package products in new ways; devise flat fee projects. Redesign projects into small phases with milestones for delivery and payment. Offer loyalty programs and innovative promotions and payment plans. What sales practices work? Examine the past three months of sales processes and compare campaigns using reports.
Realign your organization by looking at sales territories and focused task forces to concentrate on new campaigns. Where should we be spending our marketing dollars? Review your pipeline reports in Dynamics CRM by stage and status. Make sure your inside sales team has access to all customer data and product collateral by organizing and storing it in all in Dynamics CRM. Evaluate non-productive activities and design workflows to take care of mundane tasks like creating recurring activities or email reminders.
How can we manage change? Review sales incentives to promote the behavior that is working like cross-selling or new customer acquisitions. Make sure everyone is and tips and tricks on using the systems so that adoption is not a stumbling block.
Information needs to be accurate and available. Be sure to get feedback on campaigns and promotions that are working using Dynamics CRM reports. Follow up with and loyalty programs that can be tracked in CRM. Invest for the long term in business intelligence using the dashboards and SRS reports available for Dynamics CRM users. Make the system easy to use and people will use it.
Contact us for more ideas on how you can uncover your gold – your loyal customers – using Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
By Mary Lenehan, Customer Education Manager, at your
by Crestwood Associates, an
