Today we do business within a global economy that buys, sells and communicates in numerous different ways. Competition is rife and the ease with which new businesses can now enter the market means that it's getting forever tougher to stand out from the crowd. Happy customers share their experiences with the world, but so do the unhappy ones, and the success of companies and careers can be heavily impacted via the mediums of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

by Naama Aharoni

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is all about tracking and analysing the interactions that you have with your customers and prospects. CRM software is the platform that holds all of that information, ideally in a simplified and secure environment, and enables you to review and improve your customer engagement.


So what’s in it for you?
A CRM platform is one of the most valuable systems that any small business could and should implement. Many are of the opinion that the selection of the right CRM system is equally as important as that of the people you employ, and it will definitely have a more significant long-term influence than any single employee.

Here are a few important facts:

  • According to a new LinkedIn survey called State of Sales 2016, an overwhelming 82% of the top-performing salespeople cited sales software, like CRM or social selling tools, as ‘critical’ to their ability to close deals
  • Twenty-six percent of email-tracking platform users spend 3 to 5 hours a week using these tools
  • A third of CRM users spend 3 to 5 hours a week using CRM tools, and 24% spend more than 10 hours a week using CRM tools
  • Recent studies show that companies with a fully-utilised CRM system can increase sales by 29%

So, how do you choose a CRM solution and get everyone in the company to use it and provide real time data?

 

  1. Simplicity is the key - the biggest mistake that most companies make is to try to implement a system that’s too complicated for employees to use
  2. Make sure it is fully integrated to other company systems
  3. Choose a CRM solution which is easy to use and requires little to no training to get to grips with, so your employees can get their jobs done easily
  4. If the activity isn’t in the CRM system, it never happened. Every company needs to treat their CRM as the holy grail of the company and update it regularly – either everybody uses it or nobody will!


Achieving the right combination
Many companies use Outlook for their CRM communications, scheduling, and contact management, and an ERP system to track their purchasing, sales, inventory and so on. Unfortunately, there is currently no off-the-shelf tool that enables you to do your ERP work within Outlook.

However, it is possible to combine the two, and so save your employees the additional time it takes to track and update data shared between Outlook and your CRM system. Various global ERP systems have add-on solutions which enable users to see their information from within Outlook, and one of these, which is available to users of SAP Business One, is called CRM for Outlook.

CRM for Outlook is an essential tool for any daily work routine, and can boost your productivity by automatically syncing the two systems.

Here are a few functionalities you should look for in an integration of Outlook to your CRM system:

Contact synchronization: enable users to synchronize contacts to Outlook and/or from Outlook to the ERP system
Calendar synchronization: enable users to synchronize their ERP calendar to Outlook and/or their Outlook calendar to the ERP
Enable the viewing of ERP record details within Outlook: some Outlook integration plugins allow users to preview data from a ERP contact record when an email from or to a matching ERP record is selected (e.g. CRM for Outlook)
Enable users to Create a Service / Support call from an email: if someone emails with a customer service or customer support issue, a CRM Case can be easily created from the email
Create Sales Opportunities from within Outlook which will in turn be synchronized to your ERP system
Many more things besides…

To conclude...
Ultimately every business needs a CRM system to make them more productive, to increase revenue generated per employee and to create repeatable, automated and successful processes that can quite literally make a business run like clockwork.

Every business is constantly on the lookout for an innovative, competitive advantage which will push you ahead of your competition in a multi-channel customer environment. As a business owner, you need to capture the interest of customers that are increasingly sophisticated and choose to ignore the old-fashioned methods used to market and sell to them. You need to know your customers for your business to succeed, and you need a CRM system for your business to survive.