Welcome to a first in a series of blogs that I hope to write about my thoughts, feelings and experiences around Sales and Marketing processes centered around Salesforce.com as a core business application. There are many blogs about the technical aspects of Salesforce.com (SFDC) but I want to stay more focused about corporate adoption and the processes therein. Occassionally I might slip in a cool technical addition.
So let’s talk about corporate adoption in general of CRM applications. In my experience with dealing with quite a number of clients I’m amazed at the perception of CRM in an organization. On one hand it is viewed as a necessity in managing any sales force of greater than say 5 sales reps by the management team. But no matter how big the sales organization gets there’s still this perception by many in the organization that CRM is all about managing “my” contacts and “my” accounts and somehow giving “my” management visibility into what I’m doing and maybe even a slight inkling as to what business may close in the coming days/weeks/months.
What continually surprises me is that people – corporations – don’t really realize the power of CRM and it’s application in a corporate environment and in particular how critical that application is to the needs to any business. It is not really a glorified, networked version of ACT or other contact managers. It really contains crucial corporate information. So where are the misperceptions about CRM?
a.) It is “our” customer list – “our” system of record for our customers and everything about them. It is not just about being a simple contact manager. If I want to know who we’re talking to , who we sold to, who reports to who, what touch points we’ve done throughout a customer organization this is our system or record.
b.) It is “our” authoritative source of booking information. I don’t care how you account for revenue in your organization and there are many ways depending on whether or not it’s products, services, recurring contracts, maintenance agreements, etc. But when an order comes in and is accepted, CRM is the source of that data. No financial application or ERP on the back-end holds that data in the way a CRM system does.
c.) It is truly a way to measure the effectiveness of marketing programs. Leads generated if done properly can indicate which marketing programs are working and which aren’t. CRM applications in many cases can also provide automated responses to keep leads fresh and also with some add-in’s can also prioritize (score) which leads are better qualified for immediate follow-up
d.) It is truly the one source of information in a corporate that can pull together all the various performance metrics for key decisions across a wide range of functions – Marketing, Business Development, Sales, Finance, Support and should be looked to as such.
