Tim Steeves dot com

I created a Photo section on my blog to post some of the pictures I’ve taken in my spare amateur photography hours. I uploaded the first set of photos and will continue to upload new ones that I shoot and will also try to dig up some from the digital archives closet. Check out the link in the navigation bar at the top of the site. Hope you enjoy!

I like revenue.  You like Revenue.  Who doesn’t like revenue?

How do you improve revenue?  Increase sales…duh.  CRMs can increase sales so get one for the sales department, right?  Wrong.

The problem here is that sales people are generally not a process oriented group of people.  You see them out for dinner, on the phone talking with someone that might as well be a buddy they are going out for beers with later – they golf, email, and often don’t look like they are working very hard.  HOWEVER they are working hard.  Their job is to build relationships with the clients.  Doing this requires flexibility in their work schedule, which not only requires their appointments and lunch breaks to be flexible, but it requires that the tools they use to be quick side-notes in their day.  Phone and email follow you everywhere and so should the CRM; however the ability to push and pull information from the CRM needs to be as flexible as their schedule.  This tends to make sales people a much harder team to get to adopt a CRM.

The second group of people that are thought of when it comes to implementing a CRM is the marketing department.  Good marketing equals increased revenue.  Marketing is more of a process oriented job and tends to have routines and schedules that are much more orderly than sales.  While they still need to be flexible in their ability to put out a value proposition, they’re timelines and policies are more easily defined.  The marketing department tends to adapt to a CRM more easily than the sales department because often times a single workflow can accommodate many marketing campaigns and creating campaigns can become streamlined through the use of a CRM.  However, the marketing department already has routines and policies in place that allows them to do their job effectively and bringing in new tools will always have a bit of a learning curve.

Where a CRM is adopted the easiest and most effectively is with the service personnel.  They often have strict structures as to how to handle operations and management continually looks at how to improve policies to improve efficiencies so adoption rates tend to be highest with service personnel over the other departments.  Once a service team has converted to the new system there is an immediate improvement to customer service and operational efficiency.  The beauty of having the service team on-board quickly is that all the information that they enter into the system becomes available to the other departments – sales people can quickly and easily lookup customer inquiries and marketing can start to run reports on topics and trends.

By getting the service personell involved early on with the CRM implementation, the adoption rate for the sales and marketing departments is much higher.

In Part 3, I talked about how it is important to ensure that Customer Relationship Managment (CRM) software deployment is not driven from the top down; however the flip side to that is not having enough Senior Management contribution.  It may seem obvious to say “It’s important that Senior Management be involved,” but all too often there is not enough feedback in the deployment process from Senior Management and may not have a clear understanding of the benefits and abilities.  It’s not only important that everyone puts in input into what is essential for their departments, but that they understand how the CRM will fit with logistics and automation. The CRM provider < plug: iTeam > can help assist in this decision making process, but Senior Management is what deals with logistical issues in your business from day-to-day.  Their input is valuable to help plan deployment stages: what is manditory for launch, and what can be delayed for later implementation.

CRMs can facilitate increased revenue, improved operational efficiences, and help provide outstanding customer service, but without input from senior management and their “signing up” to help meet numbers on ROI, deployment will not be as successful.  At the end of the day, senior managers will be responsible for the successful deployment of your company’s CRM initiative.  After all, once the CRM provider has implemented the system to meet your business’ requirements, it’s senior managements responsibility to make sure that your metrics are met and to provide feedback on where things can be improved for future enahancements and additions to your CRM system.

Not only is it important to ensure that your CRM is not deployed from the top-down, it’s equally important to ensure that Senior Managment are involved from start to finish!

Firefox 3.5 has had over a million 2 million downloads (and counting) since it was released this morning.  Click on the image below to see the downloads from across the world in realtime.

For those of you who don’t know, iTeam consists of a highly qualified design and development team made up of graphic designers, programmers, and systems and business analysts. This team combines the skill and creativity required to promote your business online with website design and Search Engine Optimisation, increase online sales through website analytics, and improve productivity and efficiency through custom database software, and office network maintenance.

Check out the new site!

www.iTeamTech.ca

I appreciate any feedback you have.  Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think!