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Wednesday, 22 February 2012 12:21 |
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So you want to move to a new CRM solution. This might be your first time using CRM with this organisation, or you could be migrating from one CRM solution to another. Perhaps you feel your existing solution has become too expensive; there are countless reasons that might prompt a move.
On top of getting the new system up and running and educating your Users, one of the main challenges is getting your data imported.
There are a number of things which can make this task either quick and simple, or long and painful. Having been in involved in the data migration process for numerous systems, here are a few pointers which might help.
- Have you mapped all the fields you need in the information you are exporting? One field that is often not present in data we see is the “assigned to” field. It is easy to add this field to a csv file by copying and pasting the relevant users prior to import, and this means that ownership is assigned to your data right from the start.
- Have you looked at the format in which the data is presented in the system you will be using? Look at the fields that contain details such as name and address – are they separated into first and last name? Is the street address all contained in one field? And is the data in the correct field? Looking at data on a csv file it is easy to see where email addresses have erroneously slipped into the phone number field.
- Have you looked at the related entities and how the data needs to interact within your new system? If you are importing companies and contacts, do you have the right company name on the contact record and are those names consistent? If you have a “Jones Limited” in one spreadsheet and a “Jones Ltd” in the next, this will create two unrelated records, which brings you quickly into those murky waters known as duplication.
- If you are importing other data such as Activities, do you have a means of identifying the related contacts and companies in the import data?
- Remember, all of your information is easy to merge, delete, re-arrange and tidy up at this early stage, when your data is contained in a spreadsheet format such as csv.
Of course in a CRM solution such as OpenCRM you can filter your data and should you need to bulk update records, this is easily done. But the earlier you start to tidy up your records and data, the easier it will be to manage when on your CRM solution, not to mention starting with a clean slate like this will help encourage a solid practise for future data management.
For more advice and tips have a look here: http://opencrm.co.uk/crm-knowledgebase/kb1401086/Things-to-consider-when-importing-data-into-OpenCRM--Troubleshooting-imports-that-are-not-working.html
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Friday, 17 February 2012 11:37 |
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The internationally-based company Green Investment Services is a carbon consultancy that work with their customers to help their decision-making in the Carbon Emissions Trading Market, to find and recommend the best green investments worldwide. This requires a sophisticated and deep CRM solution and we are pleased to say that GIS have selected to work with OpenCRM to fulfil this need.
http://www.greeninvestmentservices.com |
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Friday, 17 February 2012 11:35 |
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We are delighted to announce that North Yorkshire based office fit-out and refurbishment experts Brava have opted to use OpenCRM for their CRM requirements. Established in 1980 Brava has developed into a client led resource for the office fit-out and refurbishment market place with an enviable reputation for service.
http://bravals.com |
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Wednesday, 15 February 2012 17:17 |
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Different businesses and organisations all have one thing in common regardless of size or level of success – they are all facing the prospect of managing ever increasing volumes of data. This can be anything including growing numbers of historic records, email and other addresses, sales documents, marketing data, quotes and all kinds of information that you gather about your leads and customers. The quantity of data is increasing, and this needs to be processed with the same or possibly fewer resources that have traditionally been used.
A great step forward in terms of data management is the ability to store it in a centralised database. This enables the post-sales team to access data that was collected and managed before and during the sale by marketing and sales teams. The logical way to store this is in a cloud-based solution, which can be accessed real-time at any time and any place. Managing all your customer data in one location offers the marketing team the chance to push new product and company information, special offers and customer advice, based on the sales and account history of each client.
The more this data grows, the more challenging it becomes to manage. This challenge can be met by using a standardised practise, such one CRM solution to house this data and manage the relations between the different fields of knowledge. As your data grows, you are able to keep the historic data on your virtual workplace, without having to file it away into boxes of paperwork or discs down in the basement. Maintaining your data on your CRM solution also means you do not have to worry about any additional safety or security implications should you be storing data in a secondary location.
Whereas traditional forms of data grew and became more complicated to manage, filtering and reporting tools within CRM mean more information brings additional value as you are able to build up more complete and accurate images of your customers and potential clients.
What’s more, instead of piling more and more files on top of each other, cloud-based CRM stores these records in a manner that is easy to access and manage. If knowledge is power, being able to store all of this intelligence at your fingertips in a CRM solution is surely the most effective means of harnessing and benefitting from what could be your greatest asset – your customer data.
Sales Pitch: OpenCRM offers you a huge storage facility, allowing you to keep all your important data together, in one CRM solution. This provides many benefits, amongst others the ease of access of data in the cloud and the peace of mind of a secure storage solution for your day-to-day and historic business records. |
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Wednesday, 08 February 2012 09:31 |
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I recently followed a number of news reports that revealed how a major player in the automobile industry launched a twitter campaign to coincide with the Superbowl; unfortunately for them the campaign was a thinly disguised form of spam and was quickly exposed as such (OK, as you probably know the company was Toyota, for further reading see: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/02/04/toyota-takes-to-spamming-twitter-for-camry-super-bowl-promotion/)
This clearly shows that even the biggest companies and multinationals around are in the same starting blocks as everyone else when it comes to social media. Of course social media is here to stay and every serious contender needs to feature it in the marketing mix, but jumping on every platform available simply “because it is there” is not going to work. Blatant sales marketing on a direct marketing platform will backfire as it breaks down the levels of trust upon which that very platform is built. Being spammed with an unsolicited sales message on a person’s private space is a sure way of getting to “unlike” or “unfollow” the product or company in question!
Implementing tools available in your CRM solution is a good way to get your social media campaigning in tune with your target audience. You can filter your customers and potential customers using the data you have collected, and are able to send intelligent direct messages that are in tune with the intended audience.
The campaigns module in your CRM solution is a great place to build lists of addresses related to a specific marketing offensive. This can be converted into the type of campaign required – whether by phone, email, a mailout or via a social network – your target group data is contained in one location with plenty of tracking tools to enable you to get the most from your marketing efforts.
Sales Pitch: Click on the hyperlinks to see how OpenCRM can help you with your Campaign Tracking and your Event Management . |
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Wednesday, 01 February 2012 16:44 |
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When you use something on a daily basis, it quickly becomes a part of your routine. This might be the route you choose to drive to work, how you make a cup of coffee in the morning, or some of the ways you approach your work, or in our case, your CRM solution. Sometimes it takes a bit of observation and input from someone else to suggest improvements to your routine. Of course your first reaction will probably be to defend your way of doing things, after all this is how you have always done things – no-one likes change for the sake of it! Once your pride has been swallowed however, you’ll see how filtering the water does makes your coffee taste so much better, or how that short scenic route to the office really does make the day start on a more pleasant note. I was happy enough with the way I searched for information in OpenCRM, clicking back and forth between modules in one window, when a colleague smiled and pointed at the magnifying glass beside the contact name. Clicking here opened the record in a new window, meaning I no longer had to click back and forth. Of course the magnifying glass had not appeared out of nowhere, it had been there all along. But having slipped into a routine I limited myself to see the tools I used every day and blended the rest out.
Every now and again some collaboration, advice and shared information will provide either new food for thought, or possibly a great new angle on how to approach certain tasks.
Sales Pitch: For advice on using OpenCRM whether a general overview or for a specific part of a particular module, our Knowledgebase is a great starting point. If the topic you are searching on is not covered in there, please contact us and we will do our best to remedy this. |
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Wednesday, 25 January 2012 16:56 |
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We are pleased to take former Salesforce user Rubicon Workflow Solutions on board with OpenCRM. Rubicon is a company dedicated to supporting creative professionals working on a digital platform. This is an exciting CRM project which we are glad to be involved with.
http://www.rubicon-solutions.co.uk |
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Wednesday, 25 January 2012 16:55 |
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Nationwide is the UK’s largest vehicle body repairer, and we are proud to announce their decision to work with us at OpenCRM for their hosted CRM requirements. Of course a business such as Nationwide is as much about caring for the customer as anything else and so it makes sense to have a solid CRM solution in place.
http://www.ncrc.co.uk |
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Wednesday, 25 January 2012 12:45 |
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A real benefit a CRM solution can bring to your organisation is one of information consistency.
Moving away from disparate siloed solutions and folders containing spreadsheets and data lists dotted all over on different machines means this data remains constant, with the added advantage of being able to track any alterations that are made.
Data conformity in CRM stems from the fact that everyone in your organisation is working on the same page. Instead of individuals or departments having their own copies of customer records, everyone remotely accesses and uses the same record. This means that as soon as one of your company clients changes their phone number for example, this alteration is apparent across the board instead of on the one person’s machine.
This centralised database of records promotes data consistency and reduces the margin of error.
A further benefit of using hosted CRM for your data storage concerns record of ownership. This means when viewing data, you can also see to whom the information is assigned, and who has been responsible for any amendments to the record. A principle beneficiary of this is the Helpdesk team. Being able to see the “assigned to” operator provides a Helpdesk ticket with an anchor point, should anyone else take a call from the same customer they are able to refer you back to the original technician or to view any notes made by that person.
This potentially cuts out any unnecessary and potentially unprofessional follow-up calls for a case that has already been dealt with.
The transfer of ownership is also a simple and error-free process. Reassigning a record keeps information intact, whilst notifying the new owner of the record in question. So if a particular issue needs to be transferred to another operator in your system there will be no loss of information, with the audit function offering the necessary mechanism for internal control.
In other formats, information passed around the office and beyond will gradually alter in shape and message as it goes from one desk to the next. However, information that is shared within a cloud-based CRM solution either remains unchanged or has all alterations accounted for. Your data is visible across the board and is accessible from anywhere, in the office, in a meeting or out in the field.
Sales Pitch: For more information on how OpenCRM can help with your data and contact management please click on this link
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Wednesday, 18 January 2012 16:19 |
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Something we believe in here at OpenCRM is transparency. We are confident that our product will work for you and we have great long-term relationships with our customers. A part of this confidence in our product is that we offer a monthly subscription rate. This gives our customers the chance to split payments for their hosted CRM solution over the course of the year making it an affordable and easily managed overhead. A recent study showed that two-thirds of Salesforce customers are billed annually*, making this a harder pill to swallow in today’s market place where the landscape changes more frequently than ever before.
As well as making the financing of OpenCRM more manageable, this helps keep the relationship with our customers active, as we interact on a far more frequent basis than simply an annual subscription renewal. We work in close partnership with our clients, meaning that when you sign up with OpenCRM you are more than “just a number”, having a dedicated team working for and with you. We like getting to know our customers and us knowing their CRM needs puts us all on the same page and sets the foundations for a happy and fruitful working relationship.
*source: Zdnet: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/salesforce-competition-distractions-to-hamper-growth/65230
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Thursday, 12 January 2012 10:09 |
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Focussing on medical education services, we are pleased to announce that Pharma Mix have adopted OpenCRM as for their hosted CRM needs after having vetted a number of different solutions. Pharma Mix is a technology and services company specializing in knowledge and effectiveness solutions for the healthcare industry.
www.pharma-mix.com |
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Thursday, 12 January 2012 09:53 |
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My Business FD are a UK based company that provide Finance Directors to help secure funding for businesses of all sizes. The team works with their clients to help build a business plan, provide a financial forecast and assist in funding applications. We are happy to announce that for their CRM requirements, My Business FD are now using OpenCRM, and we look forward to a bright sunny future together. http://www.mybusinessfd.com/
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Wednesday, 11 January 2012 15:21 |
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OpenCRM is being used by a huge variety of companies, each of which has their own individual needs and demands of the system. One way in which we are able to service these differences is by enabling the creation of custom fields. This allows you to capture all kinds of unique data within your CRM solution.
Furthermore there are many distinct types of user-defined fields you can create. As well as text fields, some of the more common ones we use all the time on clients’ systems include creating picklists, checkboxes, URL, telephone and user selector fields. As well as broadening the functionality, this makes creating new records quicker and reduces the margins of error – selecting a value from a picklist means they will always be consistent rather than having to type the entry every time.
To give you an example you could create the following field on a company record entitled “Catchment Area”. This might be a picklist populated with the values South-East, South-West, North-East, North-West, Midlands and London.
Once you have created the ability to capture this unique information, the next logical step is to make this data quickly and easily available for you. Having a way of displaying all the companies in a particular catchment area means you are able to use this list, perhaps to send out a targeted message relevant to this group of companies, or you can work your way through the list in a systematic and logical way. This is easily done in OpenCRM by creating a view which displays companies based on the selected filter.
This is just one example of how creating custom fields gives you a great way of distilling your data – by using combinations of fields, custom fields and views, you can clarify the data in as specific or general as your needs demand.
For further information on how you can create custom fields in OpenCRM please refer to this FAQ. |
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Wednesday, 04 January 2012 11:00 |
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Year in year out, this is the period in the calendar when people throw themselves head first into those New Year’s resolutions. They come in many shapes and forms but often fall into common categories – healthy diet, active living, a more positive approach to family and working life. More often than not it will be these same resolutions that were made the year before, and they are the resolutions that tend to fall by the wayside come this time next month.
If you need that kick in the rear every now and then to remind you to take advantage of your expensive gym membership, or your determination to not forget family birthdays, then OpenCRM may be one way of helping you out. Just as you can set yourself reminders that let you know when your meetings and activities are due you can also set up those digital memos to appear and jog (sorry bad joke) your memory as to just how much the gym subscription cost you, or that your brother-in-law’s birthday is just round the corner.
Of course, whether you pay attention to these notifications is entirely up to you – your hosted CRM solution can remind and TELL you to get down to the gym – sadly it won’t do the workout for you! (not in version 3 anyway :-)
Why not let OpenCRM help you with management of your time, your appointments and your other calendar entries? Furthermore entries that you have put into your Google calendar can be quickly and easily synchronised into OpenCRM with the tools we have available making them easily available on the road (or rowing machine) on your mobile devices. |
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Friday, 23 December 2011 10:42 |
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As the working year draws to a close it is time to reflect on what has happened here at OpenCRM over the past twelve months. If we can determine this in terms of work, rest and play – it’s been a lot of work, a lot of play, and as for rest, well maybe next year!
We have taken on a significant number of new clients, and at this point we would like to say thanks to each and every one. Every new client brings their unique needs and ideas to the table, and these ideas often provide the impetus to develop new features and push ourselves to make OpenCRM work for them. In doing so we have built up a huge portfolio of features and enhancements over the twelve months, as we saw at a show and tell session we held mid-December. We printed out a huge list of some fantastic new features that have rolled out over the past twelve months, and they included some that we are very proud of. These include our tools for google sync, the ability to edit PDF templates, a massive increase in storage space we offer, the assigning of records on a round-robin basis, management of bounced emails, and so much more.
Our developers have worked at times literally day and night on these new features, powered by a combination of coffee, energy drinks, sausage rolls, curries and biscuits. This would have been even more varied had it not been for the pizza delivery service that took two hours attempting to find our offices before giving up – times can be tough up in Silicon Dale! As well as the developers, our QA, sales, marketing, accounts and support teams have added their questions, feedback and ideas to the mix and so we look back on 2011 as a hardworking, fun year. We have grown and added new faces to the business and look forward to carrying this attitude and ambition into 2012, so we look forward to seeing you all (and more) there! Here’s wishing a Happy Christmas from all at OpenCRM. |
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Friday, 23 December 2011 00:00 |
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If time is money, then it stands to reason that you should be able to track your use of time - just as you need to view your bank statement to keep tabs on your finances. A CRM solution offers a number of services in time tracking and time management.
As well as the Calendar module which gives you an overview of your time management, you can view your time spent on all manner of projects and activities. Just as you plan a budget for an event, you can also plan a time schedule, and at the end of the event you can review this data to see if your time management is accurate. This brings us back into your finance management, as it lets you see if you have undersold your time for example.
A recent piece of development here at OpenCRM is the addition of an Active Period on the Opportunities module. This is a field which shows you how long an Opportunity has been opened. This function allows you to create views and reports for yourself and your organisation to show a set of Opportunities that have been open beyond a specific period of time, for example 14 days. This is a quick way of reviewing all Opportunities that are due for a follow-up, or those which might need a final review.
As with other functions such as setting reminders, or follow-up activities, this is another example of how OpenCRM can help you organise your time management and ensure that opportunities, tasks and calls are not missed. Good use of a hosted CRM solution is the perfect way of making the time you have in the bank work for you and your business. |
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Wednesday, 14 December 2011 16:59 |
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After having spent some time evaluating various CRM solutions including Salesforce, business event organisers and networking group The Mussel Club have chosen to use OpenCRM for their hosted CRM needs.
The Mussel Club is an informal networking event that meets once a month to facilitate local business opportunities without the need to pay annual fees, as well as sharing business opinion, a list of members and a full schedule of networking events.
www.themusselclub.com |
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Wednesday, 14 December 2011 10:09 |
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A subject that is always close to hand is that of security and the cloud. This is a broad issue that cannot be easily answered in a media-friendly snapshot. Ask yourself how safe is your office? You may have brand new locks on the doors, but haven’t got round to securing the windows. And those locks seem a lot less safe when you think about the spare key you leave at the often unattended reception desk. If you take a look around, you might see old water pipes, overloaded power points and wiring that could do with an overhaul. The more you think about security, the more complex an issue it becomes.
A cloud-based CRM solution too comes with its own set of questions that address security. You need to think about how to access the system, how to set permission levels and how to prevent the destruction or theft of data. Setting up your system requires careful consideration to achieve the right balance of security without compromising on user-friendliness.
We have been carrying out plenty of checks to make sure the OpenCRM office is as secure and safe as can be. Here are a few security measures we have or are currently putting into place:
Log-In Details are not saved. This is to prevent a “key under the mat” scenario. When you log out, your details are not saved, so anyone attempting to access your log-in will have to know your full username and password, these won’t be automatically filled in when someone start to type.
Profiles and Roles. You can decide on a number of levels which information and which records are accessible to which group of users. An example of this is to set fields on a record such as User Name that can only be edited by users that have access to that role. This is a measure that can be used to safeguard certain information against tampering.
User Restrictions. As well as setting limitations of access at profile and role level, you can also restrict accessibility on a user level. These measures allow you to control viewing and editing of information just how you and your organisation need to.
Audit Trailing. If you are under the impression that there is suspicious activity happening in your CRM solution, using the audit functions can show you details of when a record has been edited, what has been edited and who was responsible.
IP address restrictions and permissions. You can control which accounts can be accessed from which IP addresses. This protects that user’s account from being accessed from addresses other than those specified, if this setting is enabled.
Password Policy settings. Within OpenCRM there are a number of rules at your disposition to set a password policy for your organisation. These include enforcing minimum password length, use of mixed letters, numbers, symbols, upper and lower case and not being able to use dictionary words.
Of course the more complex a password becomes it also gets harder to remember. With this in mind, we have made it easier for your admin users to unlock accounts if they have been locked by accident.
For more information about you and your CRM security do not hesitate to give us a call or drop us a line. |
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Wednesday, 07 December 2011 16:39 |
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A lot of our customers are keen users of the Leads module in their CRM solution. Leads are where you store details of possible business opportunities. CRM offers you great tools to capitalise on these and ensure that the lead follow-up process is managed in an effective way.
There are many different ways in which leads can be generated – whether at a conference, through a form on your website, email enquiries, word of mouth connections, the list goes on. Inputting these names and details into your CRM solution is the first step towards making lead management easy. The lead record will typically hold all the data that you have captured such as name, email address, industry, interests and the source of that lead.
This source can provide an indicator as to how someone prefers to be contacted and gives you the opportunity to avoid making an unwanted cold call, or sending an email that won’t get read, this can be managed simply by using the preferred contact method on the lead record.
Your CRM solution adds a date stamp to the lead record, which is a good tool for your follow-up process. It means you can view lists of records as they have come in, enabling a fast follow-up action, or at least ensuring that leads are reacted to within a certain response time.
Your response can also be determined by the means and data you have captured. A submitted response to an web form or email questionnaire provides information that allows you can make very targeted offers, whereas more tentative leads such as addresses collected at a conference or trade show mean you might want to start the lead management process with some more general information.
Again with the date stamps and documentation of follow-up activity giving you information on the different stages of the lead management process (did the lead respond to your enquiry? Have you since contacted the lead, etc.), you can use this information in a marketing campaign to enhance the possibility of turning the lead into a customer.
Maybe you find you are losing potential business due to not capturing lead data correctly, or not using this information effectively. Or perhaps you are losing track of where each lead is in the nurturing process, then it might be time you looked into how using a hosted CRM solution can be a massive help to your business lead management. |
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Friday, 02 December 2011 17:12 |
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Leading sponsorship and communications agency Generate have chosen to work with OpenCRM for their ondemand CRM needs. As you might expect an agency that works with sporting and non-sporting events and is passionate about sponsorship and the results they deliver needs a solid CRM solution that offers powerful Campaign Management tools and we are happy to welcome them to our team.
http://www.generatesponsorship.com
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Friday, 02 December 2011 16:50 |
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Marketing Manchester is the agency charged with promoting the City on a national and international stage. The have chosen to use OpenCRM as their cloud CRM solution for their membership and contact management purposes. Our common goals are to provide development and growth in both the common project and our respective fields and we are excited to have them on board. As well as providing information about what they do the website also provides an online guide to the city.
http://www.marketingmanchester.com |
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Thursday, 01 December 2011 16:49 |
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One of the many things a cloud-based CRM solution can do for you is assist with your document management. As well as the important task of providing virtual space for you to store that documentation, you can associate those documents in all the right places.
This offers you a great way of reducing the need to keep duplicate or even multiple copies of a document. For example a quote can be sent out and linked to companies, contacts or leads, without having to create those documents individually. With a link to all those documents getting set up and kept on all the relevant records, you can soon build up a rich network of data in your CRM solution. Instead of being filed away in one cabinet with one copy in each company folder, the documents are filed alongside each of the records giving you speedy access to them and a clear overview of your customer records and histories.
Another advantage is that your entire team have access to a centralised documents library and this means avoiding the danger of people creating their own documents and perhaps not capturing the image or tone of the company that you wish to see portrayed. More importantly it reduces the potential for error or misunderstanding by enabling everyone to send out the standard approved documents.
Keeping your data in a cloud-based CRM solution is a real world solution to the question of file and document storage and management. It provides the virtual storage space necessary, as well as giving the tools you need to find and associate documents to other entities in your system.
Sales Pitch: At OpenCRM we are only too aware of how quickly data can build up. If you thought data storage implied a hefty bill then you might be pleasantly surprised when you look at our plans and pricing in relation to storage costs: http://opencrm.co.uk/storage-costs.html
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Tuesday, 29 November 2011 16:51 |
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MyResourcer is a unique job lead generation system that has been developed for the global recruitment industry. We are pleased to announce MyResourcer have opted to use OpenCRM, following experience of Salesforce, with a focus on Lead and Contact Management. http://www.myresourcer.com
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Tuesday, 29 November 2011 16:45 |
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Based in The City, we are pleased to welcome Future GS on board as a customer at OpenCRM. Future GS are a preferred HP partner, specializing in 3Par storage solutions. http://fgsl.co.uk
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Tuesday, 29 November 2011 16:21 |
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Service Innovators Inntabiz have recently elected to use OpenCRM as their hosted CRM solution of choice. Inntabiz help clients work out how they can apply service innovation to their business to create sustainable competive advantage. http://inntabiz.com
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Wednesday, 23 November 2011 16:55 |
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The way customer interactions take place is in a constant state of change. A customer may now want to talk to you face to face, or on the phone, via live chat, email, on the comments section of your site, on your twitter page or on any of your social media platforms. As well as the means of communication the tools being used are also expanding - do you want to use your smartphone, tablet, pc, softphone or even the telephone...
Despite the ever growing methods of communication available one fact remains where it always was – customers want a quick reply to their enquiries with the minimum of fuss.
A CRM solution can help both customer and support agents take steps to reduce the resolution time. Whether taking a support call, dealing with a helpdesk ticket or communicating via livechat, your CRM solution has the ability to house a rich library of information on your client. As well as basic details the historical data archived on the customer record can include details such purchase and incident history. You can quickly identify issues which have arisen in the past – either generally with a product or other areas specific to that customer’s account, and doing so means you can have a resolution strategy close to hand. You can also specify the customer’s preferred platform of communication – you’ll know which customer prefers a phone call and which would rather be reached via email.
Regardless of time of day, tools used or nature of the enquiry, a CRM solution gives you the ability to deal with customer enquiries quickly and easily keeping your track record on target and ensuring customer satisfaction levels remain as high as can be.
Sales Pitch: OpenCRM’s ondemand solution gives you a 360 degree overview of the customer meaning your helpdesk is fully connected across all departments giving you including full historical information and helping you to build up a complete picture of interactions in a single and comprehensive view. |
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Thursday, 17 November 2011 15:55 |
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A personalised message works far better than a generic letter or email addressed. It implies to your current or potential customer that your company looks out for and cares for people instead of just dealing with numbers. Your hosted CRM solution is the perfect place to take your address book and create some targeted marketing with a combination of addresses, emailing capabilities and some clever email templates.
Sending that personalised message targeting the interests of a specific group is likely to result in a greater percentage of qualified leads and generated revenue than a blanket mailshot. An untargeted mailout that hits everyone on your radar means there is a high likelihood of people reaching for the unsubscribe button and this in turn means you will miss out on sending them information that is more likely to interest them at some point in the future. Bad idea! An email template is a powerful tool. Using merge variables you can populate the message with information pulled from your CRM contact records – name and address and other data you have captured. The template can also feature user-specific details such a signatures, so different users can use the same template without needing to customise details themselves. Responses to your mailout will be recorded in the relevant parts of your CRM solution and linked to the appropriate contacts, enabling you to proceed with a firm follow-up strategy. This easily implemented tool means you can maximise time spent on selling, meeting and networking, rather than typing, copying and pasting and repeating messages over and over again. As well as being a time saving device this also reduces the potential for errors such as mistyping names or email addresses, giving you the basics for building a great campaign.
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Thursday, 17 November 2011 15:24 |
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We are pleased to report that automotive design house Kahn Designs have selected to work with OpenCRM for the implementation of their hosted CRM solution. The implementation included an import of their data and setting up of their OpenCRM system http://www.kahndesign.com/
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Thursday, 17 November 2011 12:39 |
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Andipa Gallery have chosen OpenCRM as their CRM solution for contact management. Andipa Gallery is a leading international dealer in Modern and Contemporary Art since 1967. Based in the heart of Knightsbridge we are amongst London’s most established commercial galleries with a large and ever-changing collection of wholly-owned artworks. http://andipa.com/
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Thursday, 17 November 2011 12:33 |
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Chartered Surveyors and Architectural Consultants Anderson, Wilde & Harris have selected OpenCRM as their hosted CRM application of choice. The London-based company offer a complete range of architectural services, providing independent and creative advice on matters of value, structure and design. http://surveyors-valuers.com/
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