Or to put it another way, how to maintain an active customer base. This post is inspired by an interesting statement concerning inactive customers – that the probability of a customer being active in the future is reduced by half for every additional year of inactivity. (Source: Journal of Interactive Marketing, Volume 27, Issue 1, February 2013, Pages 28–35)

The immediate response to this might be to not let your customers slide into inactivity! There are a number of measures you can take to prevent this. First and foremost you can ensure that you continue offering your product range or service to the best of your ability, making it desirable or even essential to your customer base. This involves not only making sure that you do what it says on the tin, but that the entire customer experience is a smooth one – from making yourselves easy to find on the web, offering solid advice and support and making purchase as easy as possible. You may provide the best product in the world, but if any of the associated factors are missing such as availability within your target market, friendliness of your sales team or accurate and appropriate pricing, insufficient instructions or support, then you’ll miss out.

With all of these hurdles bypassed you are on the road to successful selling, putting you in a position to win repeat business and maximise the lifetime value of your existing customer base.

Here is where your CRM solution comes into the equation. You hold details of your customers and their related transactions. This allows you to see exactly who has purchased what and when they have bought from you. Using the segmentation tools available you can then create lists of customers with whom you haven’t done any business over the past six months, or twelve months or indeed whichever time frame suits your requirements. With this information in hand, you can then use the talents you showed to win over the customer first time to encourage they continue to buy from you.

Even information about non-repeat customers offer you value – identifying particular types of customer or product purchased on a once-only basis means you know how much (or little) effort you should invest in this customer category. Once again, reporting and segmenting the data in your CRM solution enables you to view these records and establish any patterns on these accounts.

With those records out of the way, you can continue to manage your active customer base, ensuring that those heading towards inactivity are kept alive and do not slide into the other half.

Poor internal communications can have a catastrophic effect on your organisation. Your various departments are all interdependent and only work when everyone pulls together. On a more granular level we can see how this means the machine relies on each member of staff fulfilling their role to keep the wheels in motion. Any failings in this can result in a vicious circle whereby the underperformance of one department has a knock-on effect throughout the business and these internal frustrations can only result in a loss of confidence in front of the customer.

For an external marketing strategy to be effective, a well-oiled internal marketing strategy needs to be put in place. This means increasing the inter-departmental transparency to let each other see what is going on.

In my last blog post I used an example of a bakery so let’s carry on running with this idea and a mouth-watering example. If the sales team are actively pushing sales of a particular item, the production department needs to be aware of this and to alter their manufacture scheduling accordingly – it’s no good going all out and producing a surplus of doughnuts when the sales team are out there pushing your cream buns to the customers! Similarly, the purchasing departments will need to ensure they are buying in the right raw materials, and your shipping fleet will also have to make available suitable transport – in our example they would need regular trucks rather than refrigerated ones to get the doughnuts into the shops.

OK, if that takes care of the “how” the internal machine works, we can also address the “why”. Letting the internal departments know why it is they are doing what they are doing is a good way of empowering staff. It keeps them in the loop and increases the sense of being part of a team, as opposed to having jobs thrown at them with no sense or purpose. If the final target is of selling 100,000 doughnuts in a month, people across all departments are able to see how the role they play in the machine has enabled this target to be met – giving a sense of responsibility and accountability. There are many great stories to illustrate the power of internal marketing - a quick look at the website of Greggs Bakers paints an image of a team of internal customers , a “warm family” that comes together to create great tasting food.

Adopting a CRM solution gives your organisation some effective tools to help promote this departmental transparency. With leads, companies and contacts at the heart of the system, you are able to view, report on, consider and quickly action any activities on the system – whether it is an increased volume of orders and tentative enquiries, a growing number of unpaid invoices, or a dramatic fall in stock or raw materials. These actions are all reflected in the CRM solution and this transparency allows you to easily visualise and act to rectify any instances where the departments are not all pulling in the same direction.

Working on enhancing the internal marketing machine helps put everyone on the same page. As well as reducing internal frustrations this has the potential to increase job satisfaction, in turn boosting productivity – turning what might once have been a vicious circle into a winning cycle!

I have recently had to explain to a number of customers what the difference between a lead, opportunity and contact is. To illustrate this let’s look at the following scenario:

You run a bakery making very high quality bread and so you want to sell to more customers.

You have compiled a list of shops along the high street that you think might sell your produce. There’s no indication that they would be interested, but all the same, you want to contact them. At this point you create LEADS in your system for those shops.

You then work your way through the list of Leads trying to discover if there is any interest for your bread. After a productive week, 10 out of the 20 shops seem interested in what you have to offer. As such, they move off the list of unqualified leads and into your sales data as prospective customers.

At this point you can convert the Lead to create the COMPANY (the shop), the CONTACT (person working at the shop), and you can also create the OPPORTUNITY (a proposal for 50 loaves of bread per day at £1 each, creating an opportunity worth £50).

One shop in your data - Tasty Sandwiches - loves the taste of the bread and follows through on the Opportunity you have proposed – that Company has now become a “Customer” in your data, and you start selling them bread. They are still a Company, but you’ve also told the system that they are of the type “Customer”. You might also create new opportunities for this company, for example selling them croissants or cakes you make. Another shop, The Italian Pizza Company is undergoing a refurbish, and so won’t be buying from any suppliers for the next six months; however they are still an interesting proposition for you. They can be marked as a “Prospect” in your data, to be contacted again at a later date.

You can maintain your list of Customers, Prospects and other types of companies that you do business with, such as suppliers or media partners, in the Companies module, and some simple straightforward segmentation just like the Customer/Prospect example above, will show you the sets of records you need to see.

Why keep CONTACTS and COMPANIES separate, I sell to Alan at Tasty Sandwiches right?

Well, after 6 weeks, Alan Jones at Tasty Sandwiches moves on, and Jane Smith takes over. You are still selling your bread to Tasty Sandwiches, but instead of speaking to Alan, it’s Jane who you deal with. No need to change anything on the Company record, simply link the new Contact to the relevant Company and you can carry on delivering the bread. The complete history of the business you have done with Tasty Sandwiches remains intact on the Company record.

Alan himself may then become the new buyer at The Italian Pizza Company, and so you simply link his Contact record to his new Company, and with a bit of luck you can soon convert that Prospect to another Customer. In this manner, the correspondence you have had relating to each Company remains intact, as does any dialogue you’ve had with each Contact.

Having explained the terminology and how these fit together in OpenCRM, all that remains is to wish you successful baking, and successful business.

The recent news stories about the collapse of the likes of HMV and Blockbuster look set to hammer another nail in the coffin of a music industry that is already a shadow of its former self. HMV appears to have been bailed out which is obviously good news, but it will probably be a temporary reprieve rather than a long term solution. The effects will be felt throughout the industry – distributors are losing major channels to market and as a result, labels will find it harder to pitch their current and back-catalogue to them. With labels being able to distribute less, then they will reduce the press runs and ultimately not sign as many artists. Of course the whole download industry removes the need for a physical product, but many labels are struggling to profit substantially from the download market and you do still have a market out there for music on record or cd. In fact vinyl has seen a continued surge in popularity over recent years.

So is this all such a bad thing? Well I have mixed feelings about it all. I say this as a vinyl aficionado, eager to get my fix of large black (although coloured vinyl seems almost more common that black these days) cylinders of plastic. I love record shops, I love their history, the chance to unearth hidden treasures or discover new bands and so each record shop closure comes as a disappointment.

Moving the focus away from the industry is a way of empowering the artists themselves. New channels are opening up for acts to distribute their work and there are crowdsourcing options available to attract recording funds without relying on the purse strings of a record label. Instead of producing demos bands are publishing recordings on the likes of bandcamp and soundcloud and are using their Facebook and Twitter accounts for some imaginative promotion campaigns.

To be able to do all of the above effectively, a sound management of social media and other marketing channels is required – instead of having a label to do the promotion of new releases, the bands or their management need to do this themselves. Trying to get a voice heard over all the others is no mean feat and requires some pretty astute maneuvering.

One of the key factors that everyone in the game needs to learn is the effective management of contacts and of data. Whether on a large or small scale, a bedroom recording artist or professional touring outfit can use the software available to manage their contacts and work on their agenda. The advantage of todays’ cloud-based software and modern CRM solutions is that they provide the mass availability of tools that were once an exclusive luxury only available to large corporations with the required financial and human resources.

Whilst the music industry itself is reeling from the recent changes to the High Street and is still scratching its head searching for an answer to their woes, musicians and artists have the possibility of side-stepping the middleman, harnessing the capabilities of hosted CRM to manage their own data and push their talents to market.

January can be a slow month. People and organisations have made investments over the previous months to ensure that the shelves and stores are filled to deal with the Christmas markets and January can be a time when stocks are assessed and accounts are checked. One way to beat the January blues is to show your data some love, and give your existing customer database a polish. In particular if new business slows down for the early months of the year, you have a chance to catch up on managing your existing customer relations and possibly winning some cross and upsells into the bargain.

Here are a couple of ways of making your existing customer data work for you:

Networking

This could mean emailing some contacts you haven’t spoken to for a while or making sure the leads in your system are kept up to date with your activities. This activity is not geared towards the hard sell, rather you are strengthening and cementing relationships and catching up on where your customers are in terms of product or service requirements. This gives you the chance to update your records and bring your data bang up to date.

Opportunities

Bringing that customer data up to speed may highlight areas where future opportunities lie. You might find groups of customers that have bought a core product but have yet to buy upgrades or periphery products. You may identify gaps in a product portfolio sold to certain customers, or other regular customers whose interaction with you has tailed off recently. There are countless ways of making the most of your data and so making sure that both you and your customer are reaping the full benefit of your mutual business relationship.

Clearance

A bit of data management every now and then can’t be a bad thing. It means your data is live and up-to-date and above all useful. This could be a good time to create lists of contacts with incomplete records, finding duplicates and generally managing the various contact groups. A lead pipeline containing ten live hot prospects is likely to be more motivating than an old list of those 50 odd records that have sat collecting dust for the past couple of months staring back at you each time you log in. Of course with the storage capacity now available data does not necessarily need to be deleted, but can be moved away from your calendars and day to day activities and contact lists, and put into archives, or storage. These records won’t get in your way, but can easily be recovered if and when they are needed. Furthermore, data that is gathered over a busy period may not be as tidy or comprehensive as you would like, so now might be a good time to get these records cleaned up.

Now that the feeding frenzy of the end of the year is over you can enjoy tidying up after the party and put the house back into perfect order, primed and ready for the business of the months to come. Show your data some love and benefit from the many opportunities which are hidden away within your existing customer records.

Lemon is a 24/7 call centre located in the North East of England offering bespoke call answering solutions to quality focused clients throughout the UK and internationally. It is always fun to work with customers that have their own unique approach and in this case an individual twist on things, so we are happy to welcome Lemon Business Solutions on board with OpenCRM.

http://www.no-sour-business.co.uk

It’s no secret that a modern business needs a web presence. A website, a blog, social media activity, hopefully all of the above and more. However the secret is not just being online, but being nice and visible. Here’s where Versatile Marketing comes in providing web design, SEO, PPC and online marketing services. Of course a vital aspect of marketing is your contact management and we are pleased to declare that Versatile Marketing have opted OpenCRM over the competitors look after their hosted CRM requirements.

www.versatile-marketing.com

“Going Green” is no longer simply the motto of an enlightened few but is a vital step towards establishing social responsibility whether on a corporate or individual basis. It is also an essential way of ensuring that a company stays one step ahead of legislation regardless of how quickly or slowly it is implemented. And so an industry around green investment and carbon trading goes from strength to strength and we are delighted to welcome Green Investment Services on board with OpenCRM.

www.greeninvestmentservices.com

Without them you would be lost – signs telling you what a particular building is, notices letting you know where places are located, advertisements of all shapes and sizes, warning of dangers or hazards present or an offer you cannot afford to miss. Signs are a vital part of everyday life. The management of finance and contact data are some of the cornerstones of a modern business and we are happy to announce that TAM signs have decided to satisfy their CRM requirements through use of OpenCRM.

www.tamsigns.co.uk

Well the season of over-indulgence is just behind us – how was it for you? Did you manage a reasonable level of self-control, or did you give in to each and every temptation, meaning you are now facing a short period of self-assessment and navel gazing? This usually comes in shape of personal New Year’s resolutions – lose a few pounds or use that gym subscription a bit more this year, for example. I’m sure many of you will hit your approach to business with renewed vigour and will also have a new set of goals and targets for 2013.

But setting expectations and goals realistically can be a challenge. You may set an unrealistically high target – for example to going to the gym four times a week instead of twice a month – chances are this is destined to fail after the initial couple of weeks. Other goals may be vague and therefore impossible to track and measure, for example “live healthier” without going into any specifics such as whether you intend to eat better, get outside more, or take on extra exercise.

Similarly, objectives and opportunities in your business life need to be set realistically and results will want to be tangible for you to be able to measure your success.  A target of “becoming the best in the field” is going to be difficult to evaluate, whereas “increasing sales revenue by 5%” can be tracked more easily.

As long as your objectives are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound), then you can set yourself some great goals which will help enhance your performance and ultimately your own personal satisfaction as well as helping your business achieve its targets.

CRM software contains many tools and features which are designed to help you in measuring and tracking your business goals. Opportunity and Project Management, Action Plans and Reporting are just a few examples of some of your business operations which can be aided by use of a CRM solution.

If you think OpenCRM can help you in achieving those goals, why not get in touch?

Whatever your personal or business goals are for 2013, we wish you every success on the road to achieving those objectives.

It’s pantomime time. Whether you’re seated in the front row cheering everybody on or hiding at home with the curtains drawn waiting for it to go away, it’s pretty hard to avoid the panto season. We’re even seeing American and Scandinavian actors getting in on the act so who knows one day this rather British phenomenon may well spread its wings across the globe.

Either way, this bizarre piece of theatre can only work if the various departments come together and work as a team. If you have the finest actors but no good lighting then they’ll be singing from the shadows. If your theatre cleaners have been booked for the wrong day or times then your audience will be groaning at the stale popcorn stuck to their bottoms and not just every time the wicked witch appears on stage. And if the box office hasn’t printed enough tickets or the marketing team didn’t do their jobs, there will be no bums on seats in the first place.

If we liken panto to the business process then we can see how the various parts of the organisation need to work together towards the common goal. Marketing, project and personnel management, sales and post-sales support are the vital cogs in the machine. The obvious business solution to manage this under one (theatre) roof is of course CRM. All of the above can easily be managed, offering a 360 degree view of the panto project. You also have the means to measure your ROI by running reports on the various aspects of the show to see how successful you have been. This provides results of your efforts and gives you some targets to smash next year when the show rolls back into town. And having some figures to show your likely revenue means you know how much to splash out on a big name for next year’s widow Twanky!

Whether you are after a stylish show complete with champagne and canapés, or a panto so cheesy you need to hand out grapes and crackers at the interval, using CRM software to manage the project can help turn a major drama into a song and a dance.

For more information on how OpenCRM can help your project management please visit http://opencrm.co.uk/features/project-management.html

In an ever shrinking world, largely thanks to our online presence (not presents – focus, there’s a few business days left yet!) we’ve become much more accustomed to enquiries arriving at odd times in the morning, and indeed on ‘odd’ days of the year. While the rest of the world is off celebrating Christmas, shutting shop for the holidays comes with more consideration than in years gone by, and certainly doesn’t mean that you are closed for business.

If you do receive an enquiry at half past leaving time on Christmas Eve and nobody makes contact until early January, it’s likely that customer will find another supplier before you’ve even had chance to formulate a reply. Short of staffing up or working yourself on those important family days what can be done to combat this?

Well for starters, your OpenCRM system can help. First of all it is accessible anywhere you have a web browser – while we’re not advocating sending a flurry of emails from your tablet hidden under the dinner table, there’s nothing stopping you from managing your enquiries. But there are slicker and certainly more “family-friendly” ways of achieving that...

You can use a web form in conjunction  with OpenCRM to capture enquiries from your website this data will automatically generate a Lead in your system. Using a mixture of Auto Email rules and Action Plans you can respond instantly, thanking your potential customer for making contact, and managing their expectation for a response, and your Action Plan could set up an automated Activity, scheduled as a reminder on the day you know you’re returning to the office.

Using the automation features in OpenCRM can save you time throughout the year but it’s never more important to set these actions up before the holidays. One big missed enquiry can mean the difference between hitting your target or the wall.

OpenCRM also gives you the facility to auto manage Support enquiries from inbound email. Provide us with some basic email settings and we can enable auto ticket creation, auto replies and escalation. Again, make use of always available access to combat any urgent enquiries – right from your armchair at home.

So whatever you’re doing this Christmas, make time for family and OpenCRM will help to ease your mind.

We’d like to wish all our customers and regular readers a restful but productive holiday, and a prosperous New Year, and we look forward to sharing many more seasons as an integral business partner.

A CRM solution is a fantastic place to bring the customer information for your organisation into one easily accessible location. As well as your current customers and companies that you do business with, you’ll want to collect and track information about your leads – or potential customers.

One of the most effective weapons in the CRM marketing and sales armoury is the ability to segment your data any way you like.

Regardless of the products and services you offer, understanding your customer demographics is of paramount importance – knowing exactly what type of person or business it is that is buying from you. Some of you may have a niche product that targets a small specific market. Even in a narrow niche you will still probably want to segment your data to show your customers that you anticipate will be making a repeat purchase in the foreseeable future, or customers yet to purchase an upgrade or periphery product. In a more general market there are a lot more conditions you might want to use to segment on. Age, gender, profession, geographical area and interests are all qualities which can be pulled together to build a customer profile.

Getting such groups of records is very easy to using good CRM software.

So, once you have the records sorted as suits your purpose, what to do with them? Well the easy answer here is to assist you in carrying out your inbound marketing. Perhaps you need to view the records in list form in order to make phone calls to each contact one after the other. You might prefer to create an email marketing campaign with which to hit this set of contacts.

However you choose to target this group, using CRM allows you to track the results of your campaign too. Results of phone calls can be logged directly onto the contact records as and when you make the calls, and clickthrough tracking means that any response to your emails will be logged against the relevant contacts. When you reach the end of your campaign, these results can be collated into report form -in much the same way as the records were initially grouped together - in order to help you track the ROI of your marketing efforts.

With each campaign launched and results tracked, your customer data gets that bit richer, allowing you to make more intelligent segmentation and selectively target your leads and customers with valuable material and information that ultimately benefits both your customer and your own organisation.

With Christmas just round the corner the advertising industry sees its usual festive offensive in full flow. The big hitters such as John Lewis’ Christmas ad campaigns have become an industry unto themselves. This year’s campaign featuring a snowman couple is aiming big in a number of ways – the television advertisement is being backed by a social media campaign designed to create actionable results; a further tie-in being that the soundtrack to the ad will also be available for purchase. If you hear Frankie Goes to Hollywood blasting out of a car near you, chances are you’ll know where they have been shopping.

A campaign such as this functions on so many levels and requires some serious tracking and direct response mechanism putting into place to ensure that each component is well thought out, and contributes to the overall success of the campaign.

No doubt most of you won’t have the budget for a one-off television piece and associated support campaigns, but using your CRM software you are able to create, nurture and track a campaign such as an email or web campaign and any follow-up campaigns you might wish to use. By analysing your customer data you can set up an email targeting groups of people with a campaign tailored to match their tastes.

As well as being an attractively designed piece, this template is full of trackable and actionable links – each time a person clicks on a link that statistic gets added to their details and to the campaign itself. In this way you can follow the overall success of a campaign as well as creating a new list of people that express an interest in your products and services. You are then in a position to launch the next phase of your campaign, moving away from a generalised message and hitting these people with some more specific calls to action.

Of course having the campaign and sales cycle all integrated into a CRM solution such as OpenCRM means you have the ability to create opportunities and take them through to invoices in the same framework, managing all your data within the one platform. The following year, the cycle comes full circle as you already have a list of potential customers primed and ready to find out about the new goodies and offers you have available.

Long after the snowman has melted away and the theme tune has been replaced by the next smash hit you can keep looking after those campaigns and making sure your valued customers are still singing your song.

Conquer the gulf between reaching out blindly to your entire customer base and being able to make educated and targeted communications by using your data to make educated and informed decisions. Save time and effort for both your customers and yourself. With CRM you can categorise and segment your data in many different ways. Your best customers, your leads based in a certain geographical area, your contacts working in a specific industry, customers with similar buying patterns; the possibilities are endless. CRM enables you to create mass communications which are delivered on a one-to-one basis featuring content that is valuable to the recipient. Turn that ignorant bulk mail into an intelligent piece of correspondence very easily with CRM software.

Wouldn’t it be great if when you went into a shop, the sales assistant told you which of your favourite products are on special offer, which are restocked, and what new and exciting offerings are available from your favourite brands?

Smart use of CRM software can make you a private customised marketer and salesperson to each and every one of your clients. The benefits are evident for both you and your customer. No clumsy attempts to connect with a customer and sell them something they would not want or even already have, and the customer won’t feel like their time is being wasted when you do get in touch, as know that they are provided with valuable content and interesting offers from you.

To make sure the relationship is managed without being intrusive, buyers preferences can and should be noted too, ensuring that you aren’t sending five emails a week to someone who would prefer one phone call or brochure a month.

Using the tools available in OpenCRM, even on a mass mailout you are able to create a personalised 1 to 1 dialogue with your leads and customers, as you segment the records in your database and target accordingly. You can break down your list of customers on many different levels, and by doing so you can tailor your messages not only to the types of customers you have but also according to which stage of the buying process or where they are on the product life cycle.

With a stylish email you can send each member of this group an eye-catching personalised message and you are able to track the results of this mailout and record customer behaviour, allowing you to further enrich your data.

As a result you have a happy customer who has received a great service without having to swallow a load of excess sales pitch, and you are able to concentrate on those likely wins instead of shaking the whole tree in the vague hope that one or two pieces of fruit drop to the ground.

Time and time again we are being told that by using web 2.0 tools such as social media and other peer information sharing sites, the buying powers lie in the hands of the consumer.

The producer, reseller or retailer is no longer actively leading the selling, but fielding enquiries that are consumer-driven or so we are told. But can this really be the case?

Whilst the customer may consider themselves in the driving seat of the whole process – of course there are many websites only too happy to confirm and tell the customer how right they are - there’s no denying the skills and powers of the provider to drive the customer’s search for information. After all if this were the case, organisations would not be able to create and build a hype surrounding a new product, movie, holiday offer and so on.

The dynamics of this relationship have already changed – instead of simply selling to shift a certain number of products to reach a particular target, your sales line is tied into a whole process whereby your sales people are educating, advising and informing just as much as they are selling. The seller organisation has had to become far more customer-centric – with different departments all geared towards transparency and letting the consumer in on the whole process, from manufacture to marketing to distribution to point of sale. Rather than an “us versus them” scenario, the two sides of the transaction are more likely to be working as partners, both benefitting the same product as a means to achieve different ends – the end user has a new product or service and the provider has a new customer.

The advantages are clear to both supplier and customer – the supplier makes sales, has the opportunity to cross-sell, and through education can ensure that the customer makes the best use possible of the product, thus increasing customer satisfaction. At that point it is the supplier that is not only able to but also needs to drive the relationship and by providing the best service possible is able to retain customers, knowing that as soon as there is a hint of dissatisfaction the customer has the resources available to research alternatives and substitutes.

A CRM solution is an effective tool in helping manage this process on so many levels.

Starting well before the initial purchase, potential sales can be tracked, segmented and then nurtured accordingly. Once a sale has been won, the customer can be helped along the full duration of the customer relationship. Customers can be categorised according to levels of subscriptions or frequency of purchase. This means alarm bells can be rung when a repeat purchase is not made or a subscription remains un-renewed.

Account and campaign management permits you to deal with these various different categories of customer in actionable ways. Subscription renewal dates can be highlighted and automated processes set into motion to ensure the renewal process is easy to manage. Reports can show you who your best customers, just as they can show you customers that have not made a purchase for a while.

Of course a successful business is not just dependant on customers – there are plenty of other interested parties involved. You are just as able to keep all your important data concerning your suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and other connections in your CRM software, allowing you to manage all of these relationships from the one location.

So whilst it is fair to say that whilst the consumer enjoys a far heightened position when it comes to wielding power, a modern transaction involves heightened interaction between both buyer and seller, allowing for a long term relationship to be established to mutual benefit – the customer is actively buying whilst with smart use of CRM you are actively creating those conditions under which the customer is likely to buy.

The merits of how a CRM can improve efficiency and productivity are well documented. But what if we told you that there was a big chunk of your business that was not getting the benefits of CRM software - that would make you sit up and pay attention wouldn’t it?

As well as being the ideal place to store contact details and additional information about all the organisations and people that you deal with in the world, a CRM solution is also the ideal place to keep up to date with your internal environment and that vital stakeholder group – your workforce.

But surely you might think that you keep a track of those people anyway as they are the users of your CRM? Well that may be true for some, but the User record and Personnel record hold very different sets of information. You may also have people from outside of your organisation that are using your CRM software and you don’t need to store personnel information about them.

The personnel module enables you to keep all your staff records in a centralised location. You can track and trace holiday allowances, what each employee has used up and what they have left.  And those inevitable other absences which can be recorded against the personnel record and this data can all be reported on. This gives you an overview of time when any particular department might be understaffed which is definitely a good insight to have.

As well as tracking these movements of your workforce, you can hold so much more information. Further personal data can also help you to build a profile of the make up of your workforce - should you wish to or be permitted to store this data. Of course you need to consider the sensitive nature of such information and so levels of security and permissions allow you to restrict access to the Personnel records to ensure that data privacy is absolutely respected.

There is so much more which may be relevant to your organisation which can be stored against personnel records – if your organisation employs drivers you are able to store vehicle and license information here. Perks and assets such as company phones, laptops or company vehicles can also be recorded against the personnel record.

Holding this information in your CRM software gives you the ability to work with your workforce data on many levels - overall, on a per department basis or drilling right down to the individual level.

As mentioned at the start of this post, your workforce is probably one of your most important stakeholder groups, so why not bring this sector into your CRM software and streamline the management of your HR.

For more information about how the Personnel module in OpenCRM can help your business please click on the link: http://opencrm.co.uk/features/personnel-records.html or contact us for more information.

At a risk of showing my age and/ or going way over the heads of some readers –

Do you remember putting pieces of tape over the tabs on the top of audio or video cassettes so you could tape over them? With each new overdubbing, the quality got slightly worse until eventually there were more hisses and crackles than actual music and eventually you had to head down to the shops and buy a brand new pack of C90’s? Not to mention the fact that you had crossed out and rewritten the names of the bands on the tape label so many times that you didn’t have a clue what was actually on them? Eventually you had to play the game of ‘tip the tapes onto the floor and see what’s on them’. And when the inevitable horrendous pop came on, you’d do your best to save face and ask out loud how the hell one of your sister’s tapes got in there?! Well I know times have moved on, and as luck would have it, so have the storage capacities (not to mention musical tastes). Good CRM software comes with dedicated storage space, allowing you to build up and manage your valuable library of contacts, records and documents and keep them all in one centralised location.

As well as the obvious “Wow look at all the storage space we’ve got!” it also means you don’t need to delete data. An ex-client can be categorised as “former client” and filed in your system, or an invoice that doesn’t get used can be marked as cancelled. This means that should that company come back on your radar a year down the line, you can see that you had worked with them in the past and you have kept all that useful correspondence and dialogue you have previously had. Records can be merged rather that deleted which also links all the vital related items to the record which is kept. Older marketing pieces can be categorised in a relevant manner and archived in your CRM system. There’s no telling if and when this information may become useful again – for example when taking a “then and now” snapshot or preparing a marketing audit. Keeping your business history does not mean it is there to haunt you, but provides you with the perfect tools for self-assessment. Any low points or failures can document lessons learned, and particular highlights can also be analysed to see just what combination of your activity led to that success.

Unlike those old tapes which reached the end of the side halfway through your favourite tune, your storage isn’t going to run out of space. And these records won’t hiss and crackle, your data will remain as fresh and clear as it was that first time you hit “play” and “record”. To take a look at the storage capabilities offered by OpenCRM take a look here: http://opencrm.co.uk/storage-costs.html

Adopting new CRM software isn’t always seen as a positive move by your employees. There’s often a communication gap which can drive a void of understanding between what management believe CRM will achieve hierarchically vs. how your average user views your (management) intentions. The truth is usually much less nefarious, mostly the opposite to which the common office rumour mill purports; nevertheless this negative sentiment can lead to a steeper training and acceptance curve and a painful overall experience for everyone.

This shouldn’t be the attitude to kick start your journey into good business process management and standardization. To succeed first time, everyone needs to be fully behind and involved in your CRM project; if your users are shown where and how CRM will save time and take away some of the menial repetitiveness of office workload so that everyone can get their work done faster, adoption can bring with it the sentiment of anticipation and enthusiasm as opposed to fear and doubt.  Change will only be welcomed if it’s first understood. And yet, too often, businesses fail to get over the initial acceptance of a new CRM system. So, here are my top 6 helpful hints to bolster user support and aid your successful CRM launch.

1. Keep it Clean:

Bringing your current data into a new CRM is something you’ll want to get right first time. Work with a vendor who can help with your project and ensure you are correctly mapping all of your fields to match with any standard or customized fields in your new system. Having data present itself in the wrong place is a quick way to diminish your users’ enthusiasm and confidence. Combat this from the start by importing only correctly formatted and mapped data, thus removing one of the most common user adoption complaints.

2. Stagger Your Launch: 
Don’t give everyone access and don’t open the whole system immediately.
When rolling out, think about where you can gain the most traction with maximum results. Start with your first touch-points with the customer; marketing and then sales - and while your web portal, accounts and back office systems are integrated you already have fully supportive teams on-site to champion in-house training and ease the transition to back office staff in customer satisfaction, support and accounts teams. 3. Create Pre-Launch Opportunities:

Feed your sales team the results from your marketing rollout – Sales user adoption is simplified with the arrival of live opportunities! Use your initial marketing stage launch to feed qualified leads distributed evenly among your sales team - before they even start to use their logins. Use CRM to manage incoming web enquiries through form integration and assign inbound leads on a round robin system to fairly assign warm leads among your team. If your sales team have interested call backs ready and waiting, the opportunity outweighs resistance to change and you’re striding over several hurdles at once!

4. Integrate and Synchronize Cross-Platform:

Copy all mail and contacts seamlessly across all users devices and make available from within your CRM records. Not only is this a time saver, your team will be grateful of not having to look outside of the CRM to collect, compose and reply to email or to find best practice correspondence attached to similar, previous deals.

5. Train, Support, Train:

CRM will only make life easier for the user if they know how to use it. A steep learning curve is not necessary with adequate training, hand-holding and support. Always choose a CRM vendor who offer training options, facilitates extensive FAQ’s and provide telephone access to real people-led support. Use the resources you have on-site – experienced CRM users can be invaluable in championing correct use of your system.

6. Template for Success:

Having to create documents from loose word processing templates can be a pain, particularly without merge facility, and is always prone to costly, potentially business losing human error. Load your CRM with templates for all your external marketing and customer contact documentation, so newsletters, emails, quotes, sales orders, invoices and other critical documents are consistent and a cinch to produce and re-produce your best practice every time.

You’ll probably agree I’ve outlined some familiar aches whe n implementing any kind of new system and I hope, with our help, your next project rollout can be mapped out with a little more focus on users, whose effective and efficient use of CRM is the catalyst to the successful ROI of your project. Proper planning with your vendor, alongside some or all of the tips we provide to all of our new customers, will ensure CRM isn’t just adopted, it’s welcomed.

Kick start your campaign. Get the ball rolling on a local scale, watch the stream gather momentum as more and more join the flow until it becomes unstoppable majestic river. Build up your empire, record those communications, new contacts, online discussions, track your activities. Build your CRM software and reap the benefits of your connectivity, your passion for business and networking. Stay in touch with your regular customers and reach out to those you haven’t spoken to for a while. Let your contacts and business community feel your passion and watch them help spread your message.

We’d like to take this opportunity to share some good news on behalf of one of our esteemed customers, Home Hunts. Taken from their press release:

“Home Hunts, the leading luxury & investment property specialists throughout France, Monaco, Geneva, London and New York is delighted to announce it has won two 5 star awards for both ‘Best Real Estate Agency France’ and ‘Best Real Estate Agency Website France ’ at The International Property Awards 2012 - 2013.
The European Property Awards are part of a long established International Property Award and its winners’ logo is recognised as a symbol of excellence throughout the global industry.  Attaining one of these esteemed awards is indisputable evidence that Home Hunts is capable of beating some exceedingly strong contenders within the highly competitive European property arena.”

We have a long-term working relationship with Home Hunts and have been involved in the building and development of their website together with Pure Design International, as well as taking care of Home Hunts’ CRM software requirements. Half the fun of working on CRM projects is seeing the many different and interesting ways in which organisations use the software and Home Hunts are certainly no exception. One of the keys to CRM success is making the software work how the end-user needs it to, rather than trying to shoehorn them into working within the confines of a rigid system. As a result, Home Hunts now have a well customised system designed to service their specific needs.

What’s more working with Home Hunts gives us the opportunity to daydream a little as we enjoy looking at some of the beautiful properties that are available in some enchanting locations – a nice villa in sun soaked Provence or a penthouse suite overlooking the Louvre in Paris – that will do nicely thank you! Home Hunts director Tim Swannie adds:

“Open CRM are a delight to work with, the levels of support their team offer are second to none which is why we have been working with them for many years now.  They have developed a tailor-made database system (CRM) and customer website for us which our business relies heavily. The CRM helps to simplify the property buying process for the Home Hunts team and the website has been designed, not only to look fantastic but also to offer a simple and enjoyable user experience for all of our clients. We are particularly happy with their forward thinking approach, constantly offering ideas for improvement both on the website and the CRM database.”

Thanks Tim and congratulations again from all of us at OpenCRM!

http://www.home-hunts.com/

Regardless of the size or nature of your business, an awareness of first aid, health and safety is essential. ABC North West Ltd provide a full range of training services not limited to first aid, as well as maintaining an occupational health consultancy. The benefits of a high quality CRM software solution to such an organisation are numerous, and we are happy to announce that ABC North West Ltd have chosen to work with OpenCRM.

http://www.abcnorthwest.co.uk

We are delighted to announce that Farncombe have selected to use OpenCRM for their customer relationship management requirements. Farncombe is a leading provider of specialist strategy, technology consultancy and engineering services to the digital TV industry. As always it is fantastic to be working with organisations and watching their business and brand go from strength to strength.

http://www.farncombe.com

Research has shown time and time again that it is more beneficial to retain customers than to win new ones. With this in mind businesses in the FMCG markets need to find the best available to make the most of their customer base. As well as using a cloud-based CRM solution, there are various ways of doing this. Hive offer promotional tools such as unique codes and promotional mechanics designed to make the most out of a customer base and we are delighted to be providing Hive with OpenCRM for their cloud-based CRM software requirements.

http://hiveonline.co.uk

Liberty Electric Cars are at the forefront of state-of-the-art industry, designing, engineering and manufacturing electric vehicles with zero emissions. There are a multitude of compelling reasons for supporting this technology such as addressing health problems, the growing public demand for non-polluting vehicles and government initiatives designed to stimulate demand. As always we at OpenCRM are always excited when we are able to provide the CRM solution for cutting edge organisations and we are happy to welcome Liberty Electric Cars on board.

http://www.liberty-ecars.com

It is very tempting for businesses to open up social media accounts on as many platforms as is humanly possible. If you have a presence everywhere then you will be very visible and available across the web for you customers and potential clients and surely this is a good thing? Well, maybe not always…

Recent social media comments by England cricketer Kevin Pietersen have shown that tweeting is an easy way of getting you into hot water. Hashtag campaigns by Waitrose and McDonalds have backfired in spectacular fashion.

Other established brands are taking a deeper look into their social media agendas and are bucking trends. In a flurry of publicity, global car giant GM pulled a Facebook ad campaign reported to be worth $10 million following a marketing review.

It seems playing the social media game isn’t quite as straightforward as it may seem.  And if the waters weren’t murky enough, a whole industry around the business use of social media has appeared and with it being such a new development, there is very little by way of regulation so “experts” are springing up left right and centre offering opinions and advice.

As illustrated in the examples above, if some of the major players are falling down when it comes to social media, what chance do the rest of us have with limited budget and resource? Well, simple as it may seem (and here at OpenCRM we do like to keep it simple, or KISS), a little common sense goes a long way and so here are a few basic points to remember:

1. Do you monitor your channels? If you create a Facebook page for your business and leave it to sit there without doing anything, how can you be sure negative comment about your product or service is not being published? Or competitors may be using your platform to promote their services?

2. Do you respond to comments? Remember social media is a two-way channel, so when you are asked a question, chances are the person is expecting a response.

3. Is your audience on the same channel as you? You may be publishing to your heart’s content on Pinterest, but if your audience is predominantly active on Twitter you may be posting into the void.

4. Are you posting valuable content? If you are simply letting the world know what you had for breakfast or just retweeting instead of creating content, people will soon tune out as the impression given will be that you’re not bringing anything to the discussion table.

5. Are you keeping your pages up to date? If you set yourself up on as many platforms as possible only to let the tumbleweed take over, it will reflect badly on you and your organisation, people may even start to wonder if you are still in business.

Of course, you are able to pull content from your social media channels into your CRM system. Details of potential clients and comments made by customers can be brought in and with a few clicks you can create a report which you can use to show just about ony data within your CRM, such as the platforms where your audience is active.

These are just a few of the many basic steps worth following when setting up a social media strategy and as our use of the different channels develops this list is going to grow constantly and remain a work in progress as our usage of the social web develops and matures.

By Tom M Chapman

Regardless of the type business you run or industry you work in, chances are you will be dealing with customers and companies day in day out. Clients, potential customers, suppliers, competitors and partners are just a few examples of the types of folk that come across your radar.

Once your list of contacts starts to accumulate you need to manage this data with a CRM system of some description, at this point it doesn't matter how simple or sophisticated. And as you start to work with your chosen system you need to look at how you can make this data best work for you. There are a large number of steps which can be taken to ensure maximum return from your data and some of these are surprisingly easy to implement.

1. Look through your existing system and identify which fields are underused or not used at all. If not why not? Is it because the field is of the wrong type? Maybe you have a free text field where you should have a companies look-up or a pick-list, which would minimise the variations of entries in the system. Instead of having a "St Pauls", "St. Pauls", "Saint Pauls" and "St. Paul's" as four different companies on the system, a pick-list or companies look-up would have created one company record only and thus your data would be far more useful.


2. If a field is barely used it may be because it is simply not useful. A data migration or review of your system gives you the chance to rethink your approach, take a step back and look at what has worked for you so far and what has been less useful - too many seemingly useless fields may discourage your users from using the CRM at all if it is deemed unwieldy.


3. Are you missing vital information? Perhaps you need to review which fields are made mandatory. You may have too many customers in your system with no contact details, as it is easy to simply save after collecting a new customer name, and hoping to fill in phone and email details later. That later soon dwindles into the back of the mind and the contact record becomes fairly redundant.


4. As well as missing vital information due to fields not being used correctly, you may also be missing vital information because there is no field in which to collect it! It is worth inviting your future CRM user-base to contribute ideas to what they would like to see in the new system - something that may be blindingly obvious to those actually using CRM on a daily basis may not be at all evident to other involved in the CRM implementation process.

As well as the obvious factor of getting more useful data into your CRM system, these ideas also help make your new CRM software more end-user centric and this certainly is a determining factor on ensuring a successful user-adoption rate.

OpenCRM is a UK based provider of fully featured hosted CRM software that is easy to use and intuitive with a familiar interface and powerful features. We also offer a flexible bespoke Consultancy, Training and Support service which can be tailored to suit your needs by our clever team of professionals. For all matters CRM including links to a demo please visit http://www.opencrm.co.uk

You don’t see it yet you see it all the time – the envelope which contains your direct marketing mail will be the make or break as to whether you open it and read the contents or simply throw it away. Encore Envelopes are at the head of their game, being the largest independent manufacturer of printed envelopes in the UK. Of course one thing the envelope needs is an addressee, which makes contact management all the more paramount. We are pleased to declare that Encore Envelopes have selected to use OpenCRM for their CRM software needs and welcome them on board.

www.encoreenvelopes.com

Traffic Smart provide a powerful new digital media product, a web-based competitive search intelligence application named Adthena. Keywords, traffic and rank are all terms which are close to the forefront of an ever increasing number of business plans and Traffic Smart offer the tools to analyse the competition. We love cutting edge technology and are happy to be providing Traffic Smart with their hosted CRM requirements with OpenCRM

http://www.adthena.com/