Which comes first, Sales, Marketing or Customer Care?
Borrowing from the chicken and the egg conundrum, we're pretty convinced that we have the same type of situation with the sales, marketing and customer care departments at most companies:
- Sales wants timely, anywhere access to accurate information on prospects and customers alike in order to make quota;
- Marketing wants access to the same information in order to plan more and better lead generation campaigns;
- Customer care wants to respond quickly to customer inquiries on product shipments, invoices or any other time-sensitive queries.
Chances are, each of these groups are running their own system, with the sales and marketing department keeping track of their critical data in spreadsheets.
Consider as well the effort required to share key documents, when no central storage exist: sending emails, giving verbal updates, or exchanging paper records.
How do you prioritize giving these departments the tools they need to do their job as efficiently as possible? It is likely that each department believes their requirements are so unique that they could not possibly share a common solution.
Most important of all, employees throughout your firm should understand their role in building good customer relations, so make your plans available to employees throughout your company. Once everyone understands how a CRM solution helps the company, makes their job easier and improves their performance, they'll buy into the strategy and will support its implementation.
Rather than documenting each department's requirements separately, invite all stakeholders to a joint session.
This joint session will go a long way towards building a common set of requirements and processes. Use our primer, How to Choose a CRM system, to put critical questions in front of the participants. Chances are, you'll foster a real understanding of the advantages of a common tool.
Why is this process so important?
This process offers a logical progression of steps that allows you to build support for what inevitably will be changes in processes. There will be a learning curve once the system is deployed, and we can't stress enough the need to put in sufficient training for all participants.
The end result should be a total understanding that all three departments are equally critical to the success of the project.
Ready to get started
We can help you make great progress in identifying all your requirements, and designing a solution that will have a meaningful impact on your business. We know CRM, we use CRM eveyday and we are ready to help you.
Call us at 508-393-7731, toll free 866.400.0922 to get started.
A final thought:
“In 2015 the consumers who grew up after the advent of the Net will be ages 10-34…this group of customers will expect you to conduct business with them in an always on, always connected, real-time way. Always on, always connected is a result of the move from an analog to a digital world, which will be completed around 2030,” according to Barton Goldenberg, president and founder of consulting firm ISM Inc.