The CRM Advisor
You ask the questions, and our resident CRM guru shares her wisdom.

This week’s question:
“We are about to embark on a huge CRM initiative, and would like to seek advice from an analyst early on in our project. Who are some of the leading research firms who cover this space?”

A: Analysts can be a great resource for information about CRM solutions, as well as the existing vendors and their offerings. So, your decision to work closely with one will benefit you greatly in the long run.

Many industry analysts cover the CRM market place extensively, including larger firms like Gartner, The Yankee Group, Forrester Research, and IDC, as well as smaller independent firms such as 451 Group, Beagle Research, Nucleus Research, and ISM.

Finding the right firm to work with will take some thought. Some vendors offer complete, in-depth product reviews that highlight both the positive and negative attributes of each solution, as well as research, polls, and studies on general marketplace trends.

Others focus mostly on best practices and strategic business planning, steering clear of direct sales processes and related solution evaluations because they prefer to take a more vendor-neutral position.

Which analyst firm you ultimately decide to work with will depend on what your needs are, and what kind of role you want the analyst to play in your project.

Submit your question to the CRM Advisor at CRMadvisor@business-software.com.

“Our due diligence revealed that the Aplicor product had enough functionality to automate our relatively complex sales and marketing processes, at a price point that was reasonable for us.”

– Joe Majestic, chief technical officer, Synovus

CRM in Action: Synovus
The best way to illustrate how CRM can best address mid-market needs is to examine, in detail, a mid-market firm that’s using CRM successfully.

For this purpose, we’ve selected Synovus, a multi-service holding company headquartered in Georgia, which uses Aplicor to handle its sales and marketing processes. Synovus, which delivers banking, investment and asset management services through a network of banks and offices in the southeastern U.S., controls a little over $30 billion in assets. At first glance, that might not seem like a “mid-market” amount of money until one compares those assets with those of, say, Bank of America Corp., whose assets exceed $1.4 trillion.

As is typical for a mid-market firm in an industry where large industries dominate, Synovus is the antithesis of its larger competitors. Bank of America and its ilk are highly centralized, with worldwide branches that are as cookie-cutter as a Starbucks franchise. By contrast, Synovus consists of 43 separately branded banking institutions that operate autonomously within their respective communities through approximately 325 branch offices.

This decentralized concept allows Synovus’s banks to continue to position themselves as locally-deployed, thus offering customers the responsiveness that comes with local decision-making. At the same time, being part of a larger organization allows those autonomous banks to offer a wide array of financial products that otherwise would only be available from a multi-billion dollar holding company. “We’re trying to achieve the best of both worlds,” says Joe Majestic, the chief technical officer for Synovus’s Financial Management Services division.
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Five Things You MUST Include In a CRM Software RFP

Your CRM software initiative is moving forward, and after extensive research and preliminary evaluations, you’ve narrowed it down to your short list of potential vendors. Now, the next step is to issue a request for proposal (RFP), a formal and often lengthy document that asks pointed and detailed questions about each provider’s CRM offerings.

Be prepared! The RFP process is complex, time-consuming, and even confusing at times, but one that is vital to ensuring the selection of the best possible solution for your business.

CRM requirements will vary greatly from one business to the next, so every RFP – even if submitted to the same vendor – will look quite different. However, there are certain elements that must be included in each and every CRM RFP, to ensure that your company gets the most value from its CRM investment.

Below are the five topics or items that can help drive the RFP process and steer your organization in the right direction:

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CRM Magazine, in conjunction with their destinationCRM 2007 conference, recently announced the winners of its 2007 CRM Market Awards. The honorees, listed below, were acknowledged for their successes and contributions to the CRM marketplace over the past year.

Enterprise Suite CRM

 
Winner: Oracle’s Siebel Systems
Leaders: Amdocs, Oracle’s PeopleSoft, Salesforce.com, SAP
One to Watch: Oracle

Midmarket Suite CRM

Winner: Salesforce.com
Leaders: Microsoft Dynamics CRM, NetSuite, RightNow Technologies, Oracle’s Siebel Systems
One to Watch: Sage Software

Small Business Suite CRM

Winner: Salesforce.com
Leaders: Maximizer, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, NetSuite, Sage Software
One to Watch: FrontRange GoldMine

For more information on the awards, or for a complete list of honorees, visit the destinationCRM Web site.

By Lee B. Salz - President of Sales Dodo, LLC

The falling-out between the Yankees and Joe Torre happens every day in business. Sales people can learn a lot from the experience.

This is the time of year when salespeople begin to reflect on their performance. Was it a good year? Was it a great year? Some will say they earned the dollars they desired, so it was a great year. Others will hang their hat on an account that they won and say it was a good year. However, as Joe Torre, former manager of the New York Yankees recently learned, employers have a single data point for measuring success that dwarfs all other statistics.

As the New York Yankees were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs, the rumors began to swirl that their manager, Joe Torre, was not got going to be asked to return as manager in 2008. He had just finished the last year of a three-year contract, which meant there were decisions to be made. Interestingly, many have said that his best managerial year was 2007, a year in which the team was eliminated early in the post-season. As manager of the Yankees, he took the team to the post-season every one of the twelve years while at the helm. No other team is enjoying a streak of this magnitude, but it wasn’t enough for team executives.

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Jim Ward - President, BrainSell

Are you using Opportunity Management and Sales Forecasting within your business?  What are the reasons for Sales Forecasting?

Most companies use forecasting to predict any number of business critical decisions. Will you make quota, what needs to be done to adjust sales efforts to meet quota, will you need more resources, will you need additional investment, will you need to adjust production capacity. All of these resulting decisions rely on the accurate projection of the “sales forecast”.

Opportunity management on the other hand is the sub process to forecasting. It’s what allows a forecast to be honed and to be accurate.  Typically Opportunity Management is used in longer sales cycles.  The better you know your sales process, stages and steps toward a successful sale, the better controls you can maintain in your opportunity management system.

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At A Glance
Company: RLE Technologies
Location: Fort Collins, CO
Industry: Manufacturing
Challenges: RLE needed an integrated, Web-based solution for sales order processing, CRM and help desk functionality with an intuitive user interface

Before turning to NetSuite in February, RLE Technologies – which manufactures water leak detection and web-enabled monitoring products – found itself in an IT quandary. The company had been using Great Plains software with its pervasive database; however, with Microsoft’s recent efforts to migrate users to SQL Server and .Net, RLE was facing massive upgrade costs.

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The CRM Advisor
You ask the questions, and our resident CRM guru shares her wisdom.

This week’s question:
“We recently implemented a call center management system as part of our CRM strategy. What key metrics should we be measuring?”

A: For many businesses today, the call center is the “front line” to the customer. Therefore, you want to make sure your agents are performing at optimum levels and delivering the highest quality experience. Read more »

Harris Interactive has recently published its 2nd Annual Customer Experience Impact Report.

The study, which was sponsored by RightNow Technologies, polled over 2,000 adult consumers from various regions across the United States. The report is designed to gauge how clients interact with companies, and how their experiences impact future behaviors. Some of the key findings include:

• 80% of consumers will never return to a company after a negative experience, up from 68% last year.

• 51% cite outstanding service as the primary reason they continue to do business with certain organizations.

• 74% will register a formal complaint, or spread the word to others, after a bad experience.

• Most consumers (60%) indicated that speaking to a live agent was their preferred method of communication.

• 68% cited an inability to reach a live human being as a major source of frustration.

View the entire report. (Available at RightNow.com and registration required)

By Katherine Jones, Director of Marketing at NetSuite

We all know that our sales teams should be leveraging the businesses advantages of mobile devices when they are out of the office. But like most things, it can be easier said than done — that is, done well.

Wireless connectivity has become mainstream in today’s workplace. Here are some stats from IDC and Gartner: IDC says 40% of workers now travel for business and they say this will rise to two-thirds by 2007. Gartner reports that there will be 41.1 million mobile professionals worldwide by year end 2007.

Planning for your mobile device integration is not intuitive — it does take some thought. Here are five points I think are important to remember in creating a mobile workforce.

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