By Katherine Jones, Director of Marketing at NetSuite

Many CRM systems begin to struggle as business growth expands across borders and currencies, resulting in poor visibility across the entire business organization. Consider a global organization: sales information and results cover the territory, the country, the region, and then have to roll up together at corporate headquarters.

With typical sales force automation point systems, sales, forecasts, quotas and commission calculations cannot be accurately consolidated as they cross borders or continents. If your growth plans include crossing country borders, be sure to use these criteria in checking your potential vendors:

• Sales reps and sales management in each country need control of their orders, forecast, quota and commissions in appropriate local currency.
• Accurate currency translation for roll-up of subsidiary costs, revenue, and commissions to regional and corporate headquarters.

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By: Patty Azzarello, president, Azzarello Group

Big Help for Small Business: How Companies Waste Leads

I have worked with many different sized companies and one of the universal truths I have seen is that sales people basically hate leads that are generated by marketing.

Unless of course, the prospect has money that he will lose if he doesn’t spend it today, and he is calling you to place an order.

Sales people only like HOT leads.

I don’t say this to take a shot at sales people. Effective sales people do a heroic job of cultivating their own business, and getting their own leads based on referrals.

Warm or cool leads generated by marketing by comparison are viewed as “action items”, which get in the way of developing the business they are working on.

So why bother generating leads?

If you are in the marketing role, generating leads is built into the DNA of your job description. It’s also makes for a clear measurement: how many leads did you generate and how much did it cost?

The basic goal is to spend the right amount of money and generate high quality leads that sales people use and turn into business.

The real goal is to leverage that same marketing investment to generate more HOT leads.

I have seen two basic practices make a huge difference.

Don’t Throw Away Warm Leads

This is one of the most well studied and most ignored marketing practices.

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By: John I. Todor, Author of Addicted Customers

Put Your Offering in Context—One Meaningful to Customers

Declining profit margins and limited customer loyalty, these are common concerns of many businesses. When customers treat product like commodities and shop on price or convenience they force businesses to aggressively compete with each other. Unfortunately, this just exacerbates the situation.

How can a business differentiate on value, keep margin high and win customer commitment? Decommoditize! Put their offering in a context that is meaningful and valuable to the customer.

What is context? Context is the interrelated conditions or situation in which something exists; the circumstances that define meaning or value.

How can a company put their offering in a context that is meaningful and valuable to customers? By looking at the offering from the customers’ perspective. 

Mimeo.com is a great example of a company that did just that.

Mimeo.com sells printing. In most instances, printing is a commodity. Printers compete on price. Most printers are struggling and in recent years many have gone out of business. Yet, Mimeo.com has been very successful.

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What the CRM Experts are Talking About

What’s the latest in customer relationship management?  The leading industry analysts are saying the following about the most current CRM techniques and trends:  

CRM applications and related customer service processes continue to stay among the top five critical priorities for CIOs.  Interest in CRM solutions remains very high within corporations, government agencies, and higher education institutions alike.
 - 2007 Gartner Survey 

“Lagging indicators in monthly reports do not give companies the type of customer data that they really need to make decisions.  It’s in predictive indicators and real time analytics for decision-making that the real benefit lies.”
- AMR Research Report on Customer Analytics

The growth for hosted CRM continues at a rapid pace, with an estimated 76 percent of overall expansion in the industry expected to come from on-demand solutions.  Revenues for this segment of the CRM market will top $3.6 billion by the end of 2008.
 - IDC

The CRM market was quite strong in 2007.  By year end, total sales are expected to hit nearly $74 billion.  Software applications represent approximately $21 billion of that number, with services making up the rest.
- Forrester Research

Fastened to the Future

For most consumers, the fastener aisle at the local hardware store—with its hundreds of screws, nuts, bolts and washers— is daunting enough. For Uneeda Bolt & Screw Company, that miniscule inventory hardly represents a sample.

Family-owned Uneeda Bolt & Screw was founded in 1954 in a New York City sub-basement. In its current 40,000-square-foot warehouse just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, the company is a one-stop supplier for more than 4,000 commercialcustomers. The company sells more than 80,000 specific items, adds 30-50 new items every day and carries an inventory of more than six billion quality fasteners.

In addition to being an authorized distributor of premium brands like Apex, ACT, POP, Marson, Recoil, Brass Craft, Heyco and DTI, the company has built its reputation on the ability to produce custom products in virtually any quantity using any material. Its computerized system can match all painting and powder coatings, and its electronic bagging and boxing equipment can create a wide variety of customized packaging, including instruction sheets, custom labels and bar codes.

“It’s a very complex business,” said Ron Tantillo, the company’s Director of Sales. “It’s not just ‘Here’s a screw.’ There may be two different screws and the only difference between them is the spacing in the threads. That’s a huge difference.”

Falling Through the Cracks

Managing a business this complex takes an extraordinary amount of attention to details. When Tantillo joined the company, he realized the CRM software the company was using was not up to the task.

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Jim Ward - President, BrainSell

What’s a Hybrid CRM Solution?

It’s the best of all worlds. Hosted and on-premise customer relationship management software. In fact — it’s the new market trend.

If you’re looking for are looking for the benefits of a hosted CRM solutions, such as low IT resource requirements and low cost of ownership, but you’re concerned about the security of your data (and you should be) since recent phishing scams have attacked some of the most well know pure hosting solutions, then a hybrid CRM solution is probably what you’ll require.

A hybrid CRM solution provides the ability to go with a purely hosted option, however it will also allow you to purchase the software and install the web solution on premise. Pure web solutions, like SageCRM, are easy to maintain (no client installs), can be maintained remotely by a business partner, and the total cost of ownership is so much lower than a monthly hosting fee. Do the math and you’ll likely find that in 2 years of hosting fees you’ve probably paid for the purchased system 2X or more depending on the size of your implementation. The cost of hosted CRM is one of the reasons why hybrid CRM is fast becoming the market trend.

“For any entertainment company, whether a sports team or not, NetSuite makes perfect sense,” says Stewart. “It lets you really understand your customers and their buying habits, which lets you better serve them while building your own business.”

–Cameron Stewart, Interactive Marketing Manager for the A’s

CRM in Action: Oakland Athletics

With the 2005 baseball season in full swing, it may be too early to tell how the Oakland Athletics will fare on the field—but off the diamond, the results are clear: With NetSuite CRM providing a more efficient, flexible way to track sales, the team has been able to improve customer—and advertiser—satisfaction, while laying the groundwork for improved marketing campaigns and bigger sales.

In just six months, the A’s have been able to better manage and track sales leads, and reduce the errors that were an embarrassing side-effect of its old paper-based sales system. “We no longer have different sales representatives calling the same leads, and with NetSuite’s reporting capabilities, we get a real-time look at what’s selling and who is buying it,” says Cameron Stewart, Interactive Marketing Manager for the A’s. “Before, it took so long to compile data that everything was always out-of-date.” Read more »

By Chuck Schaeffer - CEO, Aplicor

This post is the second in a series which highlights fundamental differences among SaaS CRM applications.

The majority of hosted CRM software publishers have yet to deliver market specific business solutions for routinely recognized market segments. For the most part, on-demand solutions still trail the media and marketing hype, the industry is still in its infancy and many hosted software publishers view the customer market as a single, giant green field selling opportunity.

This lack of market segmentation is not to be unexpected when compared with previous application software evolutions. When the earliest mainframe and host-based software applications became ready for customer acquisition, the primary customer targeting was not based on company size, geography or industry, but instead on who could afford the cost of procurement. With the release of client/server business applications in the early 90’s, the vendors’ targeting was across the board from start-ups forecasting big growth or small clients desiring to upgrade from LAN-based business software to the largest of companies seeking to replace rigid and monolithic mainframe applications.
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By Katherine Jones, Director of Marketing at NetSuite

For years, the mantra for SFA and CRM systems has been to achieve a 360° view of the customer.  The sad truth, however, is that traditional standalone Sales Force Automation solutions are not able to deliver this complete view for the sales force and leave major “blind spots” on key customer activity with the company. 

The important intersection of sales teams and their customers is central to optimizing sales effectiveness. This means that real-time visibility into every aspect of the customer life cycle from initial lead through revenue transactions is vital.  Having this information within one business solution improves productivity and efficiency across the entire sales and support teams.  Without that broader visibility, the sales rep is driving blind and can easily run off the road by not knowing customer purchase, service, or payment history.  However, when businesses rely on a single integrated system, the sales team and its management can obtain more timely, accurate data while reducing the need to chase down information from disparate systems and to reiteratively enter data in multiple applications.

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

This week’s question:
“We are in the midst of our CRM implementation, and our consultant is recommending extensive customization. How much modification should an out-of-the-box CRM solution typically need?”

A: There is no black-and-white answer when it comes to CRM customization. The level of customization required will vary greatly from one company to the next, and will depend on a multitude of factors, including the functionality contained within the solution you chose, the level of complexity and uniqueness in your customer-facing processes, and the needs of your users.

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