CRM In Action

In Orlando’s highly competitive vacation market, it’s not good enough to have great values in home rentals—you have to deliver the best customer service, too. For Florida Leisure Vacation Home Rentals and Sales, delivering the level of service they wanted was becoming increasingly labor and time intensive.

Florida Leisure manages an inventory of more than 65 privately owned, luxurious 3-7 bedroom homes all,with private heated swimming pools. Unlike the typical time-share or villa setting, Florida Leisure’s properties are spread out over 4 or 5 of the most desirable neighborhoods in Orlando surrounding Walt Disney World and other tourist attractions.

The company manages rentals when the homeowners are not using the properties or if they rent them out themselves, so maintaining excellent communications with the owners and maintaining an up-to-the-minute database of availabilities is critical.

Poor Access to Information

As Florida Leisure gathered more information about their owners and renters, they found it increasingly difficult to produce reports that provided the access they needed to the data.“We had been using Access for our database, and it just wasn’t working out for what we needed,” said Florida Leisure Marketing Director Cathy Goonen. “We have an online booking engine through Rent One Online, so our customers can either go through our Web site to book homes directly or they can call us and we will place the reservation through Rent One Online.

“We take that information and put it in a backup database so that we can capture customer information and history to use for marketing purposes and customer service. We were trying to do that via Access and it just wasn’t giving us the information we needed.

We weren’t able to sort it the way we needed it, we weren’t able to get the reports we needed and it wasn’t user friendly at all.” Goonen began to search for a new solution that would give them the reporting and data retrieval they needed to manage their business.

She reviewed five server- or Web-based solutions and settled on Entellium eSalesForce. “We’re a small office with 65 homes, and we’re responsible for all the administrative work, training and follow up. We needed a tool that could automate a lot of the reporting that we were trying to do by hand. Of all of them that I checked out, Entellium was by far the most user friendly. It was the easiest for us to understand and integrate existing information from the Access system.” Read more »

We Don’t Need CRM!

Mention the prospect of a CRM system to a sales team that is not automated and your suggestion may not be greeted with excitement.

In fact, some sales representatives believe that the primary purpose of CRM is to enhance sales management functions such as performance reporting and forecasting, and that it does little to make the day-to-day activities of the sales force easier and more effective.

Others may perceive CRM to be too complicated, and fear that the system will add a new layer of complexity to their jobs. Or they may fear that the tracking of their activities will reveal inadequacies.

But, for many businesses, CRM has clearly demonstrated its ability to provide immediate value to the sales force by improving their ability to sell, and significantly increasing their success rates. In fact, a recent survey conducted by research firm CSO Insights found that almost 72% of firms surveyed indicated that CRM was having a positive affect on sales force performance.

Read more »

Email Marketing Resources

Looking for some insight into email marketing strategies that work? 
Want to learn more about the latest and greatest email communication trends? 

The Web can be a valuable resource for today’s marketers, and these sites provide a wealth of timely and up-to-date information about this important aspect of customer outreach. 

ClickZ
The Internet’s largest resource of interactive marketing news, information, commentary, advice, opinion, research, and reference.

About.com
A compilation of articles and other resources about the newest tried and true email marketing tips and secrets. 

iMedia Connections
This trade publisher and event producer serves the interactive media and marketing industries.  Their site contains a variety of information channels, including one that highlights email techniques. 

Marketing Sherpa
A research firm that specializes in tracking and reporting on today’s most effective strategies in all aspects of marketing. 

BeRelevant
An online blog that discussed best practices in email marketing. 

Email Marketer’s Club
A social network for email marketers across the globe.

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

This week’s question: “How can we extend our email security solution to provide the same level of protection for our desktop messaging applications?”

A: The instant messaging (IM) services offered by AOL, Yahoo, and other vendors have emerged as valuable productivity and communication tools for many businesses today.  In fact, in a recent Gartner survey, more than 70 percent of organizations claimed to rely on instant messaging, in some form, to facilitate fast and effective collaboration among employees, as well as between staff members and clients and other external business partners. 

Read more »