What Is CRM?

Brilliant Marketing? A Numbers Game!

Great ideas and innovative approaches notwithstanding, brilliant marketing is still a numbers game. How much do your sales cost you? How can your marketing deliver more prospects at lower cost? These two questions can lead to increased performance of your business. And "CRM" offers the tools that answer these questions.

CRM stands for "Customer Relationship Management", but its power goes beyond what we normally think of as "customers", "relationships", or "management"! . For the purpose of CRM, customers might be defined as anyone who has ever been — or might one day become — a customer; a relationship might be defined as any history you or anyone in your company has had with these people, together with any channel, event, or correspondence associated with that person, and "management" might refer to strategic analysis of all this data in order to make marketing decisions.

What sort of analysis can be done based on this data?

• Compare the value of marketing channels.
• Evaluate the performance of your sales reps.
• See where your best leads are coming from.
• Calculate the returns from certain sets of customers.

And what sort of actions can be based on this data?

• Easily follow up with people who have not ordered for a long time
• Target your largest customers with special offers.
• Direct a greater percentage of your marketing to the channels that are delivering the lowest costs per customer.
• Take measures to improve the performance of under-performing channels.
• Easily generate "personal" and "customized" offers for cross sections of your customers.

Brilliance For Dummies (and Small Companies Too!)

"CRM" was first floated as a buzzword in the 1990s, but the concept had some critical flaws. Much of the concept was untested, the complex methods they required alienated all but the most dedicated practitioners, and the lack of integration with everyday office applications meant a steep learning curve and a high on-going investments in customization.

As the concept of CRM matured, all this began to improve. CRM tools were developed to enhance — not replace — the way people work, and they have evolved to be much more modular and customizable. This maturity is most clear in Microsoft's recent CRM 3.0, which seamlessly injects its full-featured functionality into standard MS Office work environments.