Introduction to CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy for managing all your companys relationships and interactions with your customers and potential customers. It helps you improve your profitability. CRM enables you to focus on your organizations relationships with individual people whether those are customers, service users, colleagues or suppliers. Some of the biggest gains in productivity can come from moving beyond CRM as a sales and marketing tool and embedding it in your business from HR to customer services and supply chain management. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) encompasses activities and processes intended to help an organization understand, communicate with, and service the needs of, customers and prospects.

What is CRM? Customer relationship management (CRM) has the business purpose of intelligently finding, marketing, selling to and servicing customers. CRM is a broadly used term that covers concepts used by companies, and public institutions to manage their relationships with customers and stakeholders. Technologies that support this business purpose include the capture, storage and analysis of customer, vendor, partner, and internal process information. Functions that support this business purpose include Sales, Marketing and Customer Service, Training, Professional Development, Performance Management, Human Resource Development and compensation.

Why CRM . Why CRM matters A CRM system helps your business grow because it tracks the history of customer interactions. Why is this important? Because tracking is everything. From calls made and emails sent, to meetings held, presentations delivered, and even the next steps needed to close the deal or grow that customer account. To run smoothly, your business needs customer relationship data thats automatically updated, with instant access for employees, and provides a full history of all communications, meetings, and documents shared. With a CRM system, your business has one place to store every customer, every lead, every service request, all of their contact info, preferences,and history so your conversations are always personal, relevant, and up-to-date. All available on mobile, desktop and through powerful reports & dashboards. Marketers can also use CRM to better understand the pipeline of prospective sales making forecasting simpler and more accurate. You'll have clear visibility of the path from enquiry to sale, available wherever & whenever you need it.

Customer satisfaction is the key to success in any business. In order for a business to consistently maintain success, it needs to satisfy its customers by providing high quality products or services at the right price. Thats why businesses need to constantly interact with customers in order to understand their true needs.It needs to track and analyze those interactions in a systematic and organized fashion in order to build lasting customer relationship which translates to long-term success.- See more at: http://www.rishabhsoft.com/blog/5-key-challenges-in-crm-implementation#sthash.z68oE43j.dpuf

Current Challenges.

What CRM can achieve

Improve customer satisfaction

Improve operational process and productivity

Automate reporting, dashboard, & predictive analysis.

CRM Products

Market Scenario of CRM

Gartners latestCRM market share reports that the worldwide CRM market grew 13.7% from $18B in 2012 to $20.4B in 2013, with 41% of all systems sold in 2013 being SaaS-based.Key take-aways: Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) is the worldwide leader in CRM software, with 16.1% market share. Salesforce grew 30.3% from 2012, when the company attained revenues of $2.52B, outdistancingSAPs 12.7% growth,MicrosoftMSFT-1.37%s 22.8% andIBMIBM+0.34%s 22% yearly growth. Market shares are illustrated in the following graphic, Worldwide CRM Software Spending by Vendor, 2013.

Salesforce grew 24.7% faster than its nearest competitor from 2012 to 2013, attaining 30.3% growth in worldwide revenues. Microsoft achieved 22.8% growth, followed by IBM (22%), SAP (12.7%), other companies (9.9%) andOracleORCL-1.48%(4%).

41% of all CRM systems sold in 2013 were SaaS-based. Gartners analysis shows that companies of all sizes are looking for easier-to-deploy CRM systems capable of replacing legacy systems, quickly implement net-new applications and providing complementary CRM system functionality. North American CRM sales were 52.9% of the worldwide market in 2013, with Western Europe being the fastest growing with a 15.2% increase in spending from 2012 to 2013. Together these regions contributed 80% of worldwide CRM revenues and technologies in 2013. Gartner reports that Asia/Pacific (APAC) and China still achieved double-digit growth rates while noting these are nascent markets also experiencing uncertain economic conditions including currency fluctuations.

Vendors of CRM

1)Sales Force2)Oracle sales Cloud3) Microsoft Dynamics CRM4)Sugar CRM5)Work6)Emerging Vendors

1. WorkbooksThoughWorkbookshas been around for less than a decade, their successful CRM solution is a favorite of many. Workbooks CRM is designed specifically for small and midsized businesses, and is offered as a web-based solution. Workbooks was rated #1 for Customer Satisfaction on the G2Crowd Report on CRM software.2. NimbleNimbleoffers customers a reimagined contact management system that values relationships over contacts. This emerging solution incorporates information from numerous social media and email sources (think: Gmail, Skype, Facebook and more) and makes sense of it all in one simple Contact Record.3. InsightlyInsightlyprovides a CRM solution that is inexpensive, robust and mobilethe perfect tool for small businesses. Founded in 2009, this innovative company merges traditional CRM features like contact management and file sharing with new features like project management and powerful email integration.4. ZohoEmerging vendorZohooffers a number of business applications (like CRM) that businesses can pick from to build a comprehensive solution. Though Zoho CRM doesnt have all the bells and whistles found in other solutions, its affordability and potential for customization earn it a place on this list of emerging vendors.

Challenges.

The challenges associated with a CRM solution include the need to invest significant amount of money in the process. ===== Cost & investmentAs the CRM solutions do not come cheap, businesses must make the required investments and be prepared to wait and let the benefits actualize instead of being impatient and demanding instant solutions.====Paitence

The point here is that CRM implementations are usually long drawn affairs, which means that the commitment from the businesses must be deep and meaningful. ===Commitment.

Further, there is the slip between the cup and the lip as far as CRM implementations are concerned. These relate to the lack of coordination between the businesses and the vendors that usually result in the requirements being not met because the vendors did not understand the requirements properly and the businesses were pressurizing the vendors for faster implementations and quicker results. Apart from these challenges, the users need to be trained properly and this is an aspect that does not receive the attention it deserves. This is because of the fact that unless the users are trained in using the CRM software, there are likely to be mismatches between the user expectations and the reality of the implementation.

Statisiitcs.

1. CRM is expected to grow to a $36.5 billion market worldwide within the next three years! (Source:Forbes)2. 43% of customers use fewer than half the features they have on their CRM. (Source:Salesloft)>>Tweet this stat!3. 72% of users would give up all the extra features just to get a CRM thats easier to use. (Source:Salesloft)>>Tweet this stat!4. Only 47% of all companies have CRM software. (Source:Smart Insights)>>Tweet this stat!5. 24% of companies use SaaS to complement their on-site CRM solutions. (Source:Baseline)>>Tweet this stat!6. The average ROI for CRM is $5.60 for every dollar spent! (Source:Baseline)>>Tweet this stat!7. CRM increases sales by up to 29%. (Source:Salesforce)>>Tweet this stat!8. 25% of Facebook and Twitter users expect a reply to their complaints via social media in less than 1 hour. CRM can do this. (Source:Media Bistro)>>Tweet this stat!9. 66% of social media users expect a response within a day. (Source:Media Bistro)>>Tweet this stat!10. 79% of all marketing leads are never converted to sales. (Source:Pardot)>>Tweet this stat!11. 65% of small businesses who use social business tools expect positive ROI on their CRM. (Source:Salesforce)>>Tweet this stat!12. CRM is the #1 enterprise software in projected growth. (Source:Salesloft)>>Tweet this stat!