Idea #18 – CRM

As you can see, the unofficial theme of the week is free or inexpensive tools to help you manage your business or operation better. Today I want to touch on  Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Salesforce/Marketing Automation.

If the first thing you thought of was “Siebel” or “Oracle” when you read CRM in the subject then get it out of your head now; the days of expensive and complex systems are dead.

Let me start by explaining by example how I use our hosted Salesforce Automation and CRM application to run our business.

1. Prospect requests information from our website
2. Information is auto populated into our CRM system and emailed to our sales rep
3. The lead is qualified and the history tracking process begins.
4. Tasks are created and activities are logged against the account
5. An “opportunity” is created and the expected revenue goes into the pipeline and forecast
6. Opportunity is “Won” and the Account becomes a customer
7. Customer is given a login to our support portal and has access to our on-line knowledge base
8. Customer opens a trouble ticket, which is automatically emailed to support. The customer has access to check the status of their ticket on-line at anytime
9. Support closes the case, customer is emailed the notification and solution

Now, through out this process I have access to the entire history. So I can see what trouble tickets or bugs are being worked, I can see where our leads are coming from and at any time what our revenue forecast is and expected sales close dates. Even more beautiful I can pull up a customer record and see every activity that’s occurred for that person or account.

Two of the main camps in CRM right now are Hosted a la Salesforce.com or SugarCRM and premise based based via SugarCRM. You can also look at it as Open Source (SugarCRM) and proprietary (Salesforce.com).

So which way do you go? We’ll in my case I use all of the above. Let me explain.

Latigent has some complex needs which simply aren’t handled well with SugarCRM, so I chose Salesforce.com for a couple key features:

1. Customer Support- Salesforce allows us to create a custom portal for our customers to access our knowledge base and create trouble tickets. All of this activity is logged back to the customer account. SugarCRM relies on third party apps like Mambo to provide this functionality and it doesn’t exist in their hosted offering.
2. AppExchange – Salesforce has a plethora of free and pay-as-you apps that inter-operate directly with their hosted platform. Therefore I can run Product Management, Project Management and Email Marketing from within the same portal; and you guessed it, all of the activities log to the customer account. There are also apps that service a multitude of verticals such as Real Estate, Health Care and Financial Services. SugarCRM now offers SugarExchange, but the number and quality of apps available is lagging far behind salesforce.
3. Partner Relationship Management – Salesforce recently released their integrated channel management portal. We’ll be deploying this in Q1 2007 to further streamline our operation.

Now, I mentioned earlier that I use both Salesforce and SugarCRM. Why you ask? I have SugarCRM installed for my “Personal Contact Relationship Management”. But more on that in a later post ;-p

-Chris

-part of the 60 ideas in 60 days series-