Once you have your organizations and contacts in the system you will want to easily track activities against them. This way you or one of your team members can easily see what is going on with an organization. Once you start using activities you will see how much time it saves you. You will not have to send time trying to remember past conversations or searching your in/out mail box for customer’s emails. Most CRM solutions allow you to align activities with an organization, contact, opportunity, lead or project. But there is a hierarchy you should always follow. Leads, opportunities and projects should always be aligned with a contact. Some solutions might allow you to go around that but you lose the ability to easily see everything going on for a specific account.

You should only implement a CRM solution that allows you to easily configure the different types of activities you want to use. The recommended minimum ones you should use are: Call, Meeting, and Email. Optional ones are: Appointments, Tasks, Fax, and Letter. Whether you use Outlook or Lotus Notes for your email and calendar your CRM solutions should be using the email platforms native forms. This means you should be scheduling meetings, calls or sending an email the way you would as if your CRM solutions didn’t exist. Good examples would be Relavis CRM on the Lotus Notes side and Dynamics CRM on the Outlook side. The forms are exactly what everyone is already using; making it super easy and the information gets tracked in CRM.

Below are some examples of basic activities that can give you an idea on what you should have/configure with your CRM solution.

This example shows a standard Meeting form in Lotus Notes. Notice the added section at the bottom that allows for easy alignment.

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This example shows a standard Meeting form in Dynamics CRM. Notice the ribbon at the top that shows Track in CRM and/or Set Regarding. Those buttons allow for easy alignment.

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This example shows a Call action item. The CRM section is fully expanded so you can see some of the fields some companies want to carry.

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Tags: crm, CRM Basics, crm productivity

Most CRM users spend a majority of their time doing contact management. This consists of tracking organizations and contacts and the activities associated with them. While it is very important for sales reps to track and use this information, it is critical for companies to secure this key customer asset.

Getting your initial set of account information into CRM is easy. Most solutions have utilities that handle the import. If not you can always import from Excel or a flat file. I recommend spending the time to include some key fields at load time or when you enter new information as you use the solution. For each company and user it will vary but some fields are pretty common. You might not need certain information initially but when you do, to have to go back and update it will be a huge job. Below are the minimum recommended fields most CRM users find useful that you should include in your implementation:

Organizations:

Contacts

Contact Management is the heart of your CRM solution. Everything is driven and tracked from it so you need to get this part right. Most solutions will have many fields out of the box and you should be able to easily add or change field names. You should setup the fields to have drop down lists whenever possible to streamline the entry. If you carry these fields from the beginning it will make it so much better for you as you leverage the solution for your sales interactions as well as for marketing.

Tags: crm, CRM Basics

I wish everyone a happy and healthy New Year.

I wanted to make my first posting of the New Year reflective of what I believe 2009 should be about. For me it is about knowledge. The financial crisis has forced me to learn all I can about the markets and to be able to manage my own stock portfolio. I have been in a constant state of learning about stocks, bonds, credit markets, etc… Until 4 months ago I mostly relied on “expert” advice and recommendations. I have now decided that I will not work with any of these “experts” because most never saw this crisis coming or if they did, it was not in their best interest to better position their client’s assets.

I am learning all I can through books, articles, discussions, and collaboration with a group of trusted professionals, friends and family. This has produced a lot of documents that I need to store, share and easily recall.

The same is true for CRM users. We need a place we can easily have access to marketing materials, customer and industry articles, best practices, legal documents, pricing, sample proposals and many other items. The better CRM solutions will have a Knowledge Management component that handles these items. It should be an integral part of your implementation. Besides having the ability to organize and share the information it is a huge win for the reps in getting their acceptance of CRM. The reason is that it usually requires no sales rep input. It is for the marketing group and management to enter information that sales reps can just access. Sales reps initially have their hands full having to enter all their sales information and this is one place they just get to pull information. For that reason, I always try to make Knowledge Management part of phase one for new CRM implementations.

CRM solutions will have their own databases to manage this information and/or interface with third party ones like Lotus Domino Document Manager, Documentum and Sharepoint. But keep it simple initially. Try to stay within the CRM system component and a Sales Library is a good easy start. You can usually publish and categorize the documents pretty easy. As people feel comfortable you can start to use more of the advanced features or third party integrations that will give you things like check in/out and version control.

Whether you are just starting out with CRM, a seasoned veteran or struggling , giving reps and managers easy access to all the peripheral information they need will guarantee you getting 2009 off to a strong CRM start.

Knowledge Management - Sales Library Example (click to enlarge)

Tags: Add new tag, crm, crm productivity, knowledge management