What is CRM and Why You Do Need One

Whether you are starting a new business or trying to grow a small, existing one, the first thing you should do is organize everything about it. Have your customer database in order, know exactly what your sales team is doing and what partners you have beside you. All of these are not simple tasks when you begin gaining more and more customers.

And no, an Excel sheet is not the optimal solution for organizing. After that exact phrase comes the CRM. I believe you already know what a Customer Relationship Management solution is. And if you do not, all the information you need about it is this: a CRM is a software solution that can organize your entire activity occupying less space than an agenda and containing more information you can ever inclose in the Office Package.

Over time, CRM software got more and more complex and gained a lot of features that can help you do almost everything in an automated way. But statistics show that managers and salespeople use only 30 % of the features of a CRM. Taking that into consideration, my advice to you is not to suffocate your sales team with unnecessary features and stick to a basic, customizable CRM solution.

Try Zimplu for free and get a complex, but uncomplicated CRM solution.

Now that we cleared that out, let’s see what you can do with a CRM solution to improve your business.

Improve your customer relationship. The first thing your CRM can help you with is organize your sales team and your help desk team to serve better the needs of your clients. Know when to call whom and find their contact in seconds. Know what was your last conversation with that client even if you hadn’t talked to him directly.

Increase revenues. Believe it or not, a CRM solution will put a plus into your sales. Organizing your database, you will get to know your customers better and, afterwards, target your products strategically to the customers that need them most. Your efforts will be more effective and the profits will come easier.

Market your product better. Knowing who bought what, when and how long took him to purchase can help the marketing team to launch their campaigns to the exact segment of population you target. Without a CRM that is an almost impossible task, but with the help of one, the public are segmented properly and more effectively for your business’s growth.

Ease your in-house communication. With a CRM you have all the data about your customers, sales team and partners in one place organized to be found in seconds. Every sales person’s conversation can be written down and everyone will know about what to talk about when calling that customer. Of course, a manager can get reports about sales and sales team every time he wants for a better leading operation.

Save time. The most important asset none of the people in business market have is time. Automation of your internal and external processes save you and your team a lot of time to spend on other important aspects like soft skills, aspects that can never be automatized and that will improve your business’s image and bring the human touch.

So think about it. Is your business big enough to need a CRM solution or is that the reason it is not?

History of CRM

    
CustomerRelationship Management (CRM) is one of those magnificent concepts that swept the business world in the 1990’s with the promise of forever changing the way businesses small and large interacted with their customer bases. In the short term, however, it proved to be an unwieldy process that was better in theory than in practice for a variety of reasons. First among these was that it was simply so difficult and expensive to track and keep the high volume of records needed accurately and constantly update them.

How it started ?

     The 1980’s saw the emergence of database marketing, which was simply a catch phrase to define the practice of setting up customer service groups to speak individually to all of a company’s customers.

     In the 1990’s companies began to improve on Customer Relationship Management by making it more of a two-way street. Instead of simply gathering data for their own use, they began giving back to their customers not only in terms of the obvious goal of improved customer service, but in incentives, gifts and other perks for customer loyalty.

     In the beginning there was PIM, or Personal Information Manager - a limited use, all purpose electronic diary with basic database functionality, that you could use to start organizing your names and addresses, and time, amongst other things. These PIM's are good personal productivity tools, but they tend to fall over when applied in a business environment with a more demanding requirement.

The PIM slowly morphed into the CMS, or Contact Management System, as a result of its increasing take on by people in sales and marketing, incorporating a more specific set of requirements to help them scale the coalface. Contact Managers are fantastic, flexible productivity tools for most anybody or organization. They are also more robust, with improved industrial strength database engines, that are better able to manage larger volumes of data.

Contact Management software became SFA, as in Sales Force Automation systems, what now forms the cornerstone of modern CRM applications. CRM is short for Customer Relationship Management, which is the industry term for the set of methodologies and tools that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organized way.

Not to mention that some mutated into ERM, sometimes referred to as eCRM(electronic Customer Relationship Management), PRM, with Pro and Lite versions of everything to take products in and out of their respective weight divisions.

Nowadays CRM

    Real Customer Relationship Management as it’s thought of today really began in earnest in the early years of this century. As software companies began releasing newer, more advanced solutions that were customizable across industries, it became feasible to really use the information in a dynamic way.

Instead of feeding information into a static database for future reference, CRM became a way to continuously update understanding of customer needs and behavior. Branching of information, sub-folders, and custom tailored features enabled companies to break down information into smaller subsets so that they could evaluate not only concrete statistics, but information on the motivation and reactions of customers.

     The Internet provided a huge boon to the development of these huge databases by enabling offsite information storage also called SAAS(Software as a Service). A good exemple for nowadays CRM is Zimplu CRM which is able to store companies database in cloud computing. Users are now able to access their information wherever they are.
    SAAS is not a new concept, in our days using a CRM software will slow you down. Creating and launching a CRM software in 2012 it's even worse, it will be a big failure for any company. What is really coming from behind is Mobile CRM, experts expect that Mobile CRM market will boom in 2012, an opportunity of billions of dollars.