Doing business is less of a buy/sell and more of a relationship thing.
There are various businesses who do the buy/sell kind of business and spend quite some amount of money trying to get newer customers, so, their cost/customer is very high.

Typically, PUSH is the word in these kinds of organizations. These feed on the hope of new customers being pushed the product each time. This is not scalable.

Slowly PULL is the way relationships are happening ie the seller is actually trying to PULL customers his side and indulge in a long and sincere relationship. This makes the relation symbiotic. Most of the time, we buy based on emotion and this further helps the cause. Since this is an emotion-based selling, the cost/customer is low. The propensity of the customer to buy more from the same folks from whom he had bought last time and with whom he shares a good rapport is very high. This results in reduction of the cost per customer aquisition. In these cases, the potential of upselling and cross-selling is very high.

Sales becomes the by-product in this case and is the reward in its own right.

All the above you knew anyway, so what is news?

The news is this :- A good CRM works on the ability to capture the meta-data present in the relationship. Once you capture that, you have to mine it to see the gems that lie within. And then, you have a long relationship with the customer which results in WIN-WIN for both.

So try and figure out what all you need to capture when you consider using the CRM. Begin with the end in mind [or at least whatever extent the end is visible that is ...]

Archie

Truespace 3 is a cool 3D tool which can give a kickstart experience to anyone who has interest in 3D. At Zoho CRM, I am using Truespace to draw some icons or part of icons.

 

Today, I created a trash bin icon and it sure came out very well. The following image shows the Trash Can icon rendered in Ray-Tracing mode with multiple lights around. Yes, it does contain reflective finish too. :-)

 

The below shown image is the full size render. Further image editing is needed to resize and add shadows.

 

 - Rajesh Sundaram

Data is God in CRM systems!

The one common mistake committed is to have some data put into the CRM system, sometimes. No wonder CRM is blamed for failures.

CRM does not have the intelligence to keep you abreast of the happenings. It is a tool and it is a tool which is fed data by you to analyze and give you reports that you can plan/execute upon. So the efficacy of your plan is directly proportional to the quality of data in your CRM system.

Find out what is the level of granularity that you want your data to be tracked in. Figure out how good your data needs to be, then find someone to validate it. The first is the easy part, the latter is the hard part. It is a tough and boring thing to do but once the system is in place, you can swear by the CRM system.

Everyone has different metrics on what is the latest data for him - Hurricane Ike's occurence may be the latest data for someone who studies Hurricanes, the last time Mt. Etna had a blast couple of years might be the latest for someone who studies volcanoes, etc. So come up with what is your metric.

Remember, in all these cases, the age of the data is a known metric and is adhered to as the standard. Come up with something of that sort for your system too! It may just be a few minutes/seconds if it is some SOS system or days if it is some sales data that you need to track. This will help you get an understanding of what reports to generate and what you understand from the reports.

Archie