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Mobile CRM is finally catching on — according to this interesting article on CRM Daily about how mobile CRM is becoming more popular than ever and six tips for making sure your sales team is successful.
We all know it’s always been a problem for sales reps and
service reps in the field trying to access their customer and account information.
Here’s a quick summary of Elizabeth’s six tips for mobile success:
For any successful company, Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
is one of the most important factors in customer acquisition. It not
only consists of building extensive relationships with customers and
other businesses, but it also allows a company to find out how their
product is viewed by their audiences.
In order to have a
successful product, a business must have a great relationship with the
public. For instance, if Disney were to come out with a new product
line, they would have to know who their audience is, what they expect
out of a product, and the type of quality they want. Although it sounds
like a difficult quest, it is actually quite easy to find this sort of
information. Luckily, CRM software can help find out these answers.
One of the most basic of tools that every internet marketer needs to
utilize is the autoresponder. If you are trying to make money on the
internet and you’re not using an autoresponder, you are really missing
the mark. This article will describe the essentials of an autoresponder
and how you can use one to help you succeed in your online business.
First
of all, it is important to understand what your autoresponder really
is. Many people think of them as an automatic responder to customer
needs (hence the name -autoresponder), but to stop there is really not
giving them their full credit. To fully utilize your autoresponder, you
need to begin seeing them as your own personal sales force. This sales
force though, unlike their human counterpart, will never tire, works
24/7, doesn’t need a raise every year and NEVER calls in sick.
Continue reading “Autoresponders – 5 Keys to Make Them Work For You”
The primary reasons that sales managers fail is that they don’t know
how to manage their people, and they don’t manage a highly effective
selling processes. Just as an engineering manager needs to be a pretty
competent engineer, so does a sales manager need to be a pretty
competent salesperson. However, in both cases, their primary
responsibility is to manage the performance of their staff. And, both
must have a good understanding of modern management principles beyond a
few readings of “The One Minute Manger.â€
By contrast, most
engineering managers know that technology is evolving so quickly that
their managerial functions prevent them from keeping up with the
technology at the level of a functioning engineer. However, they know
enough about the latest technology to manage it.
Continue reading “Top 10 Reasons Sales Managers Fail-And What To Do About It”
Here’s another great post by Denis Pombriant making his predictions for CRM in 2007. He first talks about how the economy plays a big role in what’s to come and then goes into how he sees the on-demand CRM market continuing to blossom. Another interesting comment was that these companies need come up with more innovative on-demand ideas otherwise they could be lost in the evolution. Here’s the full article:
When making forecasts for a year ahead, I have
always found the "greater fool" theory comforting. In short, it takes a
fool to make a forecast, and a greater one to believe it.
On balance then, I think it wise to hide these predictions from
children, the gullible, the insane, etc. Some people will look at this
and see doom and gloom because there are some things to be concerned
about, but the concerns are simply the environment we have to deal
with. We can still find some ways to make lemonade out of our lemons,
and that’s what I hope to do here.
Quick growth within a company is usually a blend of good news and bad
news. The benefit is that the enterprise is successful, and increased
hiring and beefed-up operations are an indications of momentum.
But there can be growing pains, as well. If an enterprise hasn’t
anticipated more employees or planned more robust strategies, it can be
tough for systems to be flexible enough to accommodate the change.
You know the argument: SaaS applications are great for green field
deployments, but difficult or risky to integrate with those legacy
applications where all the really important data lives.
With its recent announcement of ApexConnect, an integration tool to
connect on-demand applications to back-end systems, analysts say
Salesforce.com has moved to stuff that bogeyman back in the closet and
has given SaaS enterprise-level capabilities.
The company said that ApexConnect integration services will be
built on Salesforce’s Apex programming language for multitenant
applications announced last month. The new tool will allow the
approximately 400 third-party applications on the company’s AppExchange
platform to work with legacy applications, Web services, and other
on-demand applications.
In 2005, just a week after announcing its plans to acquire CRM giant Siebel Systems Inc., Oracle Corp. executives took to the stage at the annual OpenWorld conference and pledged to continue to support and develop Siebel’s successful Software as a Service (SaaS) offering Siebel OnDemand.
It was an easy decision. While Siebel was struggling in the competitive enterprise applications market, the OnDemand division was doing well. Competitors like Salesforce.com, RightNow and NetSuite had already proven the success of the SaaS model, and Oracle didn’t have a SaaS CRM application of its own. Yet, in the year-plus since the acquisition, there has been relatively little news surrounding Oracle’s Siebel OnDemand — when compared to the flurry of activity, press releases and marketing that Siebel put out after first launching the product.
In the year and half after Siebel first announced OnDemand, it issued eight releases of the product and went on to acquire UpShot, an on-demand sales force automation tool, and Ineto, a hosted telephony firm. Siebel also spent plenty of time trumpeting customer wins and sparring with Salesforce.com. In contrast, since OpenWorld 2005, Oracle has issued one announcement about Siebel OnDemand version 10, in April.
Part of that may just be corporate style.
Continue reading “Whatever happened to Siebel’s OnDemand CRM?”
It’s hard to believe that it’s time to make
predictions for the year ahead — it feels like I just finished that
job, but here we are again. I dug up my 2006 predictions and was amazed
at how close some of them were. The lesson I derive here is that I must
not have been trying hard enough.
The funny thing is that no matter how advanced and risky you think
your predictions are, reality and the march of time have a way of
making them all look rather tame. That attitude is especially needed
for the next two columns — this one looks backward and the next one
tries to look into the year ahead. First things first.
A role-based security plan for your
company’s customer relationship management software needs to fit in
with larger company guidelines dictating customer privacy, says NeoCase
Software’s Herve Pluche. He advises companies to map existing business
processes and compliance requirements, and adopt current practices as a
starting point.
In a CRM database, each record has numerous fields that may include
confidential information, not just about your customers, but also about
your sales team and business operations. In the B2C world selling to
consumers, confidential customer information often includes social security
numbers, credit card details, and home addresses. While, in the B2B
world — selling business to business that is — confidential
information can include purchase histories that represent millions of
dollars in sales, as well as potentially confidential information about
your sales team, like sales commissions, sales goals, and a multitude
of other strategic details.
Continue reading “Role-Based CRM – Securing Customer Privacy”