CRM: Demand Through Delivery

December 8th, 2015

by Rebecca Dutcher

Managing the Customer Experience with CRM

This guest blog is from one of our AMA West Michigan Sponsors, DPT. Henry Morley, founder and Managing Partner at DPT, has provided insight in CRM solutions and touches on information from recent presentations from Martha Pease, Empathy in Marketing and Jay Hidalgo, Developing You Demand Generation Processes.  Henry is a proven project leader and business strategist with more than 20 years experience helping companies grow and become more efficient.

Demand Generation and lead management were primary topics at the November AMA luncheon. Jay Hidalgo’s message centered around defining six key ingredients to manage and generate demand to get prospects into your sales funnel. Aligning with that message, generating and managing leads needs to be included with your sales, service, and other touchpoints as a critical part of your overall CRM strategy. At the end of the day, it’s all about helping manage the customer experience from demand through delivery.

One of the other key messages from the event was standardizing and defining your processes, including the customer buying and lead nurturing processes. Building on that message, a best practice approach needs to include driving strategy first, defining your processes, then applying the right technology to meet your needs.

Wondering how you can enhance your CRM strategy? Take a look at three universal principles when developing a CRM strategy:

  • Don’t select the software first.
    Define your strategy and vision, then the processes needed to support that vision before figuring out which software will meet your needs. DPT is  a Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics partner, but before selecting software, clients are first walked through the “hard stuff” of defining their strategy, processes, and unique requirements. If those tools aren’t the solution to that need, we look elsewhere.
  • Pay attention to your user’s needs and make sure there’s something in it for them.
    Considering user adoption needs will not only help your staff get on board with a new system, but will, of course, provide them value! For example, eliminating the need to enter information into multiple systems provides tangible benefits to most users.
  • CRM is becoming one of the most critical business strategies and solutions for most organizations.
    October’s AMA speaker, Martha Pease, said it best: “Focusing 100% of your company on consumers and customers 100% of the time.” This translates to a CRM strategy that not only helps understand the voice of your customer, but translates that message back to people who don’t ever touch the customer directly. As an example, at a financial services firm, the credit department providing customer service with faster decisions will provide a better customer experience without direct contact with customers.

Even if you haven’t followed those principles in your current CRM strategy, all is not lost. As a local business performance consulting firm, DPT spends almost as much time helping clients get value out of their existing CRM solution as we do implementing new CRM solutions.

Need help getting started? Don’t where to go next? You can contact DPT Directly.

 

Reference:Pease, Martha and Campbell, Michael. (2015). Think Round. New York, New York: Continuum Press.