Helpful Idea #2. When the economy turns around, as it will, how will your organization be poised to take advantage of the next expansion?
Whether it's through increasing sales effectiveness, better managing the sales pipeline, building loyalty, improving marketing results, or reducing customer service costs, CRM can provide a vital boost to your company's top and bottom line in an adverse economic environment.
INCREASE SALES EFFECTIVENESS
While they're the key to driving revenue, salespeople are arguably the most expensive resource in your organization's front line operations. Therefore, increasing their effectiveness and efficiency is critical. Yet according to the Alexander Group, field sales representatives only spend 22 percent of their time selling. And time-time spent prospecting, building proposals based on knowledge of the prospect's requirements, and selling-is their most precious commodity as well. Companies like Oracle are leveraging Web 2.0 technology to create a new generation of sales tools specifically designed to increase sales user productivity. One of these applications analyzes purchase patterns of existing customers by mining information across the enterprise and public domain, and then identifying what products and services to sell for white-space and Greenfield opportunities. Given that salespeople spend 20 percent of their time prospecting for qualified leads,iii making this investment of time more productive is critical. Another way to increase sales effectiveness and consistency is to reduce the gap between an organization's best and worst performers by instilling the practices of the top performers across the organization. Consider investing in applications that contain specialized sales workflow support. This feature can be configured to guide sales professionals down the most effective path to closing business at every point in the sales process. At any sales stage, the application presents the most relevant information, can enforce collection of critical opportunity information, or even automatically create tasks for any of the members of the opportunity team. Embedding a company's best practices into the application drives higher close rates as well as shortens sales cycles and the learning curve for new sales professionals.
Helpful Idea #1. A downturn is a terrible thing to waste.
This quote, from a Home Depot vendor, reinforces the premise of investing for growth when times turn tough. Yet the conventional wisdom is that in the face of an economic downturn, consolidation is the name of the game. Spend less on IT. Work with fewer hardware and software vendors. And only invest in those technologies that enable your organization to meet its most basic operational requirements - in other words, reduce the IT budget to the minimum amount needed to support building and delivering your product or service. Unfortunately, in relation to customer relationship management this behaviour could be both a short- and long-term detriment to your business success. In fact, an article in The McKinsey Quarterly cites the risk of making wholesale reductions in IT spending. "Simplistic cuts, applied across the board, may endanger critical business priorities from sales support to customer service." McKinsey has also found that investments in "technology-enabled business processes" deliver far more impact than reducing costs. Also, keep in mind that in an everincreasing competitive environment the window between product conception and innovation on one hand, and commoditization on the other hand, is getting ever smaller. This increases the need to differentiate around the customer experience to distinguish your organization from the competition. And, of course, that experience can transcend every touch point on your company's front line including your sales, marketing, and service teams; your programs, campaigns and promotions in these areas; and your Web service channels and storefronts.
