Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is largely about goal setting. Having written goals for your business and for your CRM system helps ensure that your system works and grows your business geometrically.
Start CRM with company goals
You cannot develop a successful CRM strategy unless you understand what your business is in business for. What does your business hope to offer customers? What is the company mission statement? What does your company hope to contribute? What can your company offer that competitors cannot? Knowing the answers to all these questions allows you to understand what value you can offer to your customers and what some of the goals of your CRM program should be. For example, if you run a financial company, helping people with low credit scores get mortgages, then you will want to ensure that your CRM goals include sensitivity to the customer as well as a sincere willingness to help – because those are likely part of your larger company goals as well.
Know the working parts of your CRM plan
Before you start working out specific goals for your CRM plan, you may wish to find out what the working parts of your business and your CRM strategy are. How do customers fit into your business? Another way of thinking about this is to define the areas that you need to expand in order to achieve the best customer satisfaction. If you are selling movies on DVD, for example, you may need to work on specific areas of your business. You may need to work on marketing in order to get new customers, conversion to convert leads into paying customers, follow up in order to encourage customers to buy again, financing to ensure that the company is paid, customer satisfaction to ensure that customers are happy, and so forth. Overlooking any of these areas will ensure business failure while improving these elements of your business with help you succeed.
Work with team roles
Once you have your overall company goals and your working parts, you will want to take a close look at your team members. Which team members are responsible for which moving parts of the company? Who is responsible for marketing? Who takes care of billing? Do you even have someone assigned to handle follow ups and complaints? It is essential that each team member understands their role perfectly and that someone is working on improving each area of your business that relates to your customers. Luckily, Relenta CRM makes it easy to assign team members to departments. For example, if three members of your department all work together on marketing, inside Relenta CRM you can create a marketing department. Your team members can have access to all relevant files, contacts, and emails right in the Relenta CRM department in order to do their job.
Setting goals
Setting goals at this point should be quite easy. Look at each of the working parts of your business and your overall business goals. What is your ideal goal or goals for each area of your business? What does each department and each team member have to do in the next five years, year, quarter, and month in order to achieve the goals? Assign the tasks and have each team member use the Relenta CRM calendar to place deadlines on the goals.
