CRM for Verticals

* Guest Article

Zoho CRM Terminology

Leads: Suppose you have a free product that you offer for download at your website. And during installation you ask for the user’s details to be filled in. Or, you have a whitepaper on your website and you ask your readers to fill in details before accessing it. Or, you attend a tradeshow and collect info from people visiting your booth. Such collected user information belongs to Leads. Your sales guys typically call or email these Leads and see if they are interested in buying your services or products.

Contacts: Let’s say you followed up on a Lead and have made a sale. Now, you have a satisfied customer who you will be interacting with on a regular basis. You move her from Leads to Contacts.

Accounts: Accounts is where you put the company information of all your customers. You typically have one or more Contacts associated with an Account.

Potentials: This module helps you track the value of sales potential pipeline. A Potential is associated with a Contact and an Account. Suppose you have Contacts A and B in a customer Account C. And you are discussing sales of goods worth $2,000 with A and $4,500 with B. Your Potential sales pipeline for Account C is now worth $6,500.

The above is just one simple interpretation of how to use the various modules in Zoho CRM. Zoho CRM allows extensible customization. You can rename the tabs to suit the industry/business you are in. And you can even add custom fields in each module.

How to customize Zoho CRM according to your industry?

• B2B (typical CRM; you sell goods, business-to-business)
• Service providers (Lawyers, consultants...)
• Real Estate (the same product can be sold multiple times)
• Healthcare ( HIPAA compliant )
• Durable goods (you track installed products)
• Insurance (you hedge against the risk of a contingent loss)
• Advertising (you sell a space over time)

CRM is not just a technology but rather a comprehensive, customer-centric approach to an organization's philosophy of dealing with its customers. This includes policies and processes, customer service, employee training, marketing, systems and information management. Hence, it is important that any CRM implementation considerations stretch beyond technology toward the broader organizational requirements.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) initiatives often fail because implementation was limited to software installation without providing the appropriate motivations for employees to learn, provide input, and take full advantage of the information systems.

According to Forrester Research, the critical factor is to set clear objectives and establish the right metrics before making a technology purchase. To achieve this, you can follow a four-step approach to establish the correct measures for your organization:

• Define and quantify business goals
• Formulate CRM strategies and tactics
• Establish appropriate CRM measures
• Link CRM goals, strategies and metrics

From the outside, customers interacting with a company perceive the business as a single entity, despite often interacting with a variety of employees in different roles and departments. CRM is a combination of policies, processes, and strategies implemented by a company that unify its customer interaction and provides a mechanism for tracking customer information.

CRM includes many aspects which relate directly to one another:

• Front office operations — Direct interaction with customers, e.g. face to face meetings, phone calls, e-mail, online services etc.
• Back office operations — Operations that ultimately affect the activities of the front office (e.g., billing, maintenance, planning, marketing, advertising, finance, manufacturing, etc.)
• Business relationships — Interaction with other companies and partners, such as suppliers/vendors and retail outlets/distributors, industry networks (lobbying groups, trade associations). This external network supports front and back office activities.
• Analysis — Key CRM data can be analyzed in order to plan target-marketing campaigns, conceive business strategies, and judge the success of CRM activities (e.g., market share, number and types of customers, revenue, profitability).