Customer relationship management has found a great ally in information technology. It has been in existence for long enough. Blue chip corporate giants and small businesses alike have taken to CRM automation. A bird’s eye view of CRM software products will reveal a clutter of similar prototypes. After pumping precious millions of dollars into CRM software of different variety, the central question that remains to be answered is:

“ What extent of CRM automation is profitable for my business?”

Customer Relationship Management System

There are two schools of thought on CRM. There is a school of marketing pundits like Philip Kotler and Don Peppers who emphasis on the behavioral school of marketing. This approach to marketing stresses on human behavior as the most important determinant of marketing outcomes. Human behavior and customer centric leadership is stressed on. Personal touch in communication and engagement with the customer are given importance. Opposed to this is the systems approach. This systems approach has been embraced by many companies. Most companies are trying to get over the hangover of mainframe based legacy systems and questioning the performance metrics.

Economies Of Scale From Sales Automation

The biggest benefit from CRM automation is economies of scale arising from sales process automation. Manual processes are slow and often lack the efficiency of CRM software. Activities like newsletter publication, newsletter dispatch, communication of promotional offers and discounts and campaign tracking are programmable functions. These have to be performed repeatedly with full proof accuracy. With the growth in sales, the customer database keeps growing as well. In such repetitive activities, there is a definite scope for economies of scale. In the long term, there is tremendous cost saving that occurs due to economies of scale.

Enhanced Sales Output From Data Analytics

Data analytics available from intelligence panes and customizable dashboards do not go beyond basic arithmetic calculations. Analytics when seen from the marketing perspective does not need complex statistics. CRM software enables enterprises to travel from customer insights to foresight in a matter of minutes. This makes short work of marketing planning and strategizing. In reality, this has the effect of reducing the cycle time of operations. Reduced cycle time of operations leads to faster order to cash solutions.

Delegation Of Work Among Sales Team

Most enterprises today have a long list of product lines and combo packs. Add to that the diverse database of customers, it becomes difficult to track the performance of employees across sales teams. A customer relationship management software that enables distribution of the workload makes it easy for the team leaders to assess sales performance of different reps and teams.

The Travelling Salesman Problem

A sales executive spends the lion’s share of the time visiting the market place. Seldom do sales reps sit in the office chair and warm themselves with the desktop. The travelling salesman thus needs to stay in touch with customers and clients on the move. This means that CRM automation that is agnostic of products and platforms enables the sales rep to carry the back office. This is what cloud hosted CRM software does. It makes the sales office portable. Marketing strategists talk of: “catching the snake by its head.”

A cloud based CRM system provides the much needed flexibility to the strategic marketing process. Undoubtedly it results in more sales arising out of communication dynamics.

At Netfunda, our business consulting team has produced a cloud hosted CRM software that combines the benefits of standard CRM automation with the those of cloud computing. Marketing in the modern digitized landscape requires sales reps to stay in touch with customers and track them across time zones and places. Netfunda CRM, the customer relationship management software foes this to great effect and with great efficiency.

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