Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy for learning, storing, organizing, managing and cultivating your relationships with existing clients and prospects.

What is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy for learning, storing, organizing, managing and cultivating your relationships with existing clients and prospects. Often times, people think that CRM is only about software, but it is really much more than that. CRM is really a holistic approach to running your business. Every interaction with your customer, starting with first time you make contact with them, is an opportunity to improve you relationship and create a sale. CRM allows you to keep this relationship a positive one, which in turn results in higher customer retention.

Knowledge is power. The more information you have about your clients/prospects, the more likely you are to create an extra sales opportunity or close a sale. Without relevant information, you or your employees are less likely to close a sale with a client, or even resolve an issue that a client may have. Without a CRM strategy, your employees are ill-equipped to deal with the array of client situations that may occur. As a result, you may lose clients, or not close as many sales as you should be.

Imagine giving your marketing team notice of when a client is in need of a new service, thus allowing them to contact the client and offer the service to them. Imagine arming your sales team with the knowledge of your client's/prospect's current products, historical information and needs before they talk to the client/prospect. Imagine a client calling in with an issue, and your support team has all of the knowledge of the client which allows the issue to be resolved quickly, turning a potential lost client into a satisfied customer. These are only a few of the benefits of implementing a CRM system.

What are the goals of a CRM?

The ultimate goal of CRM is that it will help your business improve the customer's experience. Since your customers are your business, don't you want to keep them happy? The following can be achieved by implementing a CRM solutions:

• Improved customer satisfaction

• Higher conversion rate of prospects into clients

• Increased revenue by up/cross selling

• Higher success rate of marketing

• Automation of various business tasks

• Better insights to your business

• Improved management of business projects

These are just a few of the benefits of implementing a CRM solution. Based on the solution you choose, you may gain success in other areas.

What are some of the things a CRM can do?

• Add and maintain prospects and all their data

• Create opportunities (for sales) and link them to prospects

• Create notes to attach to a lead for other sales people

• Make the sale, and convert the lead into a client

• Monitor projects for each client

• Track the sales and offering to different accounts

• Create e-mail campaigns for your marketing team to target specific groups

What is needed for a successful CRM strategy?

At the heart of a CRM solution there is data, and a lot of it. Without a system, this data does not add a lot of value, and may actually hurt your business since there is so much information to sift through. As a result, technologies have been created that help you manage this data.

With that being said, the software portion of a CRM solution is a vital one. In this day and age, technology is required to be able to be a competitive force in the marketplace. Having the goal of implementing a CRM solution needs to be accompanied with a means to accomplish it. This is where the software component comes in. CRM software is a powerful tool that allows you to manage your business in one place. You can run your business from your CRM, and even integrate it into your legacy systems and your website. It provides a central location for all of your data about customers, partners, projects, leads, opportunities, meetings and much more.

How can Black Rhino Consulting help implement a CRM strategy?

Here at Black Rhino Consulting, we are knowledgeable in the realm of CRM. We have worked with various CRM solutions, and actually use a CRM strategy to run our business! Additionally, we can integrate the CRM into your existing business. This means customized functionality beyond what you would get with just the CRM itself. This is critical, as it will make the transition to CRM as smooth as possible. It also allows for such things as having a single place to view the data you need.

It is difficult to find a large company that is not implementing a CRM solution, as most that don't are no longer in business! Traditionally, only large companies were able to utilize CRM, since they had the resources necessary to get the system design and incorporated into their business procedures. Now, Black Rhino can help level the playing field. We specialize in helping small to medium size business compete with these larger companies.

How much does it cost to implement CRM?

It is difficult to put a figure on a CRM solution, since the needs of each company are so vastly different. To learn more about how a CRM solution will help you company and to get pricing, please request a quote.