CRM: Making One-to-One Marketing and Selling Work for You · a company to develop prototype CRM...

CRM: Making One-to-One Marketing and Selling Work for You

An Executive White Paper

Coravue, Inc. 7742 Redlands St., #3041 Los Angeles, CA 90293 USA (310) 305-1525 www.coravue.com

Table of Contents

Introduction.....................................................................................1

What is Customer Relationship Management?............................2 CRM Concepts .................................................................................................. 3 CRM Functions.................................................................................................. 5

The Challenge of B-to-B Marketing and Selling ...........................5 Traditional Marketing........................................................................................ 5 Traditional Selling............................................................................................. 6

CRM-Based Marketing and Sales..................................................7 Working as a Team ........................................................................................... 8 Tracking the Customer Life Cycle.................................................................... 8 Using Web Personalization to Tell the Right Story ......................................... 9 Using Personalized E-Mail Marketing to Increase Frequency....................... 11 Using Sales Automation to Close Profitable Sales ....................................... 13 Using Service Automation to Keep Customers Satisfied.............................. 15

Technology Challenge .................................................................16

Getting Started..............................................................................18 Selecting a CRM Solution............................................................................... 18

Summary .......................................................................................20

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Introduction Achieving the goal of generating profitable revenue has become increasingly difficult — challenging even the most seasoned marketing and sales executive.

The challenge has become more acute in recent years for many reasons. One reason is that the proliferation of technology has made it easier for competitors to manufacture, market, and distribute products that take away existing customers and make it harder to attract new customers.

There have been a few technological advances that refine marketing and selling products — but not much progress has been made to help understand and serve the customer until recently.

Fortunately, technological advances are now helping marketers and salespeople deliver marketing messages that focus on the needs of each potential customer, present a clear and consistent message on how a company’s products meet the prospects’ needs, and then help accomplish customers’ goals.

The recent decline in economic growth means it’s more critical than ever to improve the efficiency of business operations. Higher quality tools and personnel usually improve productivity and efficiency in manufacturing. Precision equipment means more accurate drilling, cutting, and bending, which results in improvements across manufacturing processes.

It’s the same with marketing and sales. Improved precision in targeting marketing activities allows each message to deliver greater impact, which helps prospects more quickly see why they should buy your product.

The result is greater efficiency in attracting the right prospects, and reducing time and effort in closing sales.

While the products you sell have specific features and functions, there can be diverse reasons why customers buy those products from you. This could be anything from meeting straightforward technical requirements to the more nebulous attributes of availability, reliability, dependability, and maintainability.

Improving marketing and sales efficiencies includes these challenges:

• Reaching the target market with messages that are more appropriate

• Reducing the time and resources required to generate leads, qualify prospects, and close sales

• Improving your marketing team’s understanding of each target market

• Improving your sales team’s understanding each prospect’s individual needs and decision criteria

In other words, it’s important to refine and manage prospects’ entire infor-mation gathering, product evaluation, and purchase decision experience.

Coravue White Paper CRM: Making One-to-One Marketing Work

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Since this buying process frequently requires many interactions with multiple departments over a lengthy period of time, you have an opportu-nity to develop a relationship between multiple representatives of your customer and your team.

This white paper is designed to help you improve the process of managing customer relationships by integrating online marketing activities of Web and e-mail with offline marketing, direct sales, and customer service activities to form a unified approach to managing customer relationships.

What is Customer Relationship Management? The need to improve the way companies manage the customer relation-ship has led to the term customer relationship management (CRM).

One of the first questions people ask about CRM is whether it is a process or a product. The answer is that CRM is both — just like other aspects of business.

For example, is financial accounting a process or a product? The tech-nique of accounting is definitely a well-defined process, and many compa-nies use an accounting software product to make the process more efficient and ensure that the process is followed and results tracked and monitored.

A similar example is inventory management — is it a process or a product? Inventory management embodies several well defined proc-esses that help ensure a sufficient supply of raw materials and finished products without overspending on storage and shipping. Inventory management is an exacting part of the science called operations research. Many good inventory management software products are available to help perform the process efficiently and help managers track and monitor performance in this area.

In fact, many companies don’t just track the total inventory of materials — they track the individual components themselves. They know when each of those components arrived in the plant, what was paid for each item, which finished product it was used in. This means companies can track the exact revenue and expense involved in every finished product and most of the components and raw materials used inside. Serial numbers on each component make tracking and cost analysis easy.

In fact, many companies keep better records on their products and components than they do on their customers!

It’s time to unify marketing and sales functions by using tools and techniques that improve the effectiveness of marketing and sales.

This approach to managing the customer relationship involves tracking the full range of interactions with prospects and customers:

• Every marketing interaction • Every sales interaction • Every customer service and support interaction


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Only by tracking the interactions that lead to sales can the customer relationship be truly managed, maintained, and nurtured.

So, how do these elements of an effective customer relationship fit into a definition of CRM? In other words, just what is CRM?

CRM Concepts CRM is the technique of providing information to prospects and customers, and collecting information about prospects and customers, that allows us to help them evaluate and purchase products that deliver the best possible value to them.

Or, as author/consultant Patricia Seybold has said, the purpose of applying techniques such as CRM, one-to-one marketing, and relationship marketing is to make it easier for the customer to do business with you.

Marketers, sales people, and customer service personnel have many opportunities to influence customer purchase decisions. Until recently it was normal for these functions to be performed separately — by different departments within a company — without acting as a unified team.

Customer relationship management has become a popular name for a variety of software tools and techniques aimed at attracting and retaining customers. In general, CRM uses a centralized database to bring marketing, sales, and customer service together in a unified approach to serving customers.

CRM vendors like to think of CRM as a category of products that can be compared and evaluated against each other. However, CRM shouldn’t be thought of as just a technology or product. Instead, marketers need to think of CRM as managing the company’s resources to create the best possible experience and value for customers — plus the software tools needed to implement that philosophy.

While the name CRM is new, the idea has been around a long time.

Salespeople responsible for selling big-ticket items have always managed customer relationships by monitoring their customers’ needs, product orders, shipments, and customer service. Many times they do this by making frantic telephone calls to headquarters demanding information that’s stored in stand-alone computer systems.

Applying CRM principles brings customer data from throughout the company together in a central database, which can bring employees together as a team to better serve a greater number of valued customers.

CRM combines many of the traditional marketing techniques that have been used effectively by themselves, such as:

• Database marketing • Sales force automation • Telemarketing • Web personalization • Customer service operations


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Some CRM software providers want to provide a complete, enterprise-wide system that replaces many of the tools and processes that are already in place. Other vendors want to provide just a piece of the CRM puzzle in what they call a “best of breed” approach where multiple products are to exchange data with each other.

While one of these approaches may be right for your company in the long run, chances are that a combination of both approaches is needed in the short term to keep the company functioning smoothly as it grows its CRM initiative for the future. In other words, it may be best to start using a sales force automation system that can be integrated into an evolving CRM system. Then, upgrade your Web site and e-mail marketing to use personalization and other techniques to gather profile data.

Technical gurus may feel that combining multiple systems is not the most elegant solution. However, a new comprehensive approach may not allow a company to develop prototype CRM solutions and quickly begin to expe-rience the benefits of a CRM solution. Based on the practical experience that comes from using an easy-to-implement interim solution, a compre-hensive plan can be developed for an enterprise-wide CRM solution.

The key to CRM success is for a company to understand its needs and requirements, not just for the present but the foreseeable future. This requires that a multi-departmental planning committee examine all customer interactions, sometimes called “touchpoints,” to fully understand how customers view the company. The analysis should cover how to track customer interactions from ad response through product delivery and follow-on service.

Customer history information can then be used to map the process of how potential customers gather information about a product and make pur-chase decisions. In addition, this analysis should include learning what customers want in a purchase experience and in the value delivered after the sale.

Understanding what customers want from your company and how to provide it is the foundation needed to help decide which technology solutions will best support your CRM process.

The best long-term approach to selecting a CRM system is to evaluate different types of CRM products and services against the company’s needs and requirements to identify the best system — or combination of products and services — that meet those needs.

In the short-term, however, it’s best to use inexpensive CRM products and services that can be implemented quickly to gain experience with CRM tools and techniques. Then, the company’s “master CRM plan” can build upon actual experience with CRM tools and techniques.


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CRM Functions CRM is typically composed of three functions:

• Marketing automation — Raising awareness and generating leads with online and offline marketing

• Sales automation — Responding to leads and communicating product features, benefits, and values, as well as closing sales

• Service automation — Helping customers obtain the maximum value from products by answering questions, training, etc.

The Challenge of B-to-B Marketing and Selling For years marketers relied on traditional mass marketing methods to spread a general message across a broad spectrum of potential prospects.

Times have changed. The expression “business as usual” has become a phrase that practically no one uses any more. Today’s expressions are:

• 360-degree view of the customer • One-to-one relationship marketing to understand the customer • 24/7 readiness to serve the customer

In other words, we now live in a customer-driven, value-focused environment that requires that marketers and salespeople work as an integrated team to understand each prospect and customer.

By combining a comprehensive database marketing system with the preci-sion of Web and e-mail marketing, it’s now possible to integrate traditional marketing with online marketing to produce more leads that are more highly qualified.

Traditional Marketing For many years the process of marketing a company’s products to other companies have used several reliable, but expensive, techniques, such as:

• Public Relations — request new product announcements, case studies, and other feature articles in trade publications

• Advertising — buy print advertisements in trade publications and directories read by potential customers

• Direct Mail — Send letters and brochures that encourage telephone calls and mail-in responses asking for detailed literature

• Trade Shows — Exhibit at trade shows and conferences that feature educational sessions of interest to the target market

These marketing activities are designed to generate responses from people who are interested in learning more about the company’s products. In other words, they are designed to generate leads. Lots of leads.


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Lead Processing

Once a potential prospect responds to one of the mass media exposures, they are sent a packet of material about the company’s products. In addition to the literature and a cover letter, a “bounce back” post card is frequently included that can be used to request detailed literature or a call from a salesperson.

By the time a reader responds to an ad, receives the initial mailing, returns the bounce back card, and hears from a salesperson, several weeks have passed — and the prospect may be well on the way to making a purchase decision.

Each of these marketing techniques performs well under the right circumstances, however when pressed beyond their optimum use the cost per lead quickly becomes very expensive.

The problems with this process include:

• It takes too much time for an inquiry to be processed • It is too expensive to generate the inquiries

Traditional Selling Traditional business-to-business selling isn’t much more efficient than traditional B-to-B marketing.

Inquiries are either provided by the marketing department, or leads are generated by the salesperson through various prospecting techniques. Sometimes leads are purchased from list compilers that sell the names and titles of key people within companies.

Salespeople then make telephone calls, leave voicemail messages, and send sales letters to these people trying to make contact.

Once the salesperson does makes contact, it takes several telephone calls or in-person visits for the contact to decide to make a purchase or, for larger purchases, include the seller on a short list to be evaluated.

It’s a slow, laborious, time-consuming process. It involves a lot of wasted effort attempting to make contact, and it requires a great deal of time talking with prospects. Once a salesperson qualifies a prospect, more time is spent generating a custom proposal and following the prospect’s process for evaluating, deciding, and approving the purchase.

The limitations of traditional sales practices are:

• Wasted time trying to contact people who have not indicated a sincere interest in evaluating the company’s products

• Inefficient process to understand the prospect’s real needs and evaluation criteria

The bottom line problem is that too little is known about members of the target market and those who have indicated an interest. And, too much time is required to convey information in order to turn inquiries into prospects.


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The solution seems obvious:

• Talk only to people with a sincere interest in making a purchase decision.

• Quickly learn what they need and how they’ll make a decision. • Tailor the marketing and sales message to show how your

company’s products meet those needs and will deliver the benefits the prospect is looking for.

While the solution seems obvious, the implementation of that solution has eluded marketing and sales executives for many years. Many marketing techniques have been tried:

Personalized direct mail was supposed to convey a sense that the sales message related directly to the prospect’s needs, but it’s too hard to manage the many overlapping lists, write all the sales copy necessary, and pay first class postage for personalized mailings. But, it does work for very specialized situations.

In-bound call centers were supposed to make it easy for a prospect to quickly contact an expert that knew the answers to fundamental questions used to determine if the vendor was a potential candidate to supply the desired product. Unfortunately, many call centers are staffed with junior level people who wind up forwarding inquiries to salespeople for response.

Trade shows have become too expensive for many companies to participate. And travel budgets at prospect companies have been reduced for financial and security reasons.

The practical solution is to automate the process of providing fundamental, detailed information needed by potential customers to make that initial decision to visit with a salesperson. That' s where integrating Internet-based marketing into traditional marketing and sales activities delivers significant value.

CRM-Based Marketing and Sales For many years, salespeople have referred to the “sales cycle” as the period of time from when a salesperson begins working with a prospect until the sale is closed and the order received.

There are many problems with this way of thinking in today’s marketplace:

• It assumes that the selling process begins with the salesperson, which ignores the work of the marketing team to raise awareness and generate the lead.

• It assumes that marketing and salespeople don’t care about a customer after the order is closed, which ignores the value of maintaining the relationship and encouraging reorders and buying additional products and services.


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Working as a Team In today’s new customer-oriented view, it’s more appropriate to look at the “customer life cycle” — a view that starts when a potential prospect becomes aware of a need or problem and starts to look for a solution.

Once they become aware, such as through an attention-getting headline or illustration in your ad, they should show up on your radar screen — and remain there until you have successfully guided them to using your product.

Teamwork is a critical part of a flawless customer experience. A unified database and real-time access is needed for the team to guide potential customers through awareness raising, interest building, evaluating, and purchasing aspects of the customer life cycle to ensure that each cus-tomer has the best possible experience throughout the life of the relationship.

Tracking the Customer Life Cycle The customer life cycle starts well before the salesperson starts talking to a prospect, and it continues well past receiving the order and shipping the product.

When you understand your target market’s customer life cycle you then have the information needed to understand how to answer questions such as:

• What attracts them to your advertisements, direct mail, and other marketing activities?

• What product benefits are they seeking to obtain? • Which product features give them confidence that your product can

deliver those benefits? • Which marketing activities are most efficient in attracting inquiries

from people who later make purchases? • Does customer size vary with the type of marketing tool that

attracted them to your company? • How long are the stages of the life cycle from awareness,

investigation, evaluation, purchase, to reorder? • Does the cost to provide customer service vary according to which

salesperson sold the account? • What is the customer acquisition cost of each marketing tool, sales

territory, customer type, and product type?

This requires understanding the needs and motivations not just for buying a product, but for the entire customer/vendor experience.

Today, a significant part of the product evaluation and purchase experience occurs when a prospect visits your Web site. Prospects may come to your Web site while searching for products to meet a need, or they may be drawn to the lead capture portion of your Web site by your advertising or direct mail programs.


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No matter how they find your Web site, it' s important that they find information appropriate for them.

Using Web Personalization to Tell the Right Story The idea of personalizing Web content is becoming well accepted because most of us already personalize the telephone and e-mail communications with friends and associates every day. Until recently, using personalization in a Web site had proven to be more of a challenge than many marketers had imagined.

However, advances in personalization software have almost eliminated the large, programming projects of early personalization and made the technology a simple point-and-click approach.

Now that the software is easy to use, it’s time to deal with the next challenge — deciding how to use personalization.

Personalization Goals

Early in the planning process it’s important to establish clear goals to guide what is personalized.

For instance, if the goal of personalization is to increase loyalty, then adding features to increase return visits would be desirable. On the other hand, if a company’s customers usually make large purchases that involve a significant amount of research and evaluation then the use of personalization should focus on improving the prospect’s decision making process.

Purchase Process

Once the goals for personalization have been determined, the next step is to look at how prospects gather information and make purchase decisions.

Salespeople who talk with customers every day learn from experience how to gather information and tailor their presentation to match each type of customer and the stage of the purchasing process. They’ve learned how to tell the difference between people who are just starting to investi-gate making a purchase and those who are on the verge of making a purchase. Sometimes the difference is which questions they ask. At other times it’s the order in which they ask them.

We need to anticipate the various ways to profile customers so a personalized site can select the most appropriate marketing messages. One of the best sources of information about the different types of customers and their motivations is your team of successful salespeople who are in constant contact with customers. When you visit with your salespeople and product managers you’re likely to turn up some very interesting insights about what prospective customers are looking for.

Marketers of consumer products are very familiar with the power of brand image in influencing sales, but business-to-business marketers can take advantage of brand marketing, too.


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Some business consumers are brand-conscious and want the product reliability and consistency, or the image, associated with certain brands. Some prospects look for brands they recognize and value, and are not necessarily looking for descriptive content educating them on why they should buy particular brands.

Other prospective customers want to be educated about a product category or informed about specific products. These customers may need to be guided through the information gathering process by helping them compare the features, functions, and benefits of your various products.

Personalization Profiles

Between the brand buyers and the customers who want to be educated are a group of prospective customers with a mix of attitudes, needs, feelings, and fears — both personal and business — that we can deal with using personalization. But before we can implement marketing techniques on a Web site we need to know the paths that customers follow as they prepare to make a purchase decision.

For example, if a company sells to some people who are brand conscious, others who are price conscious, and a third group that seeks the best value, then messages need to be tailored to each buying motive. In addition, some people may just be investigating the product category, while others know what they need and are comparing products, and still others are making a final decision.

When you take into consideration these three different buying motives and three stages of making a purchase decision, there are nine ways to personalize marketing messages! Here is an example showing the nine different message themes that would be appropriate in this situation:

Decision/Motivation Matrix

Stage of Purchase Customer Motivation

Learning Evaluating Deciding

Brand Experience means quality

Trust our quality Best known brand

Features Each product’s feature set is different

Look at the features important to you

Our features match your needs

Price All products have same features

Compare and save Lowest price

Once you have mapped out the different themes that appeal to each segment of your market, it’s much easier to plan the actual personalized Web site and supporting personalized e-mail marketing. Then you’re in a much better position to know just what to personalize on your Web site, and that will pay off making people feel comfortable buying from you.


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Personalized Customer Service

Web personalization is frequently thought of as a way to help people buy products, but it can also be used to provide personalized customer service.

It’s actually easier to personalize Web-based customer service than it is to use personalization for marketing. Once you have sold a particular product to a customer you know several things that are not available prior to the sale, such as:

• Which model of product was purchased • What consumable supplies are compatible with the product

purchased • Which geographic area the product was shipped to • Which questions about the product other customers have asked

after purchase • How long it is likely to be before the product needs to be replaced

or upgraded

This is part of the customer profile that can be used by a personalized Web site to guide the customer to answers questions about interests and needs. And, in most cases, Web-based customer service is much faster and less expensive than providing the same service through people at a call center.

Just remember, many customers want to know everything that you know about your products — and are likely to keep asking unless you provide an easy way for them to find that information for themselves.

Using Personalized E-Mail Marketing to Increase Frequency No matter how you generate interest in your product, and no matter how good your Web site is at telling your product’s story, it’s a fact of marketing life that the average person spends only a few minutes reading a Web site. And, unless they are pulled back to the site effectively and repeat-edly, you have lost a sale before you even get a chance to talk to them.

If every visitor to your Web site picked up the phone and called your sales team, you’d have more revenue than you could handle. What actually happens, of course, is that customers who finally make a purchase have probably seen your marketing materials and visited your Web site several times over a period of weeks or months. Only a few prospects are dedicated enough to make the effort to return to a Web site on their own. So, it becomes important for the marketing team to pull visitors back to your Web site over and over again until they are ready to talk to take the next step — talking to a salesperson.

E-mail marketing is proving its power to support both online and offline sales and marketing campaigns. Forrester Research recently interviewed companies about their results in using e-mail marketing techniques and


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found that the companies interviewed will triple their e-mail marketing budgets by 2004. It was somewhat surprising that these companies will spend half of their online marketing budget on e-mail marketing, but Forrester also found that e-mail marketing is both effective and efficient. Their study reported that sending e-mail to in-house lists cost about $5 per thousand messages sent and that clickthrough rates average 10 percent.

Permission Marketing

Regardless of how targeted, relevant, and informative you think your message is, unless the recipient specifically agrees to receive the information you send, you risk alienating a significant portion of your market.

You’ve probably noticed that the unwanted e-mail you receive doesn’t come from large, recognizable companies who want to maintain their reputation. But large, well-known companies do send a great deal of e-mail promoting their products and services. So how do they obtain lists of interested prospects without becoming spammers? The answer is to send e-mail only to an in-house list of people who have asked for — or at least agreed to receive — e-mail newsletters and promotions from the company.

One of the easiest ways to implement a permission marketing e-mail program is to allow Web visitors to subscribe to a company’s newsletter. At the same time, visitors can be asked if they are interested in receiving promotions (sometimes called “solo mailings”) from the same company. In addition, a variety of offline techniques can be used to obtain approval to send e-mail newsletters and promotional campaign messages. Sales-people frequently obtain e-mail addresses from their prospects and customers. Other offline sources of e-mail addresses are trade shows, product registration cards, call centers, and other “touch points” where a company’s employees come in contact with prospects and customers.

One thing to keep in mind about permission marketing is that each individual’s permission only covers the type of e-mail explicitly mentioned when asking for permission. For example, if you change the format of your e-mail newsletter to resemble a solo ad or special offer, expect a large portion of people to unsubscribe from your list.

Frequency of Contact

Most marketing and sales executives know it’s important to contact pros-pects and customers frequently to create “top of mind” awareness. What’s not always clear is exactly why this is true and how to accomplish it.

In general, exposure to a message is cumulative, and each exposure to a message helps a person move above a “threshold of acceptance” where they will take action. However, impressions have a certain “decay rate,” which means that if not reinforced with additional exposures, awareness will fade away over time.


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This means that it’s not just the number of exposures — it’s the number of times a person is exposed to a message during a certain time period.

Marketing research indicates that prospects need more exposures before they cross the threshold than customers — who presumably are directly exposed to the product’s benefits and seem to require less frequent sales and marketing messages to remain loyal.

In addition, prospects are still learning about the benefits of a company’s products, while customers know the benefits and are looking for details about features and functions.

This means that it is not only important to keep in frequent contact with both prospects and customers, but also send appropriate messages at the optimum frequency. The challenge, of course, is doing it inexpensively. In addition, it’s important to know when to increase the level of contact from primarily e-mail to a more substantive contact, such as a call from a salesperson. Fortunately, e-mail marketing techniques can meet all of these challenges.

As potential customers look for ways to meet specific needs, they move from initial awareness of their need through several stages of information gathering, and, hopefully, to product evaluation and selection. Traditional business marketing has called for mailing brochures and catalogs, sending direct mail pieces, and other expensive and time-consuming techniques to make the prospect receptive to a call from a salesperson. With sales cycles taking from 6 to 24 months, it can be expensive to have salespeople maintain frequent contact while waiting for prospects to become ready for sales calls.

A more efficient approach is to combine an e-mail newsletter and an e-mail promotional campaign with less frequent sales calls. Today, e-mail marketing can deliver a company’s marketing message more quickly and less expensively than many other customer contact methods. In addition, a combination of e-mail and Web behavior tracking can accurately pinpoint when prospects are ready to hear from a salesperson.

Using Sales Automation to Close Profitable Sales Salespeople are always looking for tools and techniques that will help them tell their story to more prospects and close more sales. Software for salespeople has evolved from simple contact managers to full-fledged applications that are typically called sales force automation systems, or SFA for short.


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Sales Automation Functions

Sales automation systems provide several key functions, plus a wide variety of extra features that are used by a small portion of a sales force. The main functions of a sales automation system include:

• Contact management • Opportunity management • Action Items • Appointment scheduling • Messaging (e-mail, letter, & fax)

One important side benefit of providing a sales force with a sales automation system is that sales management is able to generate reports, such as:

• Sales activity reports • Sales forecasts

Software vs. Hosted Solution

Sales automation products have helped individual sales representatives keep track of prospects, customers, and opportunities. However, they have presented the IT departments with significant challenges that have limited the ability of sales managers to track sales activity and manage their team.

The problem occurs when each sales representative controls the sales database on their individual computer. This makes it difficult for sales teams — and sales management — to work together as a team because the entire sales team does not have up-to-date information.

As mentioned earlier, many sales automation products provide a technique called “synchronization.” This is a process of passing changes around to all other copies of the sales automation software, which is usually done via specially formatted e-mail messages or direct program-to-program connections over the Internet. Problems with synchronization occur when a company has:

• Multiple offices that need to work together • Field salespeople who are frequently on the road • Channel partners who work directly with the company’s sales

representatives

For many small companies, synchronization is not a problem because the entire sales force works from offices at headquarters where computers are connected via a local area network. However, once remote sales offices are opened, synchronization problems begin.

In addition to the technical challenge of making synchronization work consistently and reliably is the workforce management issue. Managers at companies that depend on synchronization to obtain data from individual


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sales representatives frequently find that salespeople just don’t synchro-nize their laptops to the central server.

With employee turnover and changing territory assignments, field sales-people controlling access to the data about the company’s customer relationships can become a critical problem.

For companies with remote locations, the solution is to use a sales auto-mation service hosted by a company specializing in this type of service. Companies that provide application hosting for companies are now called application service providers (ASPs). These companies maintain a central server, database, and Web application software, that can be accessed through a Web browser from anywhere there is an Internet connection.

Practically all of a company’s core computing functions are already handled by centralized servers — and not on individual computers throughout the headquarters and remote offices — so this is not a new approach to most computer systems managers.

Most companies have come to depend on e-mail processed by a central server for communicating with remote offices and a mobile sales force. It makes sense to also use a centralized sales force automation system that is integrated with the rest of the CRM system and doesn’t depend on synchronization.

There are a number of other benefits to using a unified sales automation system, especially one that is part of an integrated CRM system. Some of the intelligence that salespeople can have available with a sales automation system that is part of an integrated CRM system includes:

• List the Web pages viewed by a contact • List the e-mail newsletter links clicked on by a contact • View self-reported interest profile data • List product catalog pages viewed • Track online purchases made by contacts and entire accounts • Integrate with legacy and offline database systems

In addition to viewing data about a contact, an integrated CRM system can allow the salesperson to supply data back to the server for use in person-alizing the Web and e-mail newsletter experience for their prospects.

Using Service Automation to Keep Customers Satisfied The customer service and support area for many companies holds an opportunity for improving operations, and possibly increasing revenue and profits. For these companies, applying CRM’s unified view of the customer allows the service team to do a better job of identifying the most valuable customers, then understanding and meeting their needs. This focused approach on customer service tends to increase repeat purchases, positive word-of-mouth comments about the company’s products, and customer satisfaction.


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Customers that request support from a vendor that has both field and headquarters customer support organizations can frequently be frustrated when those teams do not coordinate their efforts. This can be reduced or eliminated when the field and headquarters customer service organizations use a single, unified support system to track and monitor support requests from each customer.

In addition, when the support system is integrated with both a support Web site that tracks customer accesses and a sales automation system that tracks sales activity, the support team has access to a complete customer history.

In many cases, this information allows the support team to not only respond to requests, but also be proactive in suggesting appropriate additional products that increase the overall value provided to the customer. This can increase revenue without a corresponding increase in expenses, which means increased profits

Technology Challenge One of the biggest challenges enterprises have faced in enabling cooperation between operations has been the technical challenge of sharing data.

Since the advent of the personal computer in the early 1980s, depart-ments and workgroups within departments have created a large number of independent systems that don’t interact with each other. This was a reaction to the early data processing functions when practically all software had to be written by each company’s programmers, which frequently took years to accomplish.

Today, departments and workgroups have selected and purchased soft-ware products that store data on local PCs or on a department file server. This approach overcame many of the problems of large mainframe com-puting, but it brought with it the “silo” approach to business — systems don’t share data, which means employees can’t work as a team.

This leads to the marketing team collecting leads from marketing cam-paigns, then passing paper printouts — sometimes just mailing labels — to salespeople who had to reenter the data in whatever contact database or personal information manager (PIM) each salesperson used.

Then, when laptop computers became popular for salespeople to carry on trips into the field, contact data became even harder to manage.

While stand-alone sales force automation (SFA) software products like GoldMine and ACT allowed salespeople to relate contact data to opportu-nities and a calendar, sharing data with others in the company became very difficult.

Synchronizing disparate systems throughout a company is a solution that is still being used. This process has a salesperson’s PC periodically send updates to the PCs of other salespeople and sales managers in the team. Sometimes this is done at night using e-mail, and sometimes it’s done by


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allowing one copy of the software to interact with other copies of the soft-ware via a network.

Whatever way synchronization is done, it always means one thing — most of the team had out of date information until the synchronization brought all copies of the database back into sync. Of course, a few minutes later as members of the team update contact and related data, some copies of the database are again out of date.

In today’s real-time world, customers expect all data about themselves to be updated instantly. For instance, a customer might complete an online form asking for details about a product evaluation, then talk to a repre-sentative at the vendor’s call center or visit with their sales representative. The customer expects the data to be instantly available — and not have to wait for the salesperson to synchronize their computer with the Web database.

The solution to synchronization problems is, of course, not to use synchronization at all and keep all data in one central database. This can best be done with a Web-based application that can be accessed from anywhere with just a Web browser — and no software.

There are several benefits to using a Web-based sales automation system that’s integrated with the Web and other marketing systems:

• Web profile data is instantly available to salespeople and the entire support team

• Software costs are eliminated by using a Web browser • Data is more secure by not storing the database on laptop

computers in the field • Territory realignments of sales/support representatives can be

done instantly in real-time • Management has constant monitoring and refinement options

Some people in an organization may object to using a centralized database instead of having their database on their laptop computer. These people usually say they need their database available when on an airplane flying to meet with a round of prospects or customers.

Our research indicates that most salespeople do not use their contact management software while on-board an airplane for several reasons. First, passenger crowding has made it increasingly difficult to conveniently use a laptop computer aboard an airplane. Also, it’s never certain if competitors are looking over to see confidential information.

Even though it’s not wise to view contact data in public locations, it is important to have some data stored on portable computers. Most contact management systems use industry-standard data sharing formats called vCard and vCal. By using Microsoft Outlook, Palm, Handspring, or other systems that accept data in these formats it’s easy to copy contact and calendar data to portable and handheld computers for use away while en route to a field location.


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Getting Started As mentioned earlier, it’s important to keep in mind how CRM fits into a company’s overall philosophy.

For companies that depend on customers making repeat purchases or where purchases represent a major decision for a customer, two concepts come into play:

• One-to-one relationship marketing and selling principles motivate customers to want to do business with you.

• Customer relationship management tools and techniques make it easy for customers to do business with you.

While CRM embodies all marketing, sales, and support functions, that doesn’t mean that you must convert all of those functions to a new CRM computer solution simultaneously. With most CRM products you can start with one module and add others to your system as you are ready to absorb another set of functions.

Selecting a CRM Solution Implementing CRM techniques usually requires using a computer-based solution that helps track and manage communications with prospects and customers.

Unified Database

The secret to CRM technology is to use a unified database, and not disjointed individual databases that don’t share data. A unified database eliminates the synchronization problem caused by having multiple databases spread throughout departments and field operations. A unified database sets the stage for a number of very important benefits:

• Single Customer View - Real-time updating of a centralized database allows customer interaction data to be instantly available across all channels. Information entered at the Web site is available to call center personnel, sales representatives, service teams, and authorized business partners.

• Real-Time Customizations - Changing customization settings by a system manager can be done in real-time when the system uses consistent software and one unified database.

• Feature Enhancements - Adding new features, either by your software vendor or your IT department, is much easier to implement with a unified system.

A few years ago large software companies focused on selling large, com-plex CRM systems to large, complex companies. Unfortunately, many of those projects experienced longer than expected implementation times — with resulting cost overruns — because so many business functions were being automated at the same time.


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An additional problem faced by early CRM implementations was the overly high expectations for benefits such as quick cost savings and additional revenue. It was only with the expectation for quick, high returns that sen-ior management justified those early expensive projects.

In reality, much of the benefit of a CRM approach comes from a com-pany’s employees and channel partners adopting a new attitude toward customers, which occurs over time and produces long-term benefits.

And, it means that the CRM solution must be both modular and integrated.

In other words, the selected CRM solution must integrate Web and e-mail marketing, offline marketing, lead management, sales automation, and service automation. At the same time, it must be modular so that any one of the major functions can be adopted by each department or division of the company on a schedule appropriate for that unit.

Software vs. Hosted Solution

Until recently, CRM software systems consisted of software installed on desktop PCs that communicated with software installed on database server computers. However, this approach presented a company’s IT department with a number of challenges in updating data and software throughout the company.

CRM systems are now becoming available that use a standard Web browser to connect to a centralized database on a Web server.

Companies such as Siebel and PeopleSoft have converted their older software-based CRM systems into browser-based products. At the same time, newer (and usually less expensive) CRM systems from companies such as Coravue, Salesforce.com, and Upstart.com began as browser-based systems.

Some of these browser-based CRM systems are also available as a hosted service from application service providers. The use of a hosted CRM solution reduces the implementation time and costs, and reduces (or eliminates) the IT resources needed to maintain a system. A hosted CRM solution is especially good for a mid-sized company that doesn’t have the IT resources of a large company.

However, a hosted CRM solution may not be appropriate for a large company that has very complex product and channel marketing needs. In these situations the best approach is to purchase browser-based software and hire the additional IT staff needed to maintain the system in-house.

Solution Matrix

There are many CRM products on the market today, as well as a growing number of application service providers offering hosted CRM solutions. To make the evaluation process a little easier, consider using a matrix to group solutions by these main attributes.


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Representative CRM Vendors

Size of Company

Application Mid-Sized Large

Web/E-Mail Marketing Coravue BroadVision, Siebel

Sales Automation Coravue, Salesforce.com, Upshot

Siebel, Onix, PeopleSoft

Service Automation Coravue, Salesforce.com, Upshot

Siebel, Onix, PeopleSoft

Whether you use licensed software or a Web-based system, you can con-trol costs and minimize disruptions to the organization by gradually intro-ducing CRM functions. This approach allows you to grow into a comprehensive solution and avoid the lengthy analysis period where no improvements are made during the analysis phase.

Summary The economy is shifting from a product orientation using mass marketing to a customer orientation using one-to-one marketing. This is occurring in both the consumer and business-to-business environments, however the evaluation and decision periods in business-to-business environment makes customer relationship management techniques very valuable.

Serious prospects demand to have every bit of information possible about the products they are evaluating. This information gathering starts with advertisements and continues through information gathered at the company’s Web site, as well as from salespeople and the pre-sales support team.

Customers can now have a complete picture of a potential vendor and its products. So, it’s essential for companies to have a complete picture of prospects and customers. This requires presenting a customized and coordinated message based on each prospect’s interests, needs, and plans. And, it requires tracking the interactions that prospects and cus-tomers have with a company’s people — and doing it instantly in real-time.

This type of interaction starts with the online and offline marketing activities, and continues through the sales, service, and support activities.

The only way this type of totally integrated, real-time communications, tracking, and management can be accomplished is with a unified system that empowers everyone in a company to maximize the understanding of each customer and maximize the value delivered to each customer.

In addition to the challenge of pulling a company’s diverse organizations into a cohesive team, companies are faced with a technology challenge.


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The challenge of creating a unified system can be more easily accom-plished by using a Web hosted CRM system that can be customized quickly and deployed using existing Web browser software.

In this way, companies facing increased market challenges can meet those challenges by delivering exceptional customer value and, in return, generating exceptional growth and profits.

About Coravue

Coravue provides Internet-based software products and hosting solutions for managing marketing and sales activities. Coravue CRM includes functions for personalized Web and e-mail content management, lead capture and fulfillment, sales force automation, and service automation.

For more information about Coravue' s software products and hosting solutions, call (310) 305-1525.

Coravue, Inc. 7742 Redlands St., #3041 Los Angeles, CA 90293 USA (310) 305-1525 www.coravue.com

© Coravue, Inc. 2002 All rights reserved

Coravue is a trademark of Coravue, Inc.

CRM: Making One-to-One Marketing and Selling Work for You · a company to develop prototype CRM...

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