The Savvy CIO

It’s the classic CRM problem.

Management puts massive amounts of time, energy, money, resources and excitement into a new CRM system. They’re giddy with the possibilities of sales forecasting, reporting, customer satisfaction, and all sorts of information that will help marketing and sales to be more effective.

The big training and launch take place, there’s a flurry of activity…and a week later 20% of the sales reps aren’t even using the thing.

CRMs don’t work unless sales reps use them. And sales reps won’t use them unless there is something in it for them. Entering call reports at the end of each day doesn’t exactly get a sales rep fired up, and there’s no direct line between that thankless work and the next commission check.

When deploying a CRM, you need to keep your end users in mind.

The system has to be easy to use and valuable for reaching the goals of the reps (not just the goals of the company).

Here are some ways we’ve seen it done in our work with SugarCRM:

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Every business person knows it is cheaper to keep your current customers than to gain new ones. Customer support is often thought of as a necessary cost of business, and a cost that grows as your business grows. But good customer support is also the lowest cost means available for gaining additional sales of any form.

To do customer support well, your support reps need reliable, current information about your customers and any outstanding problems. Without good data requests are missed, responses are duplicated, and your company ends up looking incompetent at best and uncaring at worst.

A CRM can empower your staff to make your customers truly satisfied and help lower the cost of doing so.

Here are six ways a CRM can help customer support: read more »

Highland isn’t a software reseller shop. We do custom solutions.

So when we advocate a piece of software that we didn’t create, we feel a bit of obligation to justify our preference.

Any CRM worth its salt offers similar benefits to an organization. Why do we think SugarCRM is currently the best CRM to offer our clients? Here’s a peek into a bit of Highland history and our thoughts on the matter.

Five years ago, it became obvious to us that CRM was a recurring need among our development clients. We had built a few custom CRMs from scratch, but were looking for a solid building block we could use in our solutions so we could stop re-inventing the wheel.

We prefer open, flexible, low cost solutions, and those preferences drove our search process. After extensive research and getting our hands on several possible solutions, we began working with SugarCRM in 2005 as part of Sugar’s open source community. Since that time we’ve deployed Community and Professional Editions of SugarCRM for our clients, both as a stand-alone CRM solution and integrated into a larger web application deployment.

So why do we use SugarCRM instead of other offerings like Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics? Without a full competitive breakdown, here are four quick reasons we’ve come to strongly prefer SugarCRM. read more »

Every business wants to sell more. The most common use for a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is just that: to help sales.

This usage is so central that many systems and vendors have a unique name for it: Sales Force Automation system, or SFA for short. (Because technology always needs more acronyms.)

Here are five key ways a CRM (or SFA) can aid your sales staff in identifying, responding to and closing sales opportunities.

Gain Customer Insight

A CRM centralizes key customer information that helps sales identify when to act. Vehicle Specialties uses their CRM to show sales reps account revenue history for the past 24 months. With visibility into buying patterns, reps know when a particular account is becoming less active and can then reach out to identify and respond to a developing issue. read more »

There’s a logic often employed when launching a CRM: If you build it, they will use it. If you build it with a lot of features, they will use it a lot. If you build it capable of everything they could ever want or imagine, they will use it for everything they could ever want or imagine.

But it’s not true. Increasing the capabilities of your CRM at launch actually decreases the chances your staff will use the CRM.

So the one thing we tell every CRM client, whether they want to hear it or not, is less is more.

A CRM can do a lot of great things for your business, but only if people use it. Want to make sure no one uses your CRM? Load it up with so many expectations and features that everyone is completely overwhelmed.

Here’s a snippet of a CRM request we received a few months back: read more »

It’s easy to see CRM as the silver-bullet to solve a host of sales and support related problems: organizing and overseeing sales staff, centralizing company information, improving accuracy of forecasting and planning, among others.

Yet successfully deploying a CRM takes much more than just turning on the technology.

Without some foresight, care and planning, business leaders can actually sabotage their own CRM, dooming the project to poor acceptance and eventual failure.

The most common forms of sabotage?

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We’ve been long-time users (and advocates) of SugarCRM.

Sugar fits within our preference for flexible, powerful, open-source platforms, and we’ve found it to be incredibly useful through the past few years, both internally for our business and as a platform for our clients. We’ve used SugarCRM both “out of the box” and as a foundation for some very deep customization and integration work.

Sugar’s next major update, SugarCRM 5.5, is now generally available, and it adds several great new capabilities to Sugar Professional:

• Mobile Studio: Customizable interfaces for mobile smartphone access.
• Cloud Connectors: Real time data integration from online sources like LinkedIn and Hoovers.
• Dynamic Teams: Add multiple teams and individuals to a single record.
• Social Feeds: User created Facebook-style work status updates.

Here’s a closer look at how these new features can benefit your business:
read more »

We’ve just finished a series of posts about how small businesses can get the most out of hosted solutions. It all started with Forrester’s survey revealing the most popular hosted solutions for small businesses.

Here’s a brief recap of the key information in one place, as well as links back to the original posts.

Customer Relationship Management: How to Get the Most out of a CRM

Key Benefit: Help sales and support win, keep and grow business by organizing customer information and history.

Most popular providers: Salesforce.com, SugarCRM (we use this), ZohoCRM

Email and Collaboration: How to Get the Most out of a Collaboration System

Key Benefit: Increase productivity with best of class email and calendaring tools, without the huge costs of Microsoft Exchange.

Most popular providers: CommuniGate, Kerio, Zimbra (we use this)

Content Management System: How to Get the Most out of a Content Management System

Key Benefit: Make content updates to your own website without the ongoing need for a developer or designer.

Most popular providers: Drupal, webEdition (we use this), Wordpress

Document Management System: How to Get the Most out of a Document Management System

Key Benefit: Store and find files more easily than on a file server, get to files anywhere, help teams work together on documents, control who sees what, and provide client access to deliverables.

Most popular providers: Alfresco, HighlandShare (we use this), KnowledgeTree

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) databases have been all the rage at large companies for years. So it’s no surprise that most of the marketing for CRMs is still targeted at medium to large companies. However, CRMs today are affordable for small businesses, and small businesses are increasingly adopting them. Why?

A CRM can help a small business do what you most need to do: find new customers and grow existing ones.

In practice, a CRM usually starts out as a glorified database: a high-tech group rolodex. (Which is a valuable thing.) But a well-used CRM will put that information to work to help your business market, sell and support with more effectiveness and efficiency.

How can a small business get the most from a CRM?

1. Find out why you fail to win, keep or grow business.

2. Make the CRM simple and easy to use.

3. Find an experienced CRM partner who can tailor the CRM to your needs.

4. Get buy-in early and often.

5. Train, train, train.

Once you’ve made the transition onto a CRM and solved a problem or two, you can identify and address additional issues with the CRM. But it all begins with a solid beginning that solves real problems and empowers people throughout your business.

Where are small businesses finding value in cloud computing?

A recently released report by Forrester Research sheds some light on the subject.

The top five business processes small businesses are moving to the cloud are:

1. Customer service and support
2. Sales force automation
3. Content management
4. Collaboration
5. Marketing automation

What’s to note? You can target THREE of these processes with ONE cloud solution.

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