In the CRM space, it is a big help to us when a business has figured out what they’re trying to accomplish. Unfortunately, we often still get told “I need some CRM”, which leads us to ask the question “Well, what do you mean by that?” Those letters mean a lot of different things to different people and that makes it hard for us as the vendor to really understand whether we’re a good fit or not. So it’s important for the business to have some internal framework to help them structure the discussion with the vendor.

That’s one of the reasons why we started rolling out workshops to help businesses with customer journey mapping last year – it’s something that is vendor independent and it’s a great exercise for a business to go through because it builds a framework for them to have a discussion internally about what they’re trying to accomplish. Customer journey mapping helps you build a roadmap for how somebody becomes a customer of your business from the customer’s point of view. It’s a good starting point because it’s not about your internal organisation and so you can take all of the internal politics out of it. It’s purely about someone from the outside of the business, going through the process of buying. And this is very typically not aligned with the way your company is structured!

Once you’ve got that framework for the discussion, you can step down to the next level and having understood how the business is organised, you can examine what gaps you need to fill. And from that you can begin to go down into use cases.

MyC.  What advice can you share in terms of how practitioners should go through the process of requirements gathering?

LA. The thing about requirements gathering is that, typically, end users are not good at expressing requirements. The usual process is that you have a team that interviews all the users; they understand what users ask for; they build a very detailed set of specifications and requirements; they’ve done all their research and are very thorough and they use this to select a vendor, implement a system and then roll that back to the users. And this usually fails even though they deliver to the users what the users asked for! This is because users typically don’t understand what to ask for. They understand what they do and they understand what they’re trying to accomplish but they don’t typically understand how to ask for the systems or tools to help them do that job.

So there are two practical pieces of advice I give people. First of all, you can build a very iterative process – so although the big requirements document is designed to fail, you can still interview the users, find one painpoint and act quickly, implement and then iterate. Agile methods are a great way to do this but the only way you really understand what the user wants is to get something in their hands quickly – then, if they realise it isn’t what they really wanted, at least if you did that in a two-week period instead of a 12 month period, you still have time to recover from that, and the recovery is then the actual process. So you don’t want to get into that long cycle.

The other thing you can do – and this is a little bit harder – is get a team with some consulting or domain-specific experience, who have been there before and done enough of that work so that they understand the difference between a user’s asks and a user’s needs. And a big part of the way you get there is you don’t actually ask the user what they want – you observe what they do and then build a requirement based off of that observation and an understanding of their process.

The thing about requirements gathering is that, typically, end users are not good at expressing requirements.

MyC.  What kinds of questions should organisations ask themselves?

LA.  First of all, there has to be a clear understanding of your goals and what you’re trying to accomplish. So you should ask yourself ‘what are my goals?’; ‘what am I trying to get to in a quantifiable way – is it customer satisfaction and how do I measure that?’  Asking yourself how you’re going to measure the impact of this is very important. That will cause you to focus on the problem you’re really trying to solve. So at the beginning, if you say ‘here’s my world today; here’s what I want my world to look like for the future; and how can I quantifiably measure that difference’ then that quantifiable metric will guide you. For instance, in customer satisfaction, is it Net Promoter Score, is it customer retention or is it length of sales cycle? That quantifiable metric will help guide the process.

MyC.  When it comes to actually making the investment in a CRM solution, what advice do you have for practitioners in terms of making the business case and getting buy-in?

LA. You must make the business case based on a quantifiable outcome. So if you go to the CFO and ask for money, he/she will ask what the outcome will be from spending that money. You can say that you want your Net Promoter Score to increase and that the ROI is an improvement in customer retention. Retention is a huge one. If you’re a business that has an ongoing revenue model of the customer – whether it’s ongoing services model or subscription model, or an ongoing purchasing model – retention is massive because of the compounding effect of interest rates. If you improve a retention number by one point per year, that adds up significantly over the lifetime of a customer. So a small swing in customer satisfaction resulting in a small improvement to retention can have a very big financial impact.

That’s one way of quantifying and making the business case. Also, there are things like sales productivity. Sales productivity often comes down to quotas or what my assignment per salesperson can be.  Those are all great ways to measure the impact. If it’s a customer satisfaction piece, naturally you turn towards NPS or retention metrics. If it’s a growth sales acceleration, you tend towards those metrics that are all about the sales cycle and sales productivity.

MyC. Are there challenges specific to the CRM software market that buyers need to be aware of?

LA. One of the complexities of the market is the very large problem set that people are solving, and that’s why understanding your use cases, your metrics, and what you’re trying to accomplish, is so important. You can go to an analyst firm – for instance, Gartner – and they are going to give you a huge definition of all the different areas that fall under CRM. There are hundreds if not thousands of companies that serve across those ecosystems. Understanding where you fit is very important in that selection process.

The degree to which you can give the vendor visibility into your business goals, not just a technical specification, is very important.

I’ll give you one example area – configure price quote (CPQ) applications. CPQ falls under the CRM umbrella and there are 10 or more vendors that have really deep CPQ functionality. Sometimes we’ll have customers show up and say ‘I need CRM’, but when you dig in, what they really need is a better quoting solution for their sales team – their painpoint is that they have a very complex and configurable product catalogue and it’s difficult to pull all that together. Well, sure, SugarCRM are going to do some of that and maybe we’re a fit, but they may be better off going to a different set of vendors in the space for that kind of solution. So that’s one of the big challenges – the space is just so big.

MyC.  Once practitioners are at the solution selection stage, what advice can you share to help buyers find the most appropriate vendor for their needs?

LA. I would tell them to be very open and transparent in that process with the vendors. The degree to which you can give the vendor visibility into your business goals, not just a technical specification, is very important. During the vendor selection process, some businesses build requirements and do a request for proposal (RFP) that is overly constrained to tactical or feature-level comparison. Sometimes you see RFPs that have 10 pages of feature comparison check boxes. The business doesn’t care about feature comparisons – they’re trying to do something like increase retention.

The good vendors will have a lot of experience, and can provide a lot of best practices, and help to optimise use cases and work flows and support business and sales transformation. Give the vendors a chance to help you solve your business problem. A good vendor sees a lot of business problems and the odds are they’ve seen your scenario before. You’ve got to be open and give the vendor a chance to be part of the brainstorming process. If you try and run this really strict RFP feature comparison, you’re not going to get a strategic relationship. And you want someone who’s going to be a business partner

For all your CRM needs, contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au. We will help you “Make Every Connection Count” in your business in 2016 and beyond

http://www.mycustomer.com/selling/crm/larry-augustin-ceo-sugarcrm-tips-for-crm-buyers

It’s that time again. In addition to shopping for gifts and attending holiday parties, December is also prediction season. Here are five CRM predictions that we think we’ll see in 2016.

Do you have a prediction of your own? We’d love to hear it. Please post in the comments section below.

1. UX will be big in 2016: Companies that focus on differentiating themselves by providing a fantastic customer experience will thrive. While the “improving customer experience” concept has been a major initiative in the CRM space for some time, what really drives great customer experiences is customer-facing employees having the right information and tools to best serve the customer at exactly the right time. Traditional CRM has fallen short in this area. In 2016, CRM users will have access to enhanced, modern interfaces that incorporate social and mobile customer data to empower the employee to drive extraordinary customer relationships. A fantastic user experience will mean more intelligent CRM practices, which will make it much easier to execute a seamless customer journey from awareness and purchase to retention and advocacy.

2. Personalized Analytics: Predictive analytics will be the next big data trend, and soon salespeople and marketers will use predictive analytics to forecast the impact of their activity and provide more personalized pitches or content to individual customers. Modern CRM applications are beginning to provide greater analytics for the individual user. Nimble, and consumable tools will be embedded into CRM and provide sales, marketing and support professionals with customer preferences and history, helping them engage throughout the customer journey. CRM is moving toward “systems of engagement” that use predictive analytics to cut through the big data noise to uncover actionable customer insights.

3. Data Privacy Concerns will Affect SaaS CRM Deployments: Today’s online privacy concerns and dispersed data landscape have sparked legislation mandating how and where companies store customer data. A well-designed and tightly-integrated CRM is imperative to any organization’s security and compliance efforts. However, the “cookie cutter” model of multi-tenant, proprietary public cloud offerings is not always sufficient for global business. Companies in highly regulated industries, and those who operate globally must address data privacy laws and mandates. In 2016, more companies will opt to deploy CRM with cloud agility, meaning they can maintain security and control of customer data, choose the best public, private or hybrid cloud deployment model (as well as on-premise) for their business, and ensure regulatory compliance. The good news with modern CRM is there are many options for those that are feeling the effects of these changing regulations around the world.

4. Mobile CRM will get even better: Mobile is, and will continue to be a rising focus for the CRM space. One of the great benefits of CRM is that it allows businesses to organize themselves more effectively. However, as the workforce is dispersed and people spend time out of the office, a mobile CRM app is crucial so those valuable interactions while on the road aren’t left behind. In the past, many mobile CRM apps have had limited functionality. As we move forward, mobile platforms will become more powerful. You’ll see smart phones display the latest analytics and dashlets via their CRM.  In addition, users will be able to better customize their mobile experience to get the data they want and transform that data into actionable tasks to address customer needs in real-time.

5. CRM and IoT will become intertwined:Smart companies want to stay a step ahead of their customers so they can provide information before the customer even knows they need it. Smart devices can offer new ways to deliver on that promise. The potential of harnessing the data of billions of connected devices and integrating that data within the CRM to create extraordinary customer relationships is very exciting. CRM platforms will evolve to work with the data that is being generated, make sense of that data and communicate to the people who can benefit from the analysis so they can perform real actions to help the customer. Many innovative organizations have already embraced the potential of smart devices to deepen all types of relationships. Check out our Vetadvisor case study to learn how the organization has integrated Fitbit bands into its SugarCRM deployment.

For all your CRM needs, contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au. We will help you “Make Every Connection Count” in your business in 2016 and beyond

Read the full article here http://blog.sugarcrm.com/2015/12/03/5-crm-predictions-for-2016/

SYDNEY, Australia. – November 23, 2015 – SugarCRM Inc., the company that enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most innovative and affordable CRM solution in the market, today announced it has opened its first Australian-based hosting infrastructure, providing its customers with comprehensive data residency security and improved performance for their hosting needs.

SugarCRM’s new service will be hosted on its proprietary Sugar On-Demand servers in Sydney, enabling existing customers to comply with their own data sovereignty mandates and to better conform to Australia’s new privacy laws. By opening its own data centre, SugarCRM is offering both its existing and new customers different options around where they would like to host their customers’ data. SugarCRM’s customers within the region will also experience faster connectivity when accessing their data, further improving efficiencies.

This marks a pivotal point in SugarCRM’s expansion within the region, as an increasing number of its enterprise customers request that their data is stored exclusively within Australia, to ensure better control over their data and have visibility of where there data is. This is in line with recent statistics revealing that 50 per cent of global companies have their data stored on servers within their country – and that number rises to over 70 per cent of Australian businesses. Catering to the needs of Australian businesses was a top priority for SugarCRM’s growth strategy in Australia.

SugarCRM’s Vice-President, APJ, Wayne Goss, says “At SugarCRM, we enable businesses to engage with their customers. We, in turn, have listened to what our own customers need from their CRM provider, and have invested in a local data centre which will provide peace of mind and an improved experience through quicker speeds of data access,”

Eric Ornas, Senior Vice President, Customer Support and Operations at SugarCRM, Inc. says the ability for SugarCRM to host data within Australia reflects how seriously the company takes both data security and providing best in class performance to customers. “Barely a week goes by without a major company losing control of its customer’s data. We are entrusted by our clients to keep their own customers’ data secure, and this investment shows how seriously we’re working to minimise any risks. Our customers require access to their data, often at a moment’s notice. With a Sydney based data centre, we’re delighted that this is something SugarCRM can now provide its customers in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific region,”

The Sydney-based data centre will be built from the ground up to mirror the capabilities and security protocols of all SugarCRM’s hosting sites, which provides customers with lower latency and best-in-class failover and business continuity systems.  

For all your SugarCRM needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au. We help you to make “Every Connection Count” in your business!

SugarCRM will launch an Australian data centre for its CRM software-as-a-service, the company announced today.

The company’s Sugar On-Demand offering will be available out of a Sydney data centre.

“At SugarCRM, we enable businesses to engage with their customers; we, in turn, have listened to what our own customers need from their CRM provider, and have invested in a local data centre which will provide peace of mind and an improved experience through quicker speeds of data access,” the company’s vice-president for APJ, Wayne Goss, said in a statement.

Worldwide, spending on CRM software reached US$23.2 billion in 2014, according to figures released by Gartner earlier this year.

Spending on CRM grew 13.3 percent from US$20.4 billion in 2013, according to the analyst firm.

SaaS accounted for almost 47 per cent of CRM spending in 2014, Gartner said.

At InnoventCRM we are expecting an increase responsiveness to our clients hosted Sugar instances with this new local hosting. We are excited by SugarCRM’s on-going investment into the Australian market place.

For all your SugarCRM needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au. We help you to make “Every Connection Count” in your business!

Customer interaction is a key component of most businesses. The success or failure of a business rides on the quality and quantity of customer interactions. This process is too important not to be tracked and managed thoroughly. For this reason, many businesses rely on customer relationship management (CRM) to organize and manage all aspects of customer interactions.

A customer database that holds all customer, product, and service-related information forms the core of any CRM solution. Every customer touch is logged in order to improve customer communication and provide better service. Reporting and recommendations are strong points of CRM, and provide the ability to do things like notify customers of new products, match customer needs with existing product plans and offerings, remind customers of service requirements, and follow up on sales and service to assure customer satisfaction. In addition, the ability to customize CRM solutions means that you can initiate, track, manage, and report the outcome of any and all ways your sales and customer service personnel interact with customers, making sure that all of your employees are on the same page and working to keep customers happy.

This edition of PCMag Business Choice Awards focuses on those CRM tools. For more than 25 years, we have been augmenting our hands-on, labs-based product reviews with our Readers’ Choice Awards, in which PCMag readers rate the products and services they use the most. The Business Choice Awards extend the Readers’ Choice Awards by garnering feedback about the hardware, software, and services our readers deploy, administer, maintain, and use in a business environment.

This survey asked respondents to rate their overall satisfaction with the CRM products they use or manage and the likelihood they would recommend them to others. In addition, we inquired about their satisfaction with technical support, and the overall reliability of the solution.

If you select, deploy, or administer the products in our Business Choice Awards, or if you advise or manage people in these roles, then you know how critical it is to choose the right products. The results of the PCMag Business Choice Awards survey are invaluable when doing so.

CRM Software and Services

Everyone knows that customers are the lifeblood of their business and that anything they can do to build a relationship with customers and keep them happy is worth doing. CRM software is designed to do just that and focuses on organizing, automating, and synchronizing sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support. The term CRM covers a broad spectrum of functionality so make sure to do your homework and find a solution that includes the features you need. You’ll also want a reputable and stable CRM vendor because these solutions, in addition to being a significant financial investment, take considerable effort to set up and maintain. The Business Choice Awards for CRM are the best place to start your evaluation process.

In this year’s survey, six companies received enough responses to be included as finalists, two more than last year’s results, but with three vendors appearing for the first time (with not enough response, Sage didn’t get a spot in the results this year.)

In the end, there was a clear best among the players: SugarCRM wins this edition (after not even making the cut in 2014), earning highest overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend scores.

Looking at Overall Satisfaction, Sugar takes a sweet lead with a 7.1 (on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the best). That’s in a class by itself compared to the competition. None of the rest get a very strong endorsement. It’s quite possible that this is because of the complexities involved in CRM as a field. A good CRM initiative isn’t just about the technology, it’s also about the best practices and processes that a business has in place. With a solution this complex, we rarely see a simple answer to the question of “are you satisfied?”

Reliability, in this case the ability of the software or service to run every day and provide consistent results, also follows the trend of overall satisfaction. SugarCRM is at a high of 7.2, but tied with Salesforce.com. (Last year, Salesforce.com was our winner, but it took a mighty tumble in overall score this year to 6.1.) Only Oracle and ACT! come close to competing in reliability, each scoring a 6.8.

Looking at tech support, SugarCRM’s story begins to crystalize. It’s once again on top with a 6.8 for satisfaction with provided help; the rest of the pack struggles to keep up. The only two vendors with enough response to indicate how many customers needed tech support were the behemoths: Microsoft and Salesforce.com, and both had dismal numbers, with over one-third of their users needing to ask for CRM assistance.

Turning to the critical question of “How likely are you to recommend your CRM provider to a colleague,” we see that very few are likely to recommend their CRM provider to a colleague, period. The highest score goes to SugarCRM with 7.4, which sets the solution above the pack. Only the refined SugarCRM’s users seem likely to recommend their CRM provider. The scores are so bad for the others, that every other vendor managed a negative Net Promoter Score (NPS).

See all survey results for Business Choice 2015: CRM.

Business Choice Winner: CRM

SugarCRM
SugarCRM has come a long way from its open-source origins to become an enterprise-worthy and beloved solution for customer every aspect of the customer relationship. It’s certainly clear that PCMag readers prefer it far and above the other options, including those from big-name vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce.com, which couldn’t hold a chandle to SugarCRM in almost every measure of the survey.

Methodology

We email survey invitations to PCMag.com community members, specifically subscribers to our Readers’ Choice Survey mailing list. The survey was hosted by SurveyMonkey, which also performs our data collection.

Respondents were asked to rate their CRM provider over multiple questions about their overall satisfaction with the solution, as well as experiences with technical support within the past 12 months.

Because the goal of the survey is to understand how the CRM solutions compare to one another and not how one respondent’s experience compares to another’s, we use the average of the CRM solutions’ rating, not the average of every respondent’s rating. In all cases, the overall ratings are not based on averages of other scores in the table; they are based on answers to the question, “Overall, how satisfied are you with your CRM service provider?”

Scores not represented as a percentage are on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is the best.

Net Promoter Scores are based on the concept introduced by Fred Reichheld in his 2006 best seller, The Ultimate Question, that no other question can better define the loyalty of a company’s customers than “how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” This measure of brand loyalty is calculated by taking the percent of respondents who answered 9 or 10 (promoters) and subtracting the percent who answered 0 through 6 (detractors).

For all your SugarCRM needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au. We help you to make “Every Connection Count” in your business!

Read the full article here http://uk.pcmag.com/feature/72891/business-choice-awards-2015-crm

In part one of this blog series, we talked about the need to align the sales and marketing departments in the age of the empowered customer.

Along those lines, as prospects are converted to customers, organizations will try to retain each customer for the long term and sell additional goods or services. To accomplish this, it is vital to have a total customer view. This means records of the interactions between individual employees and the customer, and also a view of the customer’s preferences and other pertinent information that can help the organization build a stronger relationship.

While many data sources and systems contribute information to develop a total customer view, CRM is the nexus that ties it all together. It should be the place where anyone who interacts with customers can immediately see where the customer is in their journey, where they’ve been, and get an understanding of how to be successful helping them to the next phase of their journey.

To function in this capacity, the CRM solution needs to be an enterprise-grade platform that can seamlessly incorporate data from multiple systems into an inclusive, central view of the customer. That platform must be scalable and non-restrictive – truly able to grow with increased usage across the organization. It must manage the very large volume of customer data to empower customer-facing employees at every step as they aid the customer along his or her journey.

Creating a total customer view is vital to building extraordinary customer relationships. But it’s also important to take that view of the customer and provide intelligence and context to employees at the point of customer interaction.

There is simply so much information available about every individual prospect or customer that it can overwhelm employees if not properly filtered.

So, a modern CRM needs to provide a “consumer-like” user experience that allows employees to easily navigate the system. The CRM must understand the context of the customer interaction and the role of the employee. By providing role-based views and context-sensitive data, users of modern CRM can quickly identify individuals and determine where they are on their customer journey. From there, they can access the information to complete the tasks needed to successfully aid the customer along the journey.

In short, companies that build great relationships with their customers “live” in their CRM. They obtain a total view of their customer and use that to provide the right information to customers, at exactly the right time.

For all your SugarCRM needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au. We help you to make “Every Connection Count” in your business!

Sourced from http://blog.sugarcrm.com/2015/11/19/modern-crm-best-practices-get-a-total-customer-view/

SugarCRM have officially released SugarCRM Mobile 2.9.0!

You can review what was included in this update through the following release notes:

SugarCRM Mobile for Android Release Notes 2.9.0
SugarCRM Mobile for iPhone Release Notes 2.9.0

This latest release addresses bugs identified in prior releases and includes the following new features and enhancements:

• Users can now view module-specific dashboards in detail views by tapping the Dashboards tab.
• Web Page and Case Summary dashlets are now available for use in SugarCRM Mobile
• Users can now filter list views when accessing SugarCRM Mobile in offline mode.

All existing installations of SugarCRM Mobile will be upgraded through the phone or tablet’s native upgrade functionality. Alternatively, upgrades can be performed by searching for “SugarCRM Mobile” in the application store for your device or using the following links:

Google Play Store
Apple App Store

SugarCRM Mobile 2.9 is compatible with Sugar 6.7.1 and above.

If you want to ensure you are up-to-date on all our latest releases, please click the ‘Follow’ button under our ‘Releases’ category in the community!

For all your SugarCRM needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au. We help you to make “Every Connection Count” in your business!

Global marketing head of SugarCRM claims too many organisations invest in customer journey mapping but aren’t acting holistic digitally

Leveraging deeper customer insights to drive personalised experiences requires more than simply customer journey mapping, according to SugarCRM CMO, Jennifer Stagnaro.

“Customer journey mapping techniques have been around for quite some time, predominantly in consumer businesses, and there’s a great interest in using those techniques to better understand the customer,” she told CMO. “Everyone does a customer journey map, but how many actually get any value out of having gone through that exercise?”

Where companies are falling short is practical ways that take those insights and actually deploy them in their business to improve customer engagement, Stagnaro claimed.

“We’re seeing people investing a lot of time and energy in all these big studies and documenting it all, and it looks pretty and you put it on the shelf, but people don’t know how to take those insights and make them actionable in order to change how they’re actually interacting with their customers,” she added.

A study by Forrester released in June this year, Modernise your CRM in six steps, further backed up Stagnaro’s argument. The report found successful CRM is not only about features and functions or internal efficiencies, but about better serving and supporting customers during their engagement journey. It stressed too many CRM initiatives fail because they focus on siloed, internal strategies within the marketing, sales or support organisation.

As a result, CRM efforts miss key moments that matter to customers. In contrast, forward-thinking companies start by articulating their customer experience strategy in their customers’ terms, which then guides investments.

“Businesses of all kinds now are really investing heavily in how they make sure they’re putting in place digital transformation strategies that keep them ahead – and it all really centres on the customer,” Stagnaro said. “Businesses from financial services to retail to consumer package goods companies are really re-imagining how they support their customers on their journey.

“Uber is a really good example of a startup company that has completely taken over traditional business of transportation and taxis, and put a mainstream business on its rear.”

Stagnaro claimed Australian businesses are not doing enough and not being agile enough to make the changes necessary.

“Where they’re falling down is that they’re investing in these techniques, but they don’t know how to turn them into action,” she said. “The biggest gap we’re trying to close with our clients is how to turn those customer journey exercises into real actionable processes to be able to support your customer better.”

At InnoventCRM we not only help you map your customers journey with customise SugarCRM to ensure you are “Making Every Connection Count” in your business. Contact InnoventCRM today to find out more on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

Read the full article here http://www.cmo.com.au/article/587964/cmo-interview-secret-driving-customer-engagement/

Organizations that view their CRM as a tool to track sales leads and record data about current customers are missing opportunities to get the most out of the system.

It seems a given that CRM needs to evolve to meet the need to of today’s digital economy and empowered customer, but many CRM offerings lack the critical components needed to succeed in today’s world of fast-paced change, highly-informed consumers, and a constantly expanding array of customer touch points.

One of the first issues is that many legacy CRM deployments were done as departmental silos, meaning the software and processes were limited to a single company department or portion of the customer lifecycle. This leads to disconnection between departments, difficulty presenting a consistent message to customers, and ultimately frustrated customers.

Our latest blog series will provide ways organizations can leverage modern CRM tools to better align the entire organization around the customer lifecycle.

Better Alignment Between Marketing and Sales

In most companies, sales and marketing are separate departments. Organizations typically rely on the marketing team (and marketing automation software) to develop, score and nurture leads, and then simply “throw them over the wall” to the sales team.  From there, it’s up to sales to turn a lead into a paying customer.

As service becomes more important, and as we increasingly move to a subscription economy – that wall between lead generation and sales processes needs to torn down.

One of the weaknesses in the marketing-to-sales handoff is the lack of visibility and context around the true nature of the lead. Even if it’s highly qualified, much more information and work is needed to better route and engage a marketing-qualified prospect. A modern CRM takes the handoff from the demand generation tool, and can add far more sophisticated routing rules to make sure that every new lead is sent to the correct person in sales, and also ensure that existing customers are not sent to the wrong agents, reducing “lead cannibalization.”

Advanced workflow capabilities inside modern CRM tools can ensure that not only are leads nurtured, but post-sale follow ups, renewal notifications and other revenue-generating actions all improve the quality of marketing directed to known customers. After all, studies show that the probability to selling to existing customers is 60-70% higher than selling to new prospects.

So, is your CRM aligned to meet the demands of the empowered customer? Can you bridge the gap between your sales and marketing teams?

Modern CRM tools offer organizations the ability to create a more cohesive, cross-departmental view of the customer journey. And these tools are flexible – and affordable – so the actions of every customer-facing employee can make informed decisions with access comprehensive information about the customer, This customer data must be orchestrated across all departments to deliver a consistent message throughout the entire customer journey.

Contact InnoventCRM today to help you decide what is the best CRM system for your business. How do you plan to “Make Every Connection Count?”

Read the full article here http://blog.sugarcrm.com/2015/11/11/modern-crm-best-practices-get-marketing-and-sales-on-the-same-page/

When it comes to buying a new automobile, smart shoppers do more analysis than simply looking at the sticker on the windshield. While some cars may seem like a deal at the time of purchase, factors like maintenance and repair costs, resale value, insurance rates, and even fuel costs determine the true value of the vehicle.

Selecting a new CRM system requires at least the same level of analysis.

Today, a majority of enterprise software is delivered as SaaS (software-as-a-service) and sold via some form of a subscription model, meaning users pay an annual fee to access the software (like leasing a vehicle). However, when it comes to customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives, the “sticker price” subscription fees can be misleading. Many vendors charge one price to get customers locked in behind the wheel, but customers soon find they are forced to pay more to fully realize the value of the CRM software.

These additional fees can include costs associated with accessing the CRM via a mobile device, making customizations to the platform, and integrating with other technology partners and systems inside and outside the organization. If you’re not fully aware of these upcharges, you could be in for an unpleasant surprise.

An Example of Spiraling CRM Costs

We took a look at the largest CRM SaaS vendor in North America – Salesforce.com.

Salesforce customers often pay significantly more than the quoted monthly subscription fee due to hidden fees and other limitations that can increase the total cost of ownership.

Salesforce pricing includes upcharges for system usage, which is often hard to calculate and budget. Upcharges include API calls, which equate to connections to other data sources. Storage-based fees can balloon when large files like PDFs or PPT slide decks are kept within the system. In addition, complete mobile access for some versions can cost as much as $50 additional per user, per month.

Also, building custom mobile applications on the Salesforce platform can cost up to an additional $300 per application per month. Base subscription fees also do not include access and consumption fees for Salesforce’s Data.com offering.

These upcharges can more than double total system costs. Let’s look more closely at the upcharge for API calls. When connecting to external data sources, such as accounting or social media streams, Salesforce sets a limit on the number of times users can send and receive information between systems. Each time a user checks the accounting records of a customer, or augments the prospect information with Dun & Bradsteet data, for example, the system underneath executes an application programming interface (API) call. If Salesforce users go over the maximum allowed number of calls, they are forced to either add more user licenses, or upgrade ALL users to its most expensive Performance edition.

What About SugarCRM?

Sugar is offered under a subscription model similar to Salesforce, but with some important differences. SugarCRM’s PurePrice™ pricing model means the subscription fee is inclusive of maintenance, and includes mobile access, a Microsoft Outlook Plug-in, reporting, customization and integration capabilities.

SugarCRM aims to limit the “hidden fees” that some CRM providers do not include in their base license costs. SugarCRM is the only CRM solution that offers functionality for marketing, sales and support for one low price. Organizations can customize and build on the Sugar platform without hidden fees or forced upgrades to more costly editions. Additionally, users can make any number of integrations without additional charges or fees.

Finally, Sugar can be deployed either as an on-demand or SaaS deployment, or on the user’s own servers. In addition, Sugar can also be deployed on a number of public clouds, including Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, Rackspace and IBM GTS cloud. Sugar partners also deploy customer instances in their private clouds. In contrast with other CRM vendors who offer a choice in deployment, Sugar is priced the same, regardless of deployment option.

This short analysis provides some basic insight into the costs of buying and maintaining a CRM system. Several pricing and deployment models exist—and it is important to understand which model best addresses the pressing business issues. Before making any decision, be sure to plot out the value to be generated from the deployment, including, but not limited to, the hard dollar costs.

By understanding up-front what additional costs or fees may be incurred, organizations can make an educated, and more cost-effective choice when choosing a CRM provider.

For all your SugarCRM needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au. We help you to make “Every Connection Count” in your business!

Read the full article – http://blog.sugarcrm.com/2015/11/04/beware-of-hidden-costs/