Turning Your Business Goals Into CRM Strategies

To align them with customer-based strategies take the marketing, sales, and service goals and divide them into the categories of attracting, selling to, and serving prospects and long-standing customers. Dividing up goals into these areas - attract, sell, and serve - gives you and your company the opportunity to isolate strategies that share common characteristics and build CRM strategies to support their accomplishment.

After defining if a goal is part of the attract, sell or service strategies of your business, you can develop strategies that have multiple benefits associated with them. Examples are shown here:

Service Goal and CRM Strategies

Goal: Increase service and repair effectiveness by measuring a 10% reduction in "no trouble found?return material authorizations (RMAs) from channel partners.

Strategy: Develop a web-based self service application for customers to get assistance with their support and installation questions. "No trouble found" RMAs are now 40% of returns from the channel - a website to assist with installation and the use of stickers on products to guide new customers on how to use the website contributed to a reduction of 15%, so net returns ended up at 25%. The company also trained their call center reps with call scripts to make sure new buyers understood the integration requirements.

New Business Development Strategies

Goal: Increase sales of new products by 15% this year through direct sales force focused on top fifty online and direct accounts.

Strategy: Increasing sales is a goal that requires tight coordination between multiple departments - it's too big of a goal just for Sales alone to carry. The supporting teams in Marketing, Support, Service, IT, and even the executive team have to be onboard. If you're looking to use CRM to increase Sales in either your channels or with your direct sales force, consider creating a tight link between the Sales Force Automation or sales activity tools you have, list management to track leads and be able to escalate them, and finally turn to your website for assistance with Web self-service and personalization for customers. Analytics also plays a key role as you can track sales results by customer group.