Sales force management-1

Proponents claim that sales force automation systems can improve the productivity of sales personnel. Here are some examples:
1. Rather than write-out sales orders, reports, activity reports, and/or call sheets, sales people can fill-in prepared e-forms. This saves time. For blinds business online, online reports and online sales effort helps them to sell their vertical blinds and roman shades products easily.
2. Rather than printing out reports and taking them to the sales manager, sales people can use the company intranet to transmit the information. This saves time.
3. Rather than waiting for paper-based product-inventory data, sales-prospect lists, and sales-support information, they will have access to the information when they need it. This could be useful in the field when answering prospects’ questions and objections. For example, online instant life insurance rates company who are providing life insurance quotes online, they provides everything of insurance online without any paper.
4. The additional tools could help improve sales staff morale if they reduce the amount of record keeping and/or increase the rate of closing. This could contribute to a virtuous spiral of beneficial and cumulative effects.
5. These sales force systems can be used as an effective and efficient training device. They provide sales staff with product information and sales technique training without them having to waste time at seminars.
6. Better communication and co-operation between sales personnel facilitates successful team selling.
7. More and better qualified sales leads could be automatically generated by the software.
8. This technology increases the sales person’s ratio of selling time to non-selling time. Non-selling time includes activities like report writing, travel time, internal meetings, training, and seminars.

Ref: Wikipedia

Sales force management

Sales force management systems are information systems used in marketing and management that help automate some sales and sales force management functions. They are frequently combined with a marketing information system, in which case they are often called Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.

Sales Force Automation Systems (SFA), typically a part of a company’s customer relationship management system, is a system that automatically records all the stages in a sales process. SFA includes a contact management system which tracks all contact that has been made with a given customer, the purpose of the contact, and any follow up that might be required.

This ensures that sales efforts are not duplicated, eliminating the risk of irritating customers. SFA also includes a sales lead tracking system, which lists potential customers through paid phone lists, or customers of related products. Other elements of an SFA system can include sales forecasting, order management and product knowledge. More developed SFA systems have features where customers can actually model the product to meet their required needs through online product building systems. This is becoming more and more popular in the automobile industry, where patrons can customize various features such as color and interior features such as leather vs. upholstered seats.

Ref: Wikipedia

Customer intelligence

Customer Intelligence is the process of gathering, analyzing and exploiting information of a company's customer base. Any popular customer relationship management software must have customer intelligence.

Process
Information can be obtained about customers' existing and future needs, how they reach decisions, about their behavior as well as about the competition, conditions in the industry, and general trends. To properly manage the relationship with the customer the business needs to collect the right information about its customers and organize that information for proper analysis and action. For a vertical blinds company who is selling roman shade, faux wood shades and other types of blinds online. They need to collect information and they need to organize them in proper way so that what is the time when people tends to go for purchase or any other conclusion they can make. Same with the case of instant life insurance rates company, they need to come up with the new polices at the time when people are going for tax planning like financial year ending.

Tools
Tools like Speech Analytics can be used to understand customer and prospect behavior. Some Customer Intelligence solutions analyze telephone conversations taking place between companies and customers and then deliver insights to the desktops of senior executives and managers. New is using click behavior on a website to drive the Customer Intelligence. It's sometimes called behavioral targeting for lead generation purposes. You can predict someones product interest and buying intention based on the clicks and visits of a corporate website. There are 3 vendors in the field. Omniture; Netmining and Webtrends. Privacy is a hot item here. Some companies are using opt-in and refuse to collect IP addresses.

Ref: wikipedia

Customer service

Customer service (also known as Client Service) is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. According to Turban et al. (2002), “Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.”

Its importance varies by product, industry and customer. As an example, an expert customer might require less pre-purchase service (i.e., advice) than a novice. In many cases, customer service is more important if the purchase relates to a “service” as opposed to a “product". Customer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales and service representative), or by automated means called self-service. Examples of self service are Internet sites.

Customer service is normally an integral part of a company’s customer value proposition. Some have argued that the quality and level of customer service has decreased in recent years, and that this can be attributed to a lack of support or understanding at the executive and middle management levels of a corporation and/or a customer service policy.

Ref: Wikipedia

Window Blind & Shade Products online

We are talking about CRM. I was reviewing different online business website and I found shopblindsonline.com. They are the leading Internet retailer of high quality custom blinds, discount blinds, and specialty window coverings. Their window blind & shade products include wood blinds, faux wood blinds, mini blinds, and vertical blinds. Their window shades includes roman shades, cellular shades, pleated shades, roller shades, and woven wood bamboo shades.


Their website is so user friendly. They are giving tips and advice on window blind treatments from the experts. They also have free blind and shade samples to determine the right fabric or texture for your living room, bedroom, kitchen or anywhere in your home. you are having measuring problem? They are having local installer with them. They send their person to measure your need or to install blind. And if you're looking to beat the summer time heat check out their sunlight blocking cellular shades for darkening a room.

Aspect of CRM Functions -2

We talked about few Aspect of CRM Functions in our last talked and we talked following aspect of crm functions.Today we continue our talk on other aspect of crm functions.

Internal Collaborative Functional Operations

External Collaboration functions

Customer Advocates and Experience Designers

Today we are going to talk more aspect of CRM Functions.

• Customer Advocates and Experience Designers


• Performance Managers and Marketing Analysts


• Customer and Employee Surveyors and Analysts

Customer Advocates and Experience Designers - Creative designers of customer experience that meet customer relationship goals of delivering value to the customer and profit to the organization (or desired outcomes and achievement of goals for non-profit and government organizations)

Performance Managers and Marketing Analysts - Designers of Key Performance Indicators and collectors of metrics and data so as to execute/implement marketing campaigns, call campaigns, Web strategy and keep the customer relationship activities on track. This would be the milestones and data that allow activities to be coordinated, that determine if the CRM strategy is working in delivering ultimate outcomes of CRM activities: market share, numbers and types of customers, revenue, profitability, intellectual property concerning customers preferences.

Customer and Employee Surveyors and Analysts - Customer Relationships are both fact driven and impression driven - the quality of an interaction is as important as the information and outcome achieved, in determining whether the relationship is growing or shrinking in value to the participants.

ref:Insurance agency management Software, wikipedia, Insurance CRM Software

Aspect of CRM Functions -1

CRM Functions we are talking here. We talked about few Aspect of CRM Functions in our last talked. Today we continue our talk on following three aspect of crm functions.
1) Internal Collaborative Functional Operations
2) External Collaboration functions
3) Customer Advocates and Experience Designers

1)Internal Collaborative Functional Operations -
The people and technology support of processes at the policy and back office which ultimately affect the activities of the Customer Facing Operations concerning the building and maintaining of customer relationships. This can include IT, billing, invoicing, maintenance, planning, marketing, advertising, finance, services planning and manufacturing.

2)External Collaboration functions -
The people and technology support of processes supporting an organization and its cultivation of customer relationships that are affected by the organization's own relationship with suppliers/vendors and retail outlets/distributors. Some would also include industry cooperative networks, e.g. lobbying groups, trade associations. This is the external network foundation which supports the internal Operations and Customer facing Operations.

3)Customer Advocates and Experience Designers -
Creative designers of customer experience that meet customer relationship goals of delivering value to the customer and profit to the organization (or desired outcomes and achievement of goals for non-profit and government organizations)
We continue our talk in next post.

ref: wikipedia, Insurance CRM Software, Insurance Software