What Is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System and Why Should You Use One?
I see it play out all the time in my line of work, where winning new business comes down to the little things—leveraging the right contacts at the right time. For example, this might mean making a subtle on-the-fly adjustment to a marketing campaign or getting the finer points of a proposal just right based on a nuanced understanding of the potential customer.
Let’s say that two construction companies are vying for a project involving a major addition to an office building. In reviewing all the information their firm has collected about the prospective customer, someone on Acme Construction Co.’s proposal team notices that a colleague in a different Acme office has worked directly with a person on the prospective customer’s project team. A conversation with that colleague reveals important details about the prospective customer and the key contact—details the proposal team can use to angle their proposal in a certain way.
Meanwhile, the business development team at the competing construction firm, XYZ Construction Inc., believes it has a proposal that’s solid enough to win the bid. However, it lacks the visibility to uncover a similar advantage that could set its proposal apart.
Ultimately, Acme’s deeper understanding of the customer is the difference maker. Acme wins the business, due in no small part to the cross-office collaboration that prompted the firm to tailor its proposal to the sensibilities and priorities of the customer and the key contact.
The difference maker and catalyst for collaboration in this case—and in many real-life scenarios that play out every day across the business landscape—was Acme’s customer relationship management (CRM) system, which ultimately pointed the company’s proposal team to information that enabled them to push the right buttons at the right time to land a desirable piece of new business.
A CRM should be a collaborative hub for fueling business growth
A good CRM should elevate the level of collaboration inside an organization, within and across teams, departments, and offices, bringing together sales, marketing, business development, operations, and finance teams so the company is more on point with planning and forecasting, prioritizing pursuits, creating proposals, and handling other critical functions.
Perhaps the most important thing a CRM can do to improve collaboration is provide a single source of truth for its sales, marketing, business development, and executive teams. As difficult and frustrating as it can be to access and make sense of data when it’s scattered across multiple systems and spreadsheets, all that changes when a business has a single system of record and data repository at its fingertips.
With comprehensive information about prospect and customer contacts, leads, opportunities, pursuits, proposals, and valuable institutional knowledge all in one place, that data can be analyzed to yield insight that informs pursuit and go/no-go decisions, proposal creation, new business strategy, and other functions that are key to the growth of a business.
Firms can document why they won or lost specific pursuits, compile detailed records of past project experiences, build a digital Rolodex of customer and prospect contacts, and keep a running log of lessons the firm has learned, detailed by project and client category, by individual client and project, etc. This becomes a resource teams can tap into to give them an edge and avoid repeating past mistakes.
For example, it can get company leadership on the same page with business development, marketing, and sales regarding pursuit priorities. What kinds of projects are currently in the pipeline? What types of projects and clients have been most profitable and yielded the most repeat business, and why? How does our current pipeline align with our business strategy, in terms of the types of projects, markets, and clients we want to target to grow the business? With our current pipeline looking full and resources likely to be stretched thin, which pursuits should we persist with and which should we walk away from?
Analytics within a CRM can help leaders collaboratively answer questions like these so a company can put its resources toward the pursuits that are most winnable and desirable. They’re basing decisions on solid information, not just gut instinct.
Other ways a CRM can benefit an organization
Share key information about a customer
From key contacts and connections to past RFPs and project histories, there’s much to learn about a prospective customer and their projects that can inform a proposal. A CRM can serve as a conduit for people across the business, from sales and marketing to finance and HR, to record and tap into critical institutional knowledge, essentially connecting the dots between the past, present, and future of your firm.
Here’s where information about each pursuit, project, and campaign can be documented in detail to inform and guide teams in their pursuits, marketing campaigns, sales approaches, proposal development, and strategic planning. When everyone involved in proposal preparation within your company understands—and aligns with—the unique priorities, preferences, and requirements of a particular project and client, that gives you an advantage when you’re vying for new business.
Planning and forecasting
A real-time analysis of what’s in the order pipeline gives leaders across a company the insight they need to better manage their supply chain, manufacturing, inventory and distribution operations in response to dynamic market conditions. It can tell HR and production managers where and when they need to scale their manufacturing workforce up or down, or help project managers and HR identify areas in which they’re going to need people with specific skills and expertise.
CRM can also serve as a lead indicator of the success of specific product or service launches and marketing campaigns. With access to fresh, detailed data about leads, pursuits, and sales, and the ability to drill down to discern the value points that are resonating most and least with certain segments of customers and prospects, sales and marketing teams can work together to refine, improve, or pivot their marketing and sales strategies accordingly.
A good CRM can be a catalyst for a business's success
Collaboration within and across teams, departments, and entire organizations is the hallmark of a thriving, winning organization. And in many cases, a CRM system is the behind-the-scenes catalyst to it all.
About the Author
Post by: Akshay Mahajan
Akshay Mahajan is executive vice president for AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) at Unanet, a software company that provides enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management solutions for organizations in the AEC, government contracting, and professional services markets.
Company: Unanet
Website: www.unanet.com
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