Making a business case for an ERP System to manage your supply chain or an HR Software to manage your employees is clear-cut: Save time and costs, manage cash better, reduce risk and Walaah! Even investing an extra 10% on any of these systems helps increase your savings by a minimum of 25% as suggested by David Taber from CIO. What does this help you with? A hard to debate case analysis for Return on Investment. 

Sales and marketing are the largest expense in most firms and this is the most unreliable part in most organisations. A minute increase in the performance of the sales and marketing business processes, can make a big difference in your company's bottom line. Profitability increase of up to 10% can be achieved by improving the success rate of the sales team by five percent.

To analyze how much you need to spend on a CRM system, First of all you need to understand how a CRM can help your business.  A CRM can most importantly assist you manage your customers, your sales and service but what you should not forget is the part it can play in automation of your marketing processes. This makes a huge impact in your lead to sale conversion process.

The initial setup cost for a CRM System can vary from what you call a “Free open source CRM system" to systems that run $5000 per user per year, if not or more—can mostly be determined up front. What you need to keep in mind is the extensions that are required, integration and ongoing management. Let us be honest, the cost for your system is hard to quantify without extensive analysis of your business and its processes.

What you should never get excited by is the attractive figures that some CRM vendors offer to get you tied to them will be more than happy to provide you with wonderful numbers about efficiency and performance gains. Why because they might not apply to you. Since your business processes, competition, sales strategies and personnel are different from whatever is on offer, never go by the cost of someone else’s system.

The cost for your CRM depends upon your system's design target i.e. what you tend to achieve out of the system and how it will improve your business process and in turn better sales.

Like to get a no obligation quote for a CRM system customised for your business, why not contact our CRM team today

Shouldn’t your CRM be a competitive weapon you use to win against your competition? 

Shouldn’t your CRM fit your business, not the other way around?

Choosing a CRM for your business can be a daunting task. There are a lot of big players that use their marketing might to sell features, bells and whistles – many of which you don’t even need. You end up sharing a data model with all of their customers and even your competition. And you augment your business workflows to match what’s prescribed in their CRM systems.

Here are five great reasons to consider a customized approach to CRM in place of off-the-shelf or out-of-the-box options and, as a result, make your CRM a competitive weapon to win in your market.

1) Custom Data Model

An ideal system has to work based on how your business data is structured, stored and accessed. Most CRM vendors use a multi-tenant database. This means the data model is structured and normalized by the vendor, and all of their customers (including your competition) use the same model. 

NEST CRM  allows for a custom database. This means the structure and workflow is designed to fit your specific business. It also means that only you use it, and not your competition. A good data model can incorporate the end-to-end processes and business functions that differentiate your company. And your data remains relational in a way that is highly accessible, reflecting the “real world”.

2) Custom Workflows

A workflow is defined as a sequence of connected steps you use to get your work done. How you find your customers, sell to your customers, deliver and support your customers makes all the difference.

Most CRM vendors have prescribed workflows that they call “best-of-breed”. But if everyone is using them, including your competition, how do you really gain advantage? Often these prescribed workflows don’t incorporate all the upstream and downstream processes in your business, leaving you to create workarounds with spreadsheets or some other software package. And of course, they often make you take steps not needed in your business, leaving you and your employees asking, “Why do I have to do this?”

ECARET Solutions's NEST CRM allow for totally integrated, custom workflows. Having your CRM customized to match your workflows saves you time and streamlines the work that you and your team need to get done. Best of all, it allows your unique – and sometimes proprietary – workflows to differentiate you from your competitors using an out-of-the-box CRM option.

3) The Right Level of Automation

Automation is defined as the steps in a process that happen automatically or “behind the scenes”. Email alerts when a task is created, or compliance checks and verifications when clicking “next” are examples of automation. CRM automation is ideally used to increase productivity and save time.

Most CRM vendors have some level of automation build into their system. These automation levels are based on the law of averages from feedback the vendor receives from their customers. And often the vendors opt for more automation rather than less so they can market their CRM as efficient and time saving. No doubt, automation is cool. Nothing like clicking a button and letting the system do the work. But what happens when the prescribed automation is not how you run your business? Or your workflows change and now the automation is a hurdle?

 With customized CRM automation, you save time where it means the most and never get stuck with meaningless automation that ends up actually decreasing your efficiency.

4) Ease of Use

Most CRM vendors set up their CRM – the navigation, the screen layouts, quicklinks, etc. – based on feedback from their broad customer base. But is the “wisdom-of-crowds” really the best way to have your CRM set up and presented to you? Do you want to dig down ten screens deep to find the data you need? Do you want your key workflows hidden under tabs that don’t make sense?

You need a CRM vendor that sets up the navigation and screen layouts to match your custom data model and workflows, you can expect the system to be pretty easy to use. Whether it’s the way you organize your products and services, or the way you segment your customers, your CRM should be organized the same way you organize your work. When the screens in your CRM reflect the way you run your business, using it is intuitive, easy and efficient.

5) Killer Analytics

Many CRM vendors have a portfolio of prescribed reports with flashy graphics and dashboards. But should your CRM vendor dictate what metrics are most important to your business and deliver them in canned, off-the-shelf reports?

Why not have customized reports on the data that is most important to measuring your success? Why not have your dashboards show your workforce how they are doing in the terms that motivate them the most? When you measure your business the way that you run your business, you’re able to make the decisions you need to grow and outperform your competition.

Source: Capterra Blog by Craig Hubbard 

With about 1.3m apps available to Android users and approximately 1.2m apps available to Apple users, it can be hard to find an app that is user-friendly and effective. There are thousands of apps designed to help you be more productive whilst saving you time and resources.

We’ve rounded up our staff’s top 5 productivity apps to share:

       1. Evernote

It’s easy to see why Evernote is one of the most popular digital notebooks in the app market. Create notebooks, manage collaborative projects, take notes, create lists, manage expenses and more with Evernote.

Why our staff love it: Evernote’s tagging function makes it easy to search for files and keep everything organised.  

        2. Pocket

Save articles, videos and content easily with Pocket. A great app to keep track of articles and content that you want to take a look at later.

Why our staff love it: Offline reading and the sleek design makes Pocket a winner.

       3. TurboScan

Turn your phone into a scanner with TurboScan! An all round favourite, TurboScan helps us keep track of documents and ensures that everything is easily accessible.  It saves us time from rummaging through our drawers looking for miscellaneous pieces of paper!

Why our staff love it: Great to store business cards, invoices and has a great editing function.

      4. Mailbox

Mailbox is a great tool that helps users sort through their email quickly.

Archive or trash with a swipe. Mailbox takes the hassle out of going sorting your inbox.

Why our staff love it:  The ‘snooze’ email function is pretty popular. We love that it lets us focus on what we need to do now and reminds us to respond to other emails later. 

     5. Any.do

Any.do is the office’s favourite task management app as its interface is clean and lets us synch our lists, attach files to tasks and collaborate on tasks easily with other people.

Why our staff love it:  Seamless cloud sync and the function that lets us set recurring tasks make Any.do our preferred task management app.    

      

As you know CRM – Customer Relationship Management System is an efficient software built for your sales team.Don’t get me wrong, what I meant is the software is mainly meant for the sales team. CRM definitely brings transparency to the information and makes it easier for all departments to collaborate through one single platform.

If you ask me why do you need a CRM? Best answer would be

 “CRM  helps you TRACK MORE LEADS and CLOSE MORE SALES”

So here is the big Question. How do you know if you need a CRM system?  

Most  small or large  Businesses manage their contacts, track your sales pipeline and deliver customer service someway or the other without understanding what value your customer database holds. As one of our clients has previously told us " Customer Database is the most important business asset. Hold on to it" . Over the years of helping our clients implement CRM systems, what we have seen is that most businesses use excel sheets to do it. What happens with this is there is a lot of duplicate data being managed by multiple people over different departments and there is no information transparency. This costs the business lot of man hours wasted on double entries and running being others to get the required customer information. Is it not hurting the business bad?

 So what should really be asked is not why do I need a CRM but What functionality do I need from a CRM system and how complex does it need to be?’

Before making the decision to invest in any form of CRM solution, you should firstly consider your existing systems and processes, and how well these meet your business needs. Once you have clarity on the scale of the problem, you can decide if investing in a new system is right for your business.

1. Are  all your Customer records and contact history held in one central place that is easy accessible and visible to all members of your organisation?

2. Assume one of your colleagues left the business, would you have all their customer contact details and do you know the opportunities that they were working on?

3. Do you know how many customer service issues each customer has had, and why?

  

4. Are you certain that all the leads in the sales pipeline are being followed up?

5. Can you access all your customer information when out of the office?

6. Do you know which of your marketing campaigns are the most effective at generating high quality leads?

7. Are your team staying on top of follow up communication with potential clients?

8. Are you able to generate reports on the health of your business, at any point in time?

Did you answer “ No “ to at-least one of the questions above. Wait no further, 

Contact us today on 1300 559 419 or info@ecaret.com.au to speak to one of our CRM Specialists.

   Talk to us to see how you can get your own CRM System customised for your business. 

 Say no to spreadsheets and your obsolete systems. 

Work Smarter , Work Faster.