Cold Calling an existing Customer

Do you cold-call? I think there is better use of a salesperson’s time, but sometimes it’s the only way. What about cold calling an existing customer?

“WHAT?” I hear you say, “that doesn’t make sense. Why would you cold-call someone you already know?”.

I was speaking to a customer recently who was telling me how they were being called by a very large, multi-national supplier. They were asking questions like “what products do you use?” and “how big is your organisation?”. The problem was that this large, multi-national company was already a supplier to this customer. It left the customer feeling confused and abused – Why were they asking questions they should already know the answers to? Where was the usual contact person?

Why would you do this to a customer? It seems like a case of one part of the organisation not talking to the other – maybe a remote marketing department not talking to the local office? This is lunacy. The large multi-national supplier would almost definitely have a CRM system. It begs the question: are they not using it or did someone just decide to do their own thing?

In a world where customers are looking for better engagement and a more holistic approach to service delivery, you can’t afford to waste their time and risk alienating them by doing something so stupid. What are the lessons?

• Use your CRM and the data in it.
• Have a single point of contact or at least co-ordinate your customer contact.
• Make sure all your “customer facing” staff know the rules of engagement.

Enough said.

Craig Hansom. 6 June 2009.

The ABC of CRM

Do you have a CRM system? Are you getting the best value out of your investment? A CRM system is one of the best tools you can have to help maximise your sales and marketing effort. But you need to use it and you need to use it effectively.

The first step is to use your CRM. For a CRM to be of any use to an organisation, sales and marketing staff (at least) have to use it. It should be second nature and a part of doing their job. Every customer, every opportunity, every sales call should be entered into the system. A CRM system can be used to monitor your sales pipeline (how many opportunities do you have, what are they worth, when will they close). But without data being reliably entered into the system, it provides limited worth and doesn’t give you a true picture of whether your sales and marketing efforts are being effective.

Getting sales rep’s to enter and manage the data in a CRM system can be one of the hardest achievements to make happen in an organisation. The secret is to use the data contained in the CRM system at your weekly sales meeting. Most CRM systems allow you to tailor reports and create dashboards that can provide all the information you need to drive and focus a sales team (and your marketing efforts). Make your sales rep’s talk to the data that is in the system. If they start talking about deals and progress that is not reflected in the system then pull them up. If that isn’t enough, consider linking the use of your CRM to personal KPI’s – remember “What gets measured gets done”. Ultimately, the users of a CRM system have to see the benefits of it. This means it needs to be an integral part of the sales & customer interaction process and it needs to add value to the user.

A CRM is also used to manage your Customers (sometimes called Accounts) and the people who work for those customers (sometimes called Contacts). That’s the reason it’s called a Customer Relationship Management system. All your Customers and those contacts that you deal with should exist in your CRM. Now you can manage what work you do with each customer, how much it’s worth and even who you deal with within those organisations.

You can use the Customer information in your CRM to provide targeted marketing information to the people who are most likely interested in what you are sending them. Most advanced CRM systems allow you to manage these marketing campaigns so that you can monitor who you sent information to, how and when they responded and what opportunities and sales this marketing effort resulted in – the return on your marketing spend (Return on Investment).

 Other than the ongoing management and monitoring of your sales pipeline, the other great benefit of a CRM system is the ability to perform an analysis on the data. Analysing the data provides you with some very useful information (or at least confirms what other information is telling you). Some of the minimum information you should be analysing includes:

• Who your key customers are – are you giving them enough attention so they are not tempted to take their business to a competitor?
• Which products or services are doing well and which ones are not. Look for market trends that allow you to maximise cross-sell and up-sell opportunities that otherwise might go un-noticed.
• How is each division, market and sales rep performing.
• What is your sales cycle (time) per customer, product and even sales rep.

The data in your CRM can usually be sliced and diced in whatever way makes sense for your market and organisation. The trick is to make the date useful.

Used properly, a CRM system will give you all the data you need to feed into a Marketing Plan and help you with future business planning and strategy. Some of the information you should be extracting from your CRM system for planning purposes includes:

• Who are your best (and worst) customers.
• Who are your best partners or which are your best channels.
• Who are your competitors, what and how much do you lose to them and why.
• Which products or services perform the best and which market segments buy them.

One last, very important point: A CRM system (or tool) is only just that – a tool. It needs to fit in with the policies, processes, and strategies of your organisation.

Craig Hansom. 21 May 2009.