Archive for the ‘Business Intelligence’ Category

Getting new customers is essential for any business. However, when you have the ability to effectively retain your customers, you reduce your customer acquisition costs and your business becomes an effective presence in the marketplace.

Once a customer is obtained, every effort should be made in order to maximize a solid relationship with them which will inevitably turn into consistent and qualified leads via referrals from your current clients.  CRM software gives you the ability to analyze, understand and correctly profile your customers which eliminates any guesswork in your endeavors.

CRM software can help you meet this objective by aiding in the interaction between a business and their customers on a more efficient and personal level.

Prior to installing your customer management software or client management software, it is highly recommended that you clearly define your goals and have a solid plan of action in place.

By preparing beforehand and making a list of the areas in your business that you want to improve, it will be easy to see the difference that CRM software can make in the productivity of your business processes.

By thoroughly understanding your customer's demographics you can easily create a sales process that is geared towards targeting your most profitable customers.  Having the ability to analyze and determine where a majority of your income originates can help you easily expand your business reach and make your business process more effective.  In fact, many companies spend far too much money trying to understand their customers when a CRM can help them perform this market research at a fraction of the cost.

Once you understand and profile your customers, you can now easily communicate and forge a solid trust based relationship by improving your communication.  Customer service is the lifeblood of any service-based business and by enhancing your ability to communicate with your current clients and target audience, your efforts will prove to be that much more successful while giving you time to concentrate on other growth factors in your Corporation.

CRM software can also help make your daily processes easier to manage which is essential for any finely tuned company.

Before you decide to invest in customer management software or client management software, it is highly recommended to investigate the best crm software that is available on the market.  Some of the most popular brands are Microsoft CRM, Goldmine CRM, and Salesforce.com.

Each of these solutions have their strengths and weaknesses and it is important for you to find the best crm software for your organization.

These CRM's have proven to help corporations enhance their customer management time and again.

Remember, customer acquisition is one thing, but making sure that your customers are happy and will refer your business to their colleagues and future business partners sets the growth rate for your Corporation heads and shoulders above companies who do not focus on their customers once they have attained them.

If your company is almost 100% sales driven, then having a CRM that can help you in the backend with retention is literally worth its weight in gold.

If you need help identifying and implementing your customer manaement strategies we can help.  To learn more, give us a call at 858-541-1820 or send us an email at info@rbdata.com

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Reporting

One of the most important aspects that keeps a company alive is how well it deals with its customer or client relationships and that is the focus of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. 

The goal of CRM is to enable the company to get a good view on who their best customers are, and what they tend to purchase or avail of in the company, what products or services they do not like and what comments or reactions they have to the other services, products and marketing moves that the company makes.  

On paper that may all sound really complicated by the trick is to use a dedicated database software that keeps track of all these and will allow company employees to easily access the data for future references and internal analysis. Understanding the customers is what keeps a company alive.

The issue with CRM is that it is not just a database.  CRM software will allow the employers and the employees of the company to create unique dynamic reports and lists to help them perform different analytical studies on the data.  There are numerous databases and software used for CRM and CRM reporting but the one true software utilized today is Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

There are a lot of reasons why Microsoft Dynamics CRM is the go-to software; it integrates tightly with the Microsoft Office applications that pretty much everybody is familiar with (Outlook, Word and Excel) the cloud infrastructure is the most modern means of network connectivity, and it is the only CRM tool that completely integrates an email system and active communications system.

For example: via Microsoft Dynamics CRM reporting where a group of employees create a study table of all the products that customers buy, how customers value these products purchases and how long it takes before the same customer purchases the same product will be the key to determine which are the most profitable consumers that the company has.

This is one of the most essential reports that CRM delivers; it is important for a company to know who values the company the most.  

Another good example of productive Dynamics CRM reporting is when the company pools out the data from the database to study which products coming from the company receive the least amount of error reports or complaints and then those that receive the most.  From these reports the company can properly assess what production designs they need to change and can make a forecast on how these changes can affect their sales.

It is vital for a company to identify what makes them sell, what the customers like and don’t like and what the public is saying and CRM tools are the gist of getting that information sorted out, analyzed and then manipulated for the company’s assets.

Why resort to old-school systems like paper case studies (or manually putting the information into Excel) when you can analyze all the data coming directly from your company and the clients with the Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM reporting tool? 

The most common starting point for many organizations is reporting.  Many organizations need to improve reporting whether this means speeding it up, making it more flexible or reducing the reliance on internal or external IT experts to provide this information.  This is especially important when looking to add Business Intelligence to Microsoft CRM.

This white paper describes a step by step approach to building business intelligence (BI) capabilities starting with reports and ending with a combination of dashboards, what if analysis as well as automatic alerts when certain key conditions arise.

To read this white paper click here. 

Last month, we talked about CRM Business Intelligence and since there was so much interest in that topic, let's go a bit deeper.

So many companies do a great job of capturing information in their Microsoft CRM system but are awful at being able to use that information to make better decisions faster.

What about you?

Are you quickly able to quickly segment your data base to execute a new marketing campaign so that it is targetted just those customers who have purchased a certain product in the last 18 months?

Are you able to identify the characteristics of your most profitable customers such as

* SIC Code
* Zipcode
* Company Size
* Position of purchaser
* Is company in growth mode or decline

* Etc

so that you can intelligently purchase a new list of prospects?

Do you know what the average lifetime value of a customer is along with the margin rate?

Do you understand the behavior of a customer who is growing discontent with your product or service BEFORE they stop being a customer?

If you use your website to either conduct sales or generate leads do you know things like:

* How many unique website visitors it takes to generate a lead
* How many leads it takes to set an appointment
* How many appointments it takes to generate a sale?

The point is to be able to successfully grow your business you must know your numbers (commonly called metrics).  If you do, then you are in a position to make better decisions faster.

To help you get started, we are offering you a free 60 minute Business Intelligence Quickstart consultation.  This offer is valued at $250, is limited to the first 8 companies that request it and expires on July 8, 2011.  Sorry, but this offer is limited to US based companies who have over 25 employees.

If you would like to take advantage of this offer, please contact us at 858-431-1820 or by email at info@rbdata.com and we will set up a mutually convenient time for your free Business Intelligence Quickstart consulation.

One of the most important topics in Customer Relationship Management or CRM that can have the biggest impact on your business is known by several names.  Some people call it "Business Intelligence" or "BI".  Some people call it "Analytics" and some people just call it "Dashboards".

Microsoft is referring to it as "Actionable Intelligence". 

But what is it and why should you care?

For many organizations, perhaps I should say most, putting information into their CRM system is like putting it into a black hole.  You know it is there but it can be tough to find.  More importantly, it can be darn near impossible to use that information to quickly make sound business decisions.

Sound familiar?

Virtually all businesses can be made more profitable if the management team know their essential 5 to 10 core business drivers, or metrics, and can instantly access that information.

These core business drivers vary business to business but some common ones include:

Year to date sales compared to this time last year.

Sales pipeline opportunities with an 80% likelihood of closing in the next 30, 60 & 90 days broken down by region and sales rep.

Sales quota versus actual sales broken down by region and sales rep.

Which marketing activities have been successful and which have duds with hard numbers to back up those findings?

Which marketing activities have produced the highest number of closeable leads and what was the cost of per lead?

What is the average lifetime value of a customer?

Number of open support tickets.

Number of open support tickets that have been unresolved for over 3 days.

What are the top 5 support issues along with the solutions?

Again the key is to know what your key business metrics are and to be able to quickly access that information.

The most common starting point is reporting.  Many organizations need to improve reporting whether this means speeding it up, making it more flexible or reducing the reliance on internal or external IT experts to provide this information.

This white paper describes a step by step approach to building business intelligence (BI) capabilities starting with reports and ending with a combination of dashboards, what if analysis as well as automatic alerts when certain key conditions arise.

To read this white paper click here.