Why? The simple answer to this question is that people underestimate the potential benefits of CRM, and often mistake CRM as a tool solely to manage contacts and documents. However without realising the importance of better CRM through accounts integration, many are not maximising their return on investment (ROI).

What can you gain from integrating your accounting system?

CRM accounts integration can help companies to understand customer purchase patterns or the sales history of a particular customer. When trying to pitch for new business sales staff should have the full picture of their customer record, which could help them better serve their customers and create more up-sell opportunities. Effective integration with your accounting system can multiply the value and ROI of the CRM solution.

Consider this scenario:
You are a sales or account manager, and you are questioned about an account balance by your customer. Would you rather:

1. Put the customer on hold and ask a busy finance manager?

2. Access information yourself and give the customer an accurate, immediate answer?

Hopefully, your preference would be to give your customer the answer on the spot without putting them on hold.

This is what we call moments of truth. With the right approach, these moments of truth can be turned into moments of magic by exceeding customer expectations.

Turning moments of truth into moments of magic

Centralising customer information gathered from different departments is crucial to providing good customer service. For example, if you know what you have in stock you could promise the customer next day delivery, stopping them going to your competition. Or if the sales team knows the margin on a particular product they could beat a competitor price. These are just two examples of how important accounts integration can be to success.

Why is CRM Integration with your accounting System so important?

The purpose of accounts integration is to provide CRM users with live access to important data in your accounting system that will help you improve efficiency, reduce cost, close sales, improve service and improve collections. This data is presented directly from the account record in the CRM system, eliminating the need to exit or switch screens. Without this information problems such as mis-matched customer details, current pricing and stock information, order status visability, credit status’ and other time consuming business processes are likely to arise.

Top Tip: Real time accounts integration puts critical information in the hands of customer-facing staff who need it most.

For most businesses, the accounting system is probably the most complete and accurate source of customer information. It is therefore essential that your CRM system is able to access this information and make it available to the employees who talk to your customers. This helps to reduce cost, optimise resources and achieve ROI in the following ways:

• Employees can work more efficiently due to process automation, for example generating and sending more quotes, confirming more orders and making more sales.
• Customer calls are dealt with quickly and their problems solved, improving customer satisfaction and customer retention.
• Customers can be segmented by sales and purchase history to create more targeted marketing campaigns.
• Information regarding high priority accounts helps you ascertain the best match, and manage them through account management to achieve high value sales in a lesser time frame.
• Quotations can be raised with correct pricing and relevant discounts. Current stock levels, the customer’s purchase history and credit limit can also be checked prior to sending the quotation.

More and more companies are being asked to do more with less. ProspectSoft offers integrated and adaptable CRM Solutions helping you drive business growth, by giving instant, meaningful information on your customer data, allowing you to make better informed and more profitable decisions.

Next Best Practice: Are your staff working as hard as you think they are?

Doing CRM the right way…

Our first CRM Best Practice blog explained that the right way to go about a CRM project is to forget about the detail to begin with and concentrate on the bigger picture.

Implementing a CRM system is not an easy to task to take on. Your initial questions should be based on what you are trying to achieve and why you are looking to invest the time and effort.

Even after you have implemented your system there needs to be some commitment to tweaking and adjusting it as your market and customer change. This process is inevitable as you continually evolve the customer-facing side of your business.

So, if there are some good reasons behind implementing a CRM system you can move forward in the right way.

CRM is a tool, not a strategy

Most importantly, what we need to understand is that implementing a CRM system will NOT improve or grow your business immediately. In the same way that a hammer on its own will not nail two pieces of wood together; you need to wield the hammer, hold it the right way round, take aim and add some effort to swing it. Similarly, in order for your CRM system to improve your business, you need to see it purely as a tool to be used the right way, aimed at a target and wielded for maximum impact. CRM is a tool, not a strategy.

What is your business strategy?

For your CRM tool to be effective you have to know what it is that your business is looking to achieve.

You may already have a good business strategy and know what needs to change in the next two years to grow and improve your business. In which case you can skip this section.

However, if you are like most SME’s – run a good business; make a good profit; but rely (at least partially) on lady luck for strategy and improvement – then now is a good time to make some more concrete plans about which areas of your business you would like to impact with a CRM solution.

The first step is to open your mind and unleash your imagination. What do you want your business to look like? If you are after growth, how much and how are you going to achieve it? If you are after stability, what changes in your business will be required to get there?

What can CRM help you achieve?

A CRM solution can cover a variety of business requirements, but if you are focussing on growth then CRM could help your business through:

1. Generating more enquiries
2. Improving the conversion ratios and value
3. Improving customer retention
4. Increasing the value of each customer
5. Leveraging your customers as a sales and marketing force

Of course, you could choose to tackle more than one, or even all of them. Although, be warned – biting off more than you can chew, especially with software, can lead to an inevitable consequence of achieving very little in any area.

The devil in the detail…

In my experience, working out what you need to do differently is not hard, and most business owners and managers have plenty of ideas on what could be done better. Often the remedy is simply sending more mailers, better customer profiling, better customer intelligence, better proposal documents, more regular and timely chasing up of proposals, up-sell product matrices etc. You can be certain that CRM (if well implemented) can help with all of these. But what we can’t do is simply say ‘Make it so!’ and expect all of this to happen.

Selecting a high level strategy that is right for your business and your customers is vital. As is spending time on deciding how you need to change your business and how implementing a CRM system will aid these changes.

How do I begin?

My best advice to you now is to begin by trying to answer these questions…

1. What do you want your business to look like in 3-5 years time. What is different?
2. What level of growth are you looking for?
3. How many leads does your business receive per month and how many would you like?
4. How good are you at converting opportunities to business? Are some of your employees better at this than others? If yes, why?
5. How long do you keep your average customer? What impact would keeping each customer one year longer have?
6. How could you actively target your customer base for more references, referrals and recommendations?

By taking these steps you are not only creating good reasons for a CRM investment, you are also defining your business requirements to achieve growth.

Next Best Practice: Is your valuable data locked away in your back office accounting system?

There are too many failed CRM projects

How many times have we all heard about failed CRM projects? How many times in fact have we heard about failed, over-budget or under-performing IT Projects? Plenty I am sure! But for every failure there are tens or even hundreds of successful projects – whether we are talking CRM or anything else. So, as a potential CRM buyer or user, what is it that differentiates success from failure and how can we ensure that our CRM project delivers real, tangible business success?

So what goes wrong?

The reality is that very few companies actually select poor software. Most software on the market is pretty good at what it is intended to do – the real question is whether the buyer is selecting the right tools for the right job. The likely causes of dissatisfaction with a CRM purchase are:

1. Choosing perfectly good software (perfectly good, that is, for someone else’s business) but one that is wrong for your business.
2. Setting your sights too low – looking only at tactical issues and failing to see CRM as a strategic tool to deliver business advantage.
3. Failing to plan, implement and use new systems effectively and simply not being in a position to take advantage of what has been purchased.

There are clearly some poor software packages on the market, but in reality most businesses don’t actually buy poor software, they just buy the wrong software, perhaps for the wrong reasons, or are simply implementing their systems inadequately.

 Why does this not need to happen?

The right way to begin a CRM project is to forget about the detail for a while (don’t worry we will come back to this) and concentrate on the bigger picture… The really important questions are what are you trying to achieve and why are you looking to spend money and expend effort?

So, what can you do to ensure you implement the right CRM for your business and avoid becoming just another statistic?

This series is based on over 15 years experience in selling, implementing and maintaining successful CRM Software. We will reveal what we have found to be the best practice for selecting and implementing successful CRM, and take the first step to unlocking the potential lifetime value of your CRM investment.

For the next few weeks we will be looking at…

•  What can you actually achieve from implementing a CRM System?
• Is your valuable data locked away in your back-office accounts system?
• Are your staff working as hard as you think they are?

Next Best Practice: What can you actually achieve from implementing a CRM system?

We have now entered our 8th month at ProspectSoft, and it is safe to say that we are all left wondering where that time has gone – It only seems like yesterday that we were having our ‘Post Xmas Office reshuffle’.

For me, the start of 2012 has been very enjoyable. From previous blog posts you may remember that one of my main responsibilities lay in the recruitment of the 2012-2013 Sales and Marketing placements. We received around 250-300 CVs and Cover Letters and from them, I chose 12 successful candidates to attend our assessment day on the 2nd February.

The day ran very smoothly, and the 12 candidates were all very impressive.  We recruited 3 very strong candidates, and look forward to them joining the ProspectSoft family in August!

This isn’t the only recent success for our Placement scheme. On Tuesday we attended the National Council of Work Experience Awards in London, where we were awarded “Highly Commended” in the category of SME Work Placement of the Year. In addition to this ProspectSoft was recognised once again by “Rate My Placement”. Earlier this year, we were awarded the ‘Best Small to Medium-Sized Enterprise Award 2012’ – both are a great accolade for the company!

Now that our recruitment is over, I have had the opportunity to partake in different areas of Sales and Marketing. I was involved in the finding and negotiating of venues for our Business Growth Workshops in London and Manchester, and have also been able to continue to build strong, positive, relationships with our resellers.

Nick

So far our eCommerce series has focused on the end product. By this we mean:

• Deciding on the right web layout to ensure success
• Choosing which of your products and/or services are suited to online selling
• How to make sure your existing customers and prospects are visiting your website instead of calling your sales team.

But how do you get to this point – your site up and running, reducing pressure on your sales team, offering customers the same fantastic experience online and overall supporting your offline business?

Simply: Content Management System.

You may now be thinking, that’s fine, the internet is littered with free CMS options, it’s just a case of picking one. So, why would you pay for a CMS?

If you want a website that displays static content (text, images, videos etc), then using an open source CMS is a good option. You will quickly have a smart looking website that is easy to maintain.

However here at ProspectSoft we believe your eCommerce strategy should be made up of two key areas: flexibility and integration.

Without being able to edit dynamic content you will soon see a number of problems. What if you need to bring in content such as:

1. Product and pricing information
   If your site is a regular eCommerce store (where customers can place orders through your website), it needs to display the latest products, offers, prices and stock levels. If you have hundreds or thousands of products, the only way to manage this is to bring in this data automatically from your back office.If your site is not an eCommerce store but still displays product and pricing information, you still want this information to come from your back office.
2. Customer special pricing
   If you want to encourage customers to start using your site to order then they must be offered their agreed pricing via the website, otherwise they won’t buy – they’ll simply pick up the phone.
3. Buying on account
   Clearly, if your customers currently run a credit account with you, they won’t want to suddenly be forced to pay by credit card simply because they are ordering from your web portal. At the same time you don’t want to double everyone’s credit limit by accident – if they are still ordering on the phone sometimes & now via the website as well, we need to share knowledge so that their credit limit is respected.
4.  Distributor link
   How about being able to list hundreds or even thousands of additional products for sale on your web portal, products that your suppliers have available but perhaps you don’t necessarily want to stock – you can list them in your store, and simply order either back to back or ship directly to your customer from your supplier.
5. Merchant centre
   Now you have all these products, what about making them available to a mass audience via Google Shopping, Amazon or ebay?
6.  mCommerce
   Having a mobile version of your web shop is rapidly becoming a necessity rather than a luxury as mobile devices pervade our lives.
7. eSales/mSales
   How about enabling your field sales staff, allow them to log in with your customers on their behalf and take orders in the field via a web site or mobile device.

ProspectSoft web solutions will allow integration to your back office so a lot of the ‘heavy lifting’ of maintaining the website happens automatically in the background. If you run a new special offer for March, the correct pricing is automatically displayed on a website (including customer specific special pricing).

Finally your eCommerce strategy of flexibility and integration can be met – your website is content specific for individual customers, will update automatically and reduce pressure on your team in the office.

ProspectSoft are offering a selection of fantastic eCommerce promotions this quarter only. These promotions are all about getting you up and running with eCommerce.

1. FOC integration suite (usually £995 for Exchequer, Pegasus, Sage50 and Access)
2. Free 4 hours of Web-design work for competitive replacement (Actinic, Red Technology, KC ecommerce, Magento, Brightmatter, Aspidistra )
3. 12 months FOC mCommerce Trial (limited to first 10 customers using easy eCommerce design). Includes software, setup, monthly fees.

So if this sounds at all like your offline business, you really ought to be talking to us. If ProspectSoft eCommerce is not right for you at the moment, we’ll just say. If it is right for you, you could not only save a lot of money but also make additional revenue by deploying a ProspectSoft eCommerce solution.

I have been given a number of projects to complete alongside this. One of my first tasks was to call our customers and gather some of their feedback on the products and services that are being offered. From this I was able to create testimonials for our website (which you can see on the side of our home page and on our testimonial page), the feedback I gathered led to a free course being held at our head offices and was a great way to further develop our relationship with customers. I have helped with and attended some of our quarterly business growth workshops and also organised an event exclusively for our customers. As well as making sure the day ran smoothly, during this event I conducted some video interviews (which can also be viewed on our testimonial page). When Lou joined the Client Services team I played a part in ensuring that she was settling in to the role well and helped her learn some of the processes that we have in place. In addition to this, throughout the duration of the year I have been responsible for the initial stages of recruitment. This involved reviewing CV’s and conducting telephone interviews for both the next set of technical placements and a Project Manager position and working with Nick on our Placement Award applications, one of which (the RMP award) we were delighted to win!

My current projects are filming and producing videos for our website, initiating a department newsletter, assisting with a revamp of our customer portal and  investigating the purchase of a printer/photocopier for the office(slightly less exciting but surprisingly enjoyable).

This is just a brief summary of some of the things I do here at ProspectSoft , I’m sure you can see that I have been given the opportunity to get involved in some great projects and I’m looking forward to plenty more coming my way in the following months.

If you want more regular updates on what all the placements at ProspectSoft get up to why not follow our twitter – PS_Placements

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For those of you that have been following this series, you will have probably already guessed what the number one answer to this question is.

For most businesses, when they start trading online the best audience to approach is existing offline customers.

The quickest way for an eCommerce site to earn its money is to use it to transfer traffic from the phones/fax/email (all areas which mean you are paying staff to enter orders) to your online store. Allowing your customers to place their own orders online increases your efficiency and cuts costs in these areas.

Not only does that mean your customers are keying the orders in for you but also that they can now browse your full product range and buy 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Experience shows that when this is the case, average order values climb and re-order frequency increases.

How can you also target potential new customers to get them to start buying?

For most SME companies Search Engine Optimisation can be a frustrating escapade, unless you operate in a niche market offering a unique product or service it can be very time consuming and often fruitless.

Pay Per Click is more likely to get you seen in the search results, but make sure that you pick your search words or terms carefully, and set you budgets conservatively until you have some proven results. Google provide many tools to help you with this from their adwords search tool, to full analytics that will allow you to see where your visitors are coming from and where they go on your site.

However the most effective way to drive traffic from a targeted audience to your eCommerce site is to use effective email marketing. Clearly data is king here – but you should now have some staff resource to build a targeted database of email addresses. Then with an integrated email marketing system like the ProspectSoft eMail Marketing solution you will be able to target specific messages to the correct audience & follow up on results (clicks to your eCommerce site) tracking whether or not those customers purchased.

Let’s be clear here, the absolute key to leveraging all of these advantages is integration:

Integrated eCommerce

• to allow existing customers to use their credit account online
• to allow existing customer to receive their agreed special pricing online
• to avoid having your staff needing to re-key web orders

Integrated CMS (Content Management System)

• to allow you to have full control over your eCommerce key SEO data
• to allow integration to Google analytics for vital visitor intelligence

Integrated eMail Marketing

• to allow specific messages and appropriate targeted audience generation
• to allow full feedback for action on results from eMail campaigns

For most of us an eCommerce venture should be an incremental enhancement of our business, taking the advantages it can bring one by one, getting them right as you go so that they are permanent and allow us to grow our business whilst reducing costs.

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I was thrilled to be put in the marketing role when I started at ProspectSoft, and so far it has been even better than I could have possibly expected.

Marketing allows me to dabble in loads of different things: planning events, telemarketing, social media, branding, email targeting and campaigns. This keeps me extremely busy, and whilst it can be tough at times, every day is different.

My main responsibility at ProspectSoft lies in our email marketing. This has by far been the most challenging but also rewarding aspect of my role so far. Grasping the ins and outs of what to me was a brand new system was tough in itself, but now I have this under my belt I have been given a fantastic opportunity. Over the last few months I have joined Rob on the usage training courses for our Email Marketing product. This allows me to go onsite with our customers and ensure that they can make the most of their email marketing solution. Whilst this is a big step it’s also very exciting and I can genuinely say I learn something new from every visit.

Finally, I’m sure you have noticed this becoming a bit of a theme but, never has the phrase ‘Work hard, play hard’ been truer! ProspectSoft is a really great company and there’s always something going on. We have a black tie event coming up, I’m personally very excited to add a little class to my life, and some of the team are taking on a 10K charity run in May – I will be attending this for support purposes only.

That’s all for now but don’t forget; for more regular updates check our Placement twitter, @PS_Placements

Fiona

Why pay for a Content Management System?

As a company that offers a paid content management solution, a frequent question we hear is ‘why pay for it?’  Good, free alternatives exist, the most common being Drupal, Joomla and WordPress.

A ‘CMS’ is a system for managing the content of your website, without having to edit the HTML source code of your pages. Most work by allowing you to set up HTML templates, and inserting your page content into the template you want to use using a simple WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor.

The CMS works by maintaining a database of your content, and inserting the appropriate content into your page template to serve you the page you clicked on.

Content management systems have dramatically lowered the cost of publishing space on the internet. Want another web page? No problem! Just paste in your content and hit publish.

About ten percent of websites on the internet are powered by Drupal, the largest open source CMS. The blog you are reading now is powered by WordPress, and maintained by people here who know little about HTML or CSS.

So again, why would you pay for a CMS?

If you want a website that displays static content (text, images, videos etc), then using an open source CMS is a good option. You will quickly have a smart looking website that is easy to maintain.

The problems start however, when you need to bring in more dynamic content. Content such as:

1. Product and pricing information

If your site is a regular eCommerce store (where customers can place orders through your website), it needs to display the latest products, offers, prices and stock levels. If you have hundreds or thousands of products, the only way to manage this is to bring in this data automatically from your back office.

If your site is not an eCommerce store but still displays product and pricing information, you still want this information to come from your back office (even if your customers have to call you or a distributor to place an order).

2. Wholesale pricing

If you sell partly or entirely wholesale, you may need to display trade and retail pricing, depending on whether the visitor has logged in (and been identified as a trade customer).

3. Problem or delivery tracking

Does your business operate a support desk, or allow customers to log problems or issues?

Allowing customers to log and track support issues through your website eases the pressure on you support team, and means problems can be logged outside regular business hours.

If any of the above scenarios sound similar to the way you work, using a ‘free’ CMS will actually cost you more in the long run, as you will struggle to maintain the site and display correct information to your visitors.

Most importantly, the website won’t support your business. Instead of going online to place an order, your customers will call your sales team. (According to our calculations, a single order taker costs £100 a day, maybe taking 50 orders. An eCommerce site costs as little as £10 a day, and can take over 2000 orders!

Instead of logging problems on your website, customers will call your support desk.

You end up with a ‘free’ website that works alongside your existing business without really supporting it or taking any pressure off your other teams.

The reason ProspectSoft CMS is a paid solution, is that the CMS itself is just the starting point for a website that supports your offline business.

We integrate to your back office so a lot of the ‘heavy lifting’ of maintaining the website happens automatically in the background. If you run a new special offer for March, the correct pricing is automatically displayed on a website (including customer specific special pricing). Customers cannot place orders on products out of stock if you do not want them to.

We also allow you to present content specific to the individual visitor, for example a list of previous orders (and the ability to re-order). A list of their open problems, and problem statuses. If your delivery times are long, maybe their order status.

If this sounds at all like your offline business, you really ought to be talking to us. If ProspectSoft eCommerce is not right for you at the moment, we’ll just say. If it is right for you, you could save a lot of money in the long run.

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eCommerce 10 point site checklist

How do I even decide on a layout?

You want to stand out.

The best way to stand out is to be different to everyone else – right?

This is true in many walks of life, but when it comes to web shopping you need to be careful about being different.

There is a fine balance between creating something that is well designed and pleasing to use; and creating something so different that it is confusing to use and therefore has a negative impacts on sales.

Conventions have already been created with web shops; we all expect to find certain features in certain places. All successful sites pay heed to this – yes even the biggest and most successful sites on the web. Read through the rest of this and then check some of the biggest names; you’ll see almost all of the following on all of them.

The answer here is to find a site with template layout options (a template is different to a design – you can still stand out with great design). These template options will help make sure that the site has the critical elements in the critical places.

10 point site checklist

Whether your site is Business to Consumer or Business to Business (or a combination) this 10 point site checklist should act as a great start when you search for a solution.

1. Easy navigable categories on the left hand side of the site. Make sure that the categories have an expanding tree structure for ease of use.
2. Searching should have ultimate flexibility, allow searching of all products or categories; and match whole or part words.
3. For an easy view, at the top of the page show a clickable breadcrumb trail, so that visitors can immediately back track if end up in the wrong place.
4. On all search results show product details and pictures. With today’s internet broadband speeds there is no good reasonto not show images as early as possible.
5. Always have a ‘mini basket’ visible. When a visitor choses a product they want confidence that it is stored in their basket whilst they browse further.
6. Show pricing on the search results; visitors won’t buy if they don’t know the price! Don’t make them navigate further than they have to if they simply want to buy.
7. Tell them whether it is available and allow them to add to their basket directly from the search results.
8. Allow people to log into their account at any point – this is particularly vital for a Business to Business site. When a Business customer comes to your site they will perhaps want to be able to buy on their account. They will certainly want to be offered their agreed pricing on products that they buy regularly. The other unseen issue here is that without true integration to your back office accounting system you won’t be able to reliably offer these elements.
9. If I log in, I want to see my history, track the progress of my order, or re-buy items that I have bought before. So provide a ‘My Account’ area with all of these key items.
10. In the checkout process allow for delivery options (both charges and addresses) and show the customer progress through the checkout process with clear graphics that tell them how many steps and what they are. Allow for buying on account for customers that have accounts, or paying by card for those that don’t.

The where and the why…

The layout shown here follows the entire internet shopping ‘friendly’ conventions… for good reason.

Here is just one example of why:

Categories on the left and available in the search drop down – that much is perhaps obvious.

However, did you know that in order to maximise sales through your category structure there is a science to the order?

Your first (top of the list) category should be your No 1 most popular category.
Then, your last (bottom of the list) category should be your 2^nd most popular category
Second from the top should be your 3^rd most popular
Second from the bottom should be your 4^th most popular
etc. until you meet in the middle with the least popular

This is the way that people look at lists and will maximise visits and therefore sales – however, try and avoid having more than 12 categories visible remember use an expanding tree structure to ease the visual navigating experience of multiple categories.

There are many more conventions like this with eCommerce sites, follow this series to maximise your online profits.