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Tactical CRM
Q&A Session Between GCCRM Advisors and Members
Mr. Ron Ho, Chief of 3C Method Institute, 3C Method Certified Consultant
www.g-cem.org
This article is exclusively written for G-CEM.
Question:
Before we adjust to CRM "hardware" system, we would like to teach our team of 600 people to aware of the important of simple data management and mining, how to read the data and how to use it for profit. what and how should I start?
Answer:
First of all, you are on right track of doing "CRM". A lot of companies act too quickly on obtaining so called CRM hardware or Software before cultivating cultural awareness of its employees about CRM concept. Therefore your intent to teach them being aware of the importance and benefits of the data management is a good approach for CRM practice.
Please try to define the following activities before you start your training session:
1. Analyze your customer data.
What do you have? Sales history? Service history? How about the quality of the data, who is the top 10, top 100? What is their buying pattern? Frequency of buying(consumables or machines or service)
2. Evaluate the sales process of your sales/marketing team
Discuss with your sales people and their managers, how do they find their prospects/opportunities? What percentages of prospects sources? (Existing customers, marketing campaigns, yellow pages, etc). How do your marketing people utilize the existing data or other data?
3. Work out training sessions to various groups.
Each group (mainly customer facing employees, like sales team, call centre, service team, marketing group) may have different work to do, they will benefit from CRM training in different way. Therefore, you should tailor your training program to their needs. Otherwise they will not feel interested in CRM.
I don't know what your job is in your company, but if you are one of IT, then you need first spend time learning the sales/marketing process in your company, watch their behavior, watch how they conduct sales call, commissions, how do they do their marketing job. You will need to be trained first before having the qualification training them in terms of CRM. And, if I were you, I won't even use "training" or "teaching" in these activities, because who train whom? Using discussion, brain storm sessions are more appropriate, finding out their complains about the 'data', about the IT. CRM is not just an IT project; it is more about sales/marketing reform project. Some sales group may benefit more from existing customers than others. Some may mainly new customers (eg: an expensive item, only needed once in 5 years time). Therefore, the real benefit won't result for granted from sort of standard CRM solutions.
If you need more information, I have a book, [CRM Theory. Design. Practice], published by Publishing House of Electronic Industry, where you can find the details how to start CRM practice, as well as other training requirements.
About the Author
Ron Ho has many years of CRM research and development experience. He is the author of [CRM Philosophy. Design. Practice], being published in January 2003 by Publishing House of Electronics Industry, China. This book is so far the most systematic and comprehensive work about CRM, and has been on the top sales record on China's biggest Internet bookstore (China-pub). Its second edition will soon be released. Mr. Ho has strong IT & Management background, with rich knowledge and experience in CRM, ERP & SCM. He is also one of the earliest CRM consultant certified by Siebel, the earliest and leading CRM vendor. In order to tackle the boundary of IT and business practice, he specially took a 2 years of marketing course, doing extensive research in CRM-Marketing junction and the integration points across marketing, sales and service processes. Mr. Ho was once appointed by UNDP as project specialist, as the deputy director of an international training project. He has rich training and consulting experience for various industries. He is also the ILO certified instructor and supervisor trainer. During his role as Chief of G-CEM Research Institute, he authored the first edition of China CRM Solution Guide. He is now the Chief of 3C Method Institute.
Ms. Ro King, G-CEM International Partner (US)
www.quaero.com
Answer:
First of all, it is great to see that you are thinking about your people and their skills and capabilities in addition to your new CRM technology. In fact, helping your team to understand the data you have and how to use it may guarantee the success of your new system.
Training a team of 600 people about data management, data mining, data interpretation and use is a very large undertaking. Let's assume this team includes sales reps in the field, customer service reps in your call center, marketers and even the IT staff that supports these groups. Each of these groups uses customer data, but they use it differently. You may decide to train along departmental lines, but I would recommend using this as a chance to work across functional areas.
You are probably going to have to develop a business case and get funding for this training. Depending upon the depth of information you want to get across, this will probably start with a one or two day session. You may want to engage a professional to help design the program. If you train people in groups of 25, you'll need to schedule 24 sessions! You'll want to workout your expenses and potential benefits, find your executive sponsor and get some buy-in from around the organization before you even begin to design the program.
While you are shopping the program around the organization to get buy-in, choose an enthusiastic team of representatives, at least one from each of the groups mentioned above, to serve as your pilot class. You can use the pilot class to help in the design of the session and/or to gather feedback about the session and improve it before rolling it out to the whole team. So plan to have one session, then give yourself time to refine before running the next 23!
Keep the session focused. Spend two to four hours on each topic area giving some basic definitions and describing how it works within your organization. Think about combining training professionals with experts from within your organization. Make sure you have examples from throughout the organization of best practices today or potential gains once your new technology is in place.
In addition to a formal training session, which you can use to kick-off your customer data initiative, you'll want to think about ways to keep this large team interested and involved in understanding and using customer data. You may want to offer a series of "brown bag lunches" - informal, one-hour talks by people in the company about how they are using customer data. You may want to have a monthly award for the best new use of customer data. Consider having a monthly e-newsletter to share ideas about using customer data profitably or to share progress toward milestones for the implementation and use of the CRM system.
All this sounds like a lot of work over a long period of time... and it is! But your company will be richly rewarded if you stick to it. The greatest financial returns from CRM programs are realized once companies begin to use customer information effectively. Good luck!
About the Author
Ro guides firms executing CRM strategies by optimizing technology choices, improving customer data use and refining marketing approaches. Ro's clients include leading firms in financial services, hospitality, media, retail and pharmaceuticals.
Previously, she was Senior Consultant at Tillinghast-Towers Perrin, Principal at Furash & Company, and Senior Vice President at Signet Bank, where she developed and implemented customer acquisition and retention programs and conducted customer profitability analyses.
Ro earned her BA at Harvard and her MBA at the Darden School of Business at University of Virginia. She is a regular contributor to industry publications and an adjunct professor at New York University where she has taught Fundamentals of CRM. Ro works with Asia Pacific clients from Jakarta, Indonesia.
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