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Keeping Track of Your Customers

13 Jun

Keeping Track of Your Customers

by SMB Suite
in Managed IT, SMB Blog
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A key to small and medium business profitability.

In the rush for revenue, businesses often forget the customer. The focus is on the invoice or transaction and the time it takes, instead of the relationship and ‘lifetime’ opportunity of a particular customer. Such behavior can lead to poor business predictability, lowered customer loyalty and satisfaction, and (ultimately) lowered profitability.

Businesses of all sizes, especially SMBs, can benefit from keeping track of their customers. Doing so leads to greater profits for the business. Traditionally there are three ways that this is done, each fraught with its own perils: 1. Salespeople keeping track in their heads or on spreadsheets; 2. Accounting keeping track by invoice; or 3. Internal ‘contact management software serving as the central clearing house for prospect/customer contact information.

A fourth way to keep track of your customers, for profit, is through the adoption of customer relationship management solutions and procedures. Below are eleven ways CRM will benefit your business – bringing additional profit opportunity to your business:

  1. Faster, Fact-based Decision Making: Because you will have your customer financial data at your fingertips, you ca quickly adjust your offer(s), pricing terms, and quickly assess any impacts. You will be more responsive to market conditions.
  2. Knowing Where to Invest: By understanding your customer’s purchases and your costs, you can automatically identify the profitable customers for further investment. At the same time, you can identify customers that actually cost you money, taking appropriate actions to mitigate loss.
  3. Predicting Business: By understanding customer purchasing habits and any associated cyclicality, you will be able to anticipate demand more accurately – allowing you to manage down your business costs.
  4. Driving Up Marketing Impact: Through deep insight into the characteristics of the most profitable customers, you can identify new prospects that share the same characteristics – increasing the profitability of sales success while lowering your cost of sales.
  5. Regular, Consistent Communication: Your relationship with your ‘certified proven spenders’ will be improved through automated use of mailing and emailing lists to constantly keep in contact with your customers. This can lead to deeper and more solid relationships and the closure of incremental business.
  6. 6. Automated Invoicing/Billing: With the ability of your CRM system to integrate to your accounting systems, accurate, timely, and automated billing will drive down your cost of business and drive up collections.
  7. Tighter Marketing and Sales Integration: CRM systems contain capabilities that allow you to track specific marketing/campaign investments to leads, opportunities, and closed deals – allowing you to know what works and doesn’t work – lowering your cost of marketing while increasing revenues.
  8. More “Home Runs”: Through integration of your customer into your product/service planning and/or decision process, you can increase the successful introduction and adoption of new products or services you bring to market – lowering your chance of failure and poor investment.  
  9. Higher Customer Loyalty/Satisfaction: Because you will see every customer, their needs, and any unresolved items, you can instantly improve your business response rate to your customer – thereby increasing loyalty and satisfaction – leading to new up sell or sell opportunities without an expensive sales process.
  10. Improved Sales Effectiveness: Let’s face it. Salespeople are asked to manage more relationships than they have time for. CRM helps them work more effectively by managing priorities, follow up responses, opportunities, communication, and territory management. The direct result is a lowered cost of sales with a greater return on sales investment.
  11. Your ‘Institutional Memory’ Continues to Grow- pointing the way to new opportunity. You don’t lose critical customer information when sales or service people turn over, allowing you to speed productivity of new sales or service people without having your customer’s experience skip a beat.

Lastly, businesses that subscribe to an outsources CRM profit even more! In addition to the advantages described above, CRM subscribers don’t have to make any added technology investments in hardware or software, nor do they have to manage the system through additional IT resources. Subscribers to an outsourced CRM have the best of both worlds – all the benefits without the capital outlay.

Learn how you can immediately benefit from the easiest, fastest, and most fully featured small and medium business CRM solution available – SMB CRM. Built upon the Microsoft technologies you are assured the greatest integration, best support, and highest productivity possible. The SMB CRM solution offers industry leading implementation and migration services to get you to benefit fast, and low monthly subscription pricing so you don’t have an large capital outlays.

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Steve’s been with SMB Suite since 1998 and has been involved with nearly every aspects of the Company’s business as a strategist, professional services executive, cloud solutions architect, and senior consultant. In his current role, Steve is responsible for SMB Suite’s revenue and oversees the execution of ERP, CRM and BI projects for customers across a broad range of industries. Steve combines his expertise in MS Dynamics GP, CRM and other Microsoft products with a strong foundation in accounting and business to identify gaps and streamline customers’ processes. Prior to co-founding SMB Suite, Steve was previously Corporate Controller for MEHLE Behr and, prior to that, Audit Senior for Ernst & Young. Steve holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from the University of Texas at Arlington.

Jeremy is responsible for SMB Suite’s technology vision, strategy and implementation and is the architect of the Company’s Dynamics Cloud Platform. Highly adept in every facet of managed services, ERP systems and e-commerce platforms, Jeremy’s expertise spans the implementation and support of business and financial software solutions, as well as the customization and integration of SMB Suite’s cloud ERP technology stack. He holds numerous Microsoft and industry-related certifications, and was primarily responsible for designing the Company’s progressive business services platform in the early days of the Cloud. Prior to SMB Suite, Jeremy served as the financial analyst, systems administrator, and information systems liaison for a $2 billion financial services corporation.

Monty is responsible for SMB Suite’s day-to-day operation and, most importantly, its customers. As a leader, motivator and mentor, Monty creates loyal high performance teams willing to “walk through walls” to accomplish their goals. Prior to SMB Suite, Monty served as President of The Bradshaw Group (TBG), a global distributor, manufacturer, and repair facility for digital printers. In this role, he was the Company’s ambassador to its most important domestic, European and Latin American customers and TBG achieved a best-in-class Net Promoter Score of 74 for its superb customer satisfaction. Prior to TBG, Monty served as the General Manager of Sam’s Clubs three highest grossing U.S. stores and was named Regional Operator of the Year in 1999. Monty holds a BBA in Marketing from Texas Tech University and is an active member of Business Navigators. He has been active in Vistage International, Executives in Action, the Dallas/Fort Worth Retail Executives Association, as well as, A.P.I.C.S., the leading professional association for supply chain and operations management. Monty also volunteers with Hunger Busters and ManeGait, a therapeutic horsemanship organization.

David is a proven financial and information technology professional with expertise in providing business accounting software and computing solutions. He began his career by starting and managing a successful independent consulting practice for several years. He then launched the local systems consulting unit of Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneurial Services Group, leading the office into the hi-tech consulting arena. After successfully developing the unit for Ernst & Young, David founded NextCorp (which became SMB Suite in 2013) to serve the business software needs of clients throughout the US. David has made SMB Suite one of the best cloud ERP providers in the industry. In addition to being a successful entrepreneur and leader, he is a software and technology specialist, holding certifications in various Microsoft and other technologies.