Manage circumstances equally as well as timing.

The obsession with time can’t be underestimated. Whether you are measuring your lifespan, war, microwave oven setting or sales cycle, these all involve a definitive time element. To better manage time elements, it’s important to manage circumstances equally well. Every month, week or day we sit down and try to make sense of our sales numbers. One of the greatest errors in our ‘subjective’ judgment may be our over-reliance on time as the driving factor. Like wars, deals are not set by time, rather by circumstance. So what does this mean?

Look for circumstances.

The Pareto Principal can come into play in a big way. It’s the 80-20 Rule. Think about your Pipeline in the same way: 80% of your sales will come from just 20% of your Pipeline Opportunities. As a salesperson or manager, we can never get away with violating the laws of nature without paying the consequences. Step off a building, and gravity will get you every time. With forecasting, while we may not experience consequences “every time” we ignore circumstances, sooner or later the laws of nature, like Pareto’s Principal, take effect. Usually it’s horribly inaccurate numbers and time lines that are difficult to make sense of.

Prima facie is Latin for ‘at first view’.

Whenever you forecast, Prima facie means you should see it the first time e.g. it should be obvious. But before it becomes so obvious there’s some homework to do. It’s important for any forecaster to know the circumstances that make up alternative directions of action. When it comes to Pipelines, analyze the number of circumstances and the order of magnitude of each.

This analysis can be as simple as a Ben Franklin plus and minus columns or more a definitive set of criteria. The circumstances affecting opportunities for your organization probably fall into five or six categories e.g. Delivery, Credit, Pricing, Customer Service, Customer Loyalty are a few. You might want to spend a few minutes creating your own list and ranking the order of magnitude each has with your pipeline opportunity.

 Two circumstances affect your Pipeline Opportunities.

1:Listing those customers that have the fewest reasons not to buy from you.

2: Define the biggest reasons why they won’t buy from you.

In either example, there will likely be a number of items. However, your task now is to separate the vital few from the trivial many. Then assign a value to each item, naturally, ranking the highest value items first. And it’s these high value items that you have to solve/analyze first.  

Set priorities for action.

Just like a general, you have to set your priorities based not so much on your wishes but what reality looks like. How this affects your forecasting accuracy will become obvious. You will now look closer at what will make the most difference in your sales success. The circumstances have a time line of their own. You simply can’t ignore a major item. Now you have to establish a timeline to the circumstance, or series of circumstances. This will result in a more accurate completion date.

The stronger the confidence in your pipeline, the less threatened you are.

We have to accept the fact that some customers are going to react irrationally. Maybe I can call it the ‘Irrational Principal’ where out of the blue you get broadsided by 20% of your opportunities. In these cases you can’t control the game, only your reactions to it.  I’ll bet that the stronger the confidence you have in your pipeline, the less threatened you will be by what happens around each opportunity. Having a high level of confidence in the vital issues surrounding your pipeline can be as a result of good ‘circumstance’ management.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

Pipeline Triangulation

Triangulation is the process of determining the location of a point by measuring angles to it from known points at either end. In MosaicCRM terms, triangulation is the process of determining the points that make up your pipeline and its ability to hone in on opportunities that have a high probability of closing. Click on the Icon for more information on how this works!

In the world seemingly on a rudderless course steered by automated ‘personalized’ marketing; we are inundated with the latest and greatest sales behavior predictions using social media, networking, blogging, video platforms… a digital cornucopia of the ‘it’ factors pointed at customers that will buy.

Beware of sales behavior predictions.

Some of the statistical data is downright poor and maybe that’s because simple statistics rely too much on buying habits under a limited number of situations, markets or conditions that bear little resemblance to what you sell. Few experts are willing to debunk these easy and simple hypothetic links e.g. a social network platform that works for selling Pepsi may have little relativity for selling houses.

Yet many a marketing guru would have your company totally revamp its selling process based on these statistics; worse yet with relatively ‘green fielding’ methodologies in lieu of tried and true methods.

Social Media Sales Stats: Does this mean the end of Wal-Mart?

Even when demographic and econometric modeling is added, a statistic hypothesis of a certain sales behavior doesn’t necessarily mean anything. For example, Twitter touts 200 million users. Even with such screaming growth, does this new wave of internet marketing spell the end to Wal-Mart? Hardly, for many solid reasons, not the least is new internet platforms are a figurative drop in the bucket. The 176 million living and breathing customers that visit Wal-Mart stores weekly and ‘stay’ awhile and ‘buy’ vastly outnumber Twitter and MySpace.

Stats tell you what customers aren’t buying.

Car crashes killed 34,000 people in 2009 and in 2008 there were six million accidents, about a one in five chance it will be your time. No one could possibly sell cars based on these statistics alone. Car manufacturers avoid the poor statistics and replaced them with items that do not change the statistical facts: zero interest loans, free this and more that. They have used poor stats to their benefit: ignore what customers aren’t buying.

Great stats can fail to sell.

Airlines can statistically prove air travel is many times safer than traveling by car. However, many a travel plan is based on a perceived and intense decision not to fly for safety reasons. As infinitesimal as the risk may be, the buying decision for air travel is not based on favorable safety statistics. So airlines ignore statistics that won’t sell: a hugely favorable safety statistic is something they can’t sell because many passengers aren’t buying it.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner
Maximize your statistical edge: “Sell a ‘Trend”

Even with exposure to the unlimited ‘customers’ on the net, selling a trend is possibly the only edge over blanket numerical statistics. What makes a trend is selling to good markets and ignoring weak markets, niches or products with proven methods and options that accentuate your edge.

At MosaicCRM we rely on tried and true statistics, particularly in the two vital areas of activities and sales opportunities.

• Market Analytics show aging, margin, unit volumes and revenue distribution is a single step
• Track Stalled Opportunities as an indicator of competition, sales programs and sales cycles
• Identify Customer Buying Cycles to minimize the selling cycle and maximize personnel deployment

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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Protocols for Measuring and Optimizing Activity Results

Helping organizations and their users achieve their activity objectives is the hallmark of MosaicCRM. Our business processes offer a unique and important approach to measuring activity ‘results’.  This differentiation is particularity valuable when it comes to Account Retention and Acquisition: our activity protocols are vital to optimize activity effectiveness and success.

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Do we enhance sales with customer satisfaction or is it customer loyalty? The differences are night and day and the effectiveness of each needs careful scrutiny. To hear the gurus talk about the value of customer satisfaction, one would think it’s the beginning and end of the customer relationship. Maybe that’s because it’s easy to define the satisfaction mission: what business practices result in the highest customer satisfaction.

In turn, the rationale is the more satisfied the customer is, the higher degree of customer loyalty and more loyal customers buy more.  Right? Not necessarily. This is not to belittle the satisfaction process in any way because a lot of our selling is often directly related to the JD Power and Associates or Consumer Reports or similar evaluations about your product and company. This is where it starts to get confusing.

What is satisfaction?

It’s hard to find a constant relationship between satisfaction and loyalty. It depends on the value weight that the buyer assigns to the purchase. It could rate with little or no value, such as in the case of a commodity like cars. If what you sell is a commodity, the satisfaction value will usually be on par with your competition. In these cases it should not be the focus of your sales efforts because in the mind of your customer, he has placed little value on it and hence you are no different from anybody else.

What’s loyalty?

Loyalty is best summed up as the reason the customer wants to return and buy something from you. There is so much less said about customer loyalty relative to customer satisfaction, yet from a sales perspective, it might be the most important buying reason of all time.

Successful organizations have a common denominator: a long history of providing value.

What drives the ‘reasons’ behind customer loyalty? I believe strongly that loyalty is driven by value. And value is what the purchaser deems appropriate at that time.  Herein is the key: you must provide the exact value equation to the customer at the time of purchase. Equally valid is the fact that to maintain loyalty, you can’t rely on past levels of satisfaction. Your customer has likely changed and so has their perception of value. As sales people, our task is to recognize and uncover our customer’s ever changing value system. Change with them or lose them. It’s that simple and it’s that easy.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

CRM is an efficient method to acquire the satisfaction and loyalty drivers unique to your customer. This could play a key role in helping you manage what the customer perceives is the life cycle of your product (buying cycle) and tracking the current ‘value’ of why they want to buy from you.

• Monitor buying ‘reasons’
• Target buying cycles
• Strategic activities and objectives that match buying cycles and customer preferences
  
• Pre-formatted customer/prospect nurturing programs
• Case/Customer Support modules
• Integrate with social network/media venues

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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Protocols for Measuring and Optimizing Activity Results

Helping organizations and their users achieve their activity objectives is the hallmark of MosaicCRM. Our business processes offer a unique and important approach to measuring activity ‘results’.  This differentiation is particularity valuable when it comes to Account Retention and Acquisition: our activity protocols are vital to optimize activity effectiveness and success.

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8 Ideas For Sweeter Sales.

Forest Gump said it best: ‘Life’s like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.’ Sales results often share the same fate. Here are a few ideas that might help you chose the best chocolates!

• A big part of any sales function is continuous and rapid prospect qualification. The key measurement is whether or not they are going to buy. This differs from what they want to do, as compared to what they can do.
• Focus on what you have to offer, and not just what you are selling.
• Continually expand your product applications to new markets and/or customers. This minimizes your reliance on fragile markets or domineering customers.
• Focus your creative energies on strategies that promote consistent wins. By doing so, you will lessen your natural tendency to fall back on the blasé behaviors that just can’t produce the long-term consistency you need.
• If your pipeline seems to be managing you, then manage your prospects much earlier in the sales cycle. Two aspects of managing prospects are rating them as a company and the value of their opportunities. If either doesn’t fit your business, move on.
• Once you have your customer’s attention, keep it focused only on them.
• Simple selling techniques work. If nothing else, try something simple to improve, innovate and demonstrate your product.
• Promote customer satisfaction, but sell loyalty. Loyalty is the reason customers want to buy from you.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

Nobody said CRM is sweet but here are a few ideas to keep your sales process on track:

• Qualification: Set out predefined Rating and Profile descriptions for your Account and Contacts. How well  each fits the ideal target can speed up this all important sales step.
• Customer Retention/Loyalty Process: Don’t leave retention and loyalty programs to chance. MosaicCRM offers ‘Marvel’ a unique system of multiple contact processes that keep your organization in front of customers.
• Daily Activity Manager: This eloquent system makes daily activities a breeze so sales staff can concentrate their energy and time on selling.
  
• Deal Nurturing: Nothing is dropped or forgotten with PipelinePro methodology and alerts systems.
  

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Written by
Bill Noonan, Founder & CEO, MosaicCRM

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Pre-CRM Planning Tips for SMB’s

I’ve put together this slide presentation that covers a number of key elements that can help in your CRM Plan or Re-Start program.  Some of the topics include Beware of ‘Quick and Easy’ CRM promotions, The Human Factors, Competition Applications, Abilities, Resources and Sales Process Design, Budgeting and more.
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“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.” Patton

Motivating your customer to buy the world’s best doodad requires some different thinking in this economy. Understanding what a client really thinks can help. Having good answers helps even more! Automating the thinking task.. not possible but CRM can help you think better!

1. What type of capital investment is required?
Client: Our new budgets have stopped everything. Who is going to cut what to do this project?

2. What’s the ROI on the world’s greatest doodad?
Client: The ROI has to pencil out to ‘immediate’ if we are to do anything new or even think to replace anything we already have.

3. How is your doodad going to improve on my current way of doing things?
Client: We need to be assured that it works, everything we do goes under a microscope.

4. How can your new doodad not add to my costs?
Client: Somehow these wonder cures always end up costing more. We really can’t add anything to the budget.

5. How can you and your doodad help in an immediate way?
Client: Time is money and that means I need tangible results today.

6. Is your doodad going to take more time and distract my staff?
Client: Training, implementation, added costs and changing the status quo are big distractions we don’t need.

7. How much money is it going to save me?
Client: What specific examples can you show? Fluff isn’t going to cut it this year.

8. What happens when we have problems?
Client: We cut support personnel to the bone. When we have a problem is it going to take us weeks to hunt you guys down?

9. What will happen if we don’t do anything?
Client: We’ve been doing this way for years so why all the urgency now? Heck, our level of performance is understandable in this economy.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

• Add topical fields to your CRM program that include the top buying issues facing your clients.  For example, Opportunity/Drawbacks/Challenges can be simple fields with drop down menus to aid in speedily adding the info and tracking changes throughout the sales cycle
• Add a new technique ‘Opportunity Rating’ unlike Probability weight the importance of each issue to Rate the Opportunity against a specific Pass-Fail number
  
• Decision delays? MosaicCRM offers a ‘Deal Nurturing Strategy’ to your Opportunity mix: use a prescribed contact schedule and script to keep value and timely contact with decision makers

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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CRM manages obsolescence better than anything else.

Ever ask yourself how we got here from index cards and a ballpoint pen? What made CRM the darling child and a must have? Let’s take a step back to 1959. Harley Earl, who for over 30 years as the Chief of Design and Styling for GM, may best be remembered for designing the classic Corvette. For sales and marketing professionals, more important was his design for the tail fins on the 1959 Cadillac.

First Key: Planned Obsolescence

This Caddy marked the epitome of planned obsolescence. By any measure, no one would confuse this masterpiece with any sort of a vehicle that would last a lifetime. Just the opposite was true:  this car was purely about style, a river of chrome, cool colors, and even cooler fins and what it said about the Customer. This is the First Key in what would forever mark the change in how we sell all goods: planned obsolescence changed our sales strategies to customer buying cycles.

Key Two: Ralph Nader added to the CRM chain

The Second Key would involve Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate who gained notoriety by killing the Corvair with his 1965 authorship of “Unsafe at Any Speed”. Few know that he actually got his first stab in this field with the ’59 Caddy. My guess is Nader felt it was unsafe at any speed because people might impale themselves on the tail fins. Nader ensured that consumer rights gained momentum and laws demanded auto manufacturers keep track of buyers (customers) for recall notices.

Key Three: Cheap and easy to use, PC’s was the breakthrough for CRM

Well, not all this Customer data was put to waste as simple mailing lists or be the privy of major corporations. Much has been said about the personal computer but what’s not evident is its role as the Third Key to the modern selling puzzle. The result of this data journey is every nuance, of everything you buy or want to buy, is available to anyone who cares to know. For miniscule cost, with equally miniscule computer or marketing skills, anyone can use this data.  

Key Four: The Internet changed buyer’s relationship habits

The Fourth Key is the Internet: Information is cheap and available to everyone. Customers are addicted to finding out what they want to buy on the net. This doesn’t eliminate the need for a sales relationship. For many organizations, just the opposite is true. Once the object of desire is found, consumers want to connect instantly in a ‘relationship’, no matter how short term they need it to be.

What this all means today is for a great many sales people, economic survival relies on the consumption of the constant turnover that obsolescence requires and how the customers prefers their client relationship.

Modern selling recognizes customers changed to a buying cycle process

Why they buy and what they expect to gain is often measured in terms of their short-term buying-cycles. Hence, we need CRM technology to stay tuned to our customer’s wavelength and gear our sales pitch to exactly what the consumer wants to buy at that very moment. Unfortunately, most CRM program designs are still back in the 1950’s mode: lots of data lists, extraneous info and doodads that do little to recognize or respond to buying cycle strategies. 

Here’s the rub: Buying and setting up a CRM is ridiculously simple….

• But this bears no relation to what you need CRM to do: support a structured process that defines the buying cycle and the enterprise-wide activities essential relationship events that surround it. 
• CRM to be of any sustainable value to an organization is a strategic process that should eliminate the clutter of extraneous data, activities and tools, the polar opposite of the soup to nuts offerings that are sold to CRM users.   

I am not here to debunk anything or upset the latest CRM guru’s solution. Rather, to illustrate that a lot of what we have learned or assumed about CRM role in sales automation starts on the wrong assumptions, neglect the relationship needs and the vast majority die quickly e.g. obsolete before they get started. That’s not entirely your fault: it’s just that many of the CRM programs and gurus fail to navigate a sustainable buying cycle relationship management strategy. Instead they see obsolescence (a river of technical chrome, doodads and bells and whistles) as a better reason to engage CRM.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

The basic roots that make up CRM ‘work’ fall into this simple summary:

• 1: Deploying a process that acknowledges the ‘Customer’s’ buying cycle as critical to whatever comes before or follows next in the sales relationship cycle.
• 2: ‘Managing’ the customer’s short-term needs and bridging the attention gap is the ‘Relationship’ job of the sales person and must be in sync with the CRM process set up.
• 3: CRM must manage the degree of automation required in the sales role e.g. the shortest route possible to the customer.

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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Mirroring our Masters

In America over 77 million dogs have owners. Then it’s not so unreasonable to imagine that in the scheme of modern urban life that they have an affinity to look like their owners. During a recent lunch my guests discussed this phenomenon and for an added wrinkle we even went so far as to match a few business associates with the dog they owned. One commented how uncanny it was that their General Manager looked remarkably like his mutt. Upon further reflection the business too was beginning to look unremarkable, like her GM. This was not an appealing spectacle.

How does the leader look?

With dogs or business, one reason we might mirror our master is that we tend to seek out those things that are most familiar to us and readily adopt those traits. Some may argue that it starts out when owners pick their dogs, or staff, they unconsciously choose them because they truly reflect the owner, or boss as the case may be. The lesson learned is be careful of what you want your business to look like as it will invariably reflect just how the leader looks.

The Customer’s perception is everything.

I believe the same logic applies for customers: a reflection of them. They find what appeals to them and what doesn’t. This is beyond nettlesome because the ‘look’ or perception for most customers is everything. Worry too about the fact that most people don’t necessarily act in accordance with your reality quite as much as they do on their own individual perception of ‘reality’. To that end, our customer’s reality, good, bad or indifferent, is formed to a large extent by what companies do and not what they say.

Follow the bouncing ball.

As business management and customers accelerate even further away from each other, success is often influenced to an immense degree by decision makers who have little experience or a ‘look’ for sales. In fact, your surroundings can begin to look astonishingly unfriendly, even somewhat dog-eared; particularly when the company’s current nirvana is simply the latest Guerrilla tactic that entirely ignores ‘reality’. Or the brains behind the new budget has patently little appreciation for brand or value; like the premier airline I flew last week whose management believes a fraction of an ounce of pretzels, a half of a can of soda, with questionable housekeeping and seats so close I could perform dental work will, of course, endear me to fly with them again.

Solution: Perception Truths.

If you find yourself or a client in this position what are you to do? Well there are a few Perception Truths I devised you can always use as a fall back.

• Brand Personality: Product Excellence and Superiority a.k.a. Value

Be ever vigilant for someone mucking it up. Your fundamental task is to correctly identify the customer’s preference for brand over price.  Look for customer clues where they value the significance of a great reputation, or beneficial cost of ownership matters like durability, warranties, multi task applications and even pretentiousness and esteem are striking buying qualities. If you’re not attracting enough of these types, then either you, the company’s marketing or its business style needs correction.

• Service

Practically nothing beats a high level of customer satisfaction, it’s not hard to understand why: customers want a pleasant buying experience together with attentive and responsive customer service, from both the sales and support staff. Lose this and you have lost the profitability associated with ‘value’ …and likely the customer. Now tell me again how much airline ‘A’ saved on those pretzels?

• Costs

Everyone knows that better products cost more and cheap products are made up of cheap bits and pieces. When it comes to cost, it’s the thing your customer perceives as price, your task is to hone in on what’s superior about your product or service. That’s because surprisingly few customers will bother to take the effort to figure it out on their own. Worse yet I am given to wonder why some salespeople can’t let go of customers that have little conscience of cost.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

There is no better tool than a well configured CRM program to monitor and manage perception truths. At MosaicCRM, we add simple yet effective fields to account monitors and specific reports in these key areas:

• Buying Qualities:
  

  Monitor and record customer preferences and translate that data into optimized sales cycle management tools

• Service Factors:
  

  Customer satisfaction, service and Case Management components tie the entire company relationship to the customer experience

• Value:
  

  Monitor where you are wining against competition, one click recording of sales factors, value milestones, even managing road blocks

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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The numbers game is dead. Long live strategic ratios.

The business climate in 2011 is projected to be brutal with less money, tighter budgets, fewer sales people and scarcer customers. In spite of this many companies will thrive. How? By changing the way they view prospects and the selling process.

Method 1: High Volume Low Results

The traditional approach to sales activity has been volume gets results. In other words, given enough volume, anyone can reach the desired results. The approach to the high volume is often too costly or too many factors skew the results. Take for example, simply adding more telemarketers to make more calls. If they are poor quality personnel with low skill levels, two things occur: The number of calls goes way, way up. The quality of the prospect goes way, way down.

A point of diminishing return becomes apparent.  Processing tons of prospects doesn’t guarantee more sales. Worse, numbers game activities can eat up valuable runway space and results in closed opportunities that carry a terrible, even unaffordable, price. It’s no longer sufficient to say any organization can sell (or manage) to the tune of just numbers.

Method 2: Regulated Volume – Strategic Results

The key management factor here is to regulate the volume to better qualify the prospects before engaging the costly sales process. With fewer resources or even with the same resources but higher quotas, defining the prospect, managing the prospecting process and inspecting what you expect are time- tested actions.

+ Don’t allow prospects into the pipeline (or prospecting channel) that don’t fit simple yet concrete parameters.

+ Deal with the ripe bananas, only the ones that can take advantage of a limited window of opportunity.

+ Deals won will increase because you have much fewer distractions and more on top of your game.

MosaicCRM Experts Tips – Looking at an improved management role for CRM

Allocating resources is critical, so is monitoring results to optimize these resources. Our CRM platforms provide a number of methods that go beyond traditional ‘activity measurement’ reports.

• Manage Call Ratios & Results: The key analytics determine how good the prospect demographics are.
• Monitor promotions with ‘Opportunity Source’ analytics: From Prospect to Customer can be a tricky course. Analyzing what prospects become customers  reinforces the call ratio and delivers a ‘success’ criteria blueprint to copy

• Aging Analysis: Tracking the time periods through the sales stages provides data to modify promotions/sales processes to shorten the sales cycle.
• Measure Deals Lost Analytics: Lost Deals tell a lot about customers, competitors, pricing, timing and more that will enable you to fine tune the next offering.

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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Alchemy was the medieval attempt to turn lead into gold. Jean Dubuis described alchemy as the “art of manipulating life and consciousness in matter to help it evolve, or to solve problems of inner disharmonies”.

Modern CRM isn’t so different: data bases follow the alchemies operation of separating the ‘the prima material’ or so called chaos by taking this unstructured data and putting it into a structure to capture, index and store it.

On a simpler plane of thought, alchemy could easily be used as a metaphor of transforming prospects into customers. It’s this process that is almost magic, but not quite. It does involve a simple, yet demanding process of turning dumb or chaotic data (leads) into usable information (customers).

This is where the magic ends: CRM by itself does little to help you turn data into information and knowledge. Let’s take a look at how to make your CRM task a whole lot easier and beneficial.

1. Get better outcomes in less time with strategically focused sales behavior.

Begin at the beginning: rank and prioritize your leads. After all, who or what makes it into your database, and then subsequently into your pipeline, will determine to a great degree your success in turning these leads into customers.

2. Set out a clear and easily defined selling stage process.

I hear it all the time: my database is no good… bad info, leads are crap, I need more accounts…etc. Sales automation provides a huge volume of information; however, separating what’s needed to advance the sales process can often be an excruciating exercise that too often bears too little fruit. If everything makes it into your pipeline then you have a fantastic bowl of goop and nothing tasty. Unlike poor Oliver, you don’t want more of the same no matter how hungry you are for a deal.

The easiest method is to plainly and clearly describe each phase of your sales process, even a basic rating scheme will work. Then when a lead doesn’t make it to the next desired stage you know why and when and can manage your time and efforts much more confidently.

3.    Manage your pipeline on a daily basis.

Regardless of the advances in CRM, you still need to figure out not only what to do, but what to do next. It’s often too late for management to have any significant impact on the outcome when they are only managing what’s closing this week or only get involved at the later stages. Rather they should be involved on a daily basis and knowledge of what works, what doesn’t and guidance on plan b.

Daily attention should not be an issue. CRM technology allows us to sort through leads, pipeline candidates and sales opportunities easily and effectively. Properly designed, it now forms the way we manage sales and activities by dictating what strategic value or action is necessary as opposed to blind sporadic oriented actions e.g. call everyone again.

4. Nurturing long term leads.

We all wish everything happened today. Alas that genie never seems to come out when we need it. Eventually it may by adding a structure to the lead nurturing process including understanding how each customer wants to be contacted and frequency. CRM make this a relatively brainless task of turning data into buying cycles.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

At the end of the day, any CRM is only as good as the data in it and how the users manage that information. To make CRM outstanding, we follow a strict methodology so users avoid the chaos:

• Implement sound business process and logic by concentrating on a vital few objectives that gain sales
• Eliminate fluff and duplication: ignore anything that doesn’t add immediate value
• Constantly improve the system: Step by step, month by month
• Vital tasks like qualification, stages and pipelines require little effort and are easy to understand
• Tracking, maintaining and developing contact points that match customer buying cycles

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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P.S. We ask questions that no CRM vendor wants to ask:

CRM Discussion Points – Getting CRM right begins with asking the right questions.

I have written this comprehensive discussion points guide that covers topics that no CRM vendor wants to ask mainly because they can’t pass you off to a junior menu list type techie. That’s because now you know what it takes to meet your CRM objectives and it is a lot of work to demonstrate how to get there. Far too many CRM vendors won’t put in that sort of time.

What this worksheet creates is the right atmosphere for discussion and strategy building your CRM. Let me know if it would help you on your CRM journey. Use the ‘Contact Us’ tab on the website and I would be pleased to email it to you.

Bill

Social Media ROI

Time Magazine named Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg Person of The Year. The digital elite followed with dozens of accolades suggesting that social networking has replaced main stream business networking? Maybe that is because many a marketing guru can’t wait to spend your time and money on the next new idea, all the while ignoring what already works and ignoring how it must integrate into what is working.

New Media ‘Returns’

For my 2011 sales plan I took the time to evaluate the return that the ‘new media’ social networks promise to deliver. So I asked myself these questions:

1. How much time am I frittering away with these new media tools and not spending on tried and true things that are working for me?
   
2. Did I build stronger Client relationships with them at the expense of not improving what I am already doing?
3. Did prospecting measurably improve e.g. did all this reach really generate good quality prospects and/or professional relationships?
4. Did I rely too heavily on digital ‘magic’ to generate prospects as opposed to doing the hard stuff like picking up the phone?
5. Did my existing clients benefit in real ways with these tools?

Just delivering information is not selling and building long term relationships.

Social networking looks tantalizing easy with equally easy returns. Besides, who doesn’t like easy. But looking at the massive ‘subscriber’, it is a numbers game played out in those industries with low value customer relations requirements like selling a CD or Pepsi drinks. So it is not for every organization. Another way to look at it is will the return deliver only low value customers.

Here’s my take: Delivering information via social networks is not the same as selling, although many who don’t sell for a living will have you believe so. It seems everyone is supposed to ignore the highly effective network tools e.g. email, personal calls and face-to-face meetings by declaring everyone get with the new ‘reach and connect’ media venues or die.

While I’m the first to admit that while these have garnered some traction for my company in very specific applications, there’s nothing universal about them. Especially when compared to the universality of email or the telephone for exemplary two way communication.

High value relationships are vital to my business.

The ever changing mosaic of social networking and ensuing chaos is not yet a place for organizations that require high value contact and deep relationships with their customers. So I question the ‘value’ of a twitter post, especially when big posters are paid by Twitter to post. High value anything is difficult, time consuming and expensive to do. Improperly done, these easy networks appear to magnify all the wrong things about relationships: spam, impersonal experiences, and low value, and ultra short term engagements, some lasting under just so many letters.

Frankly, I found that few clients have ever visited my network pages and have little inclination to do so. It just doesn’t seem all that imperative or important to them. That leaves getting spammed, open-prospecting and self-aggrandizement to stroke my ego in digital networks.

Is Social Media just a product looking for an application?

If you’re still confused by the social and business media digital age, you are not alone. Perhaps social networks may just be a phenomenon where product was looking for a market application. In my situation, it was damn hard to quantify success. I don’t feel so bad because media giants have failed miserably and lost billions on it. Does Time Warner’s AOL acquisition fiasco ring a bell? Compared to their traditional media empire, that included Time Magazine, that worked and how AOL destroyed it.

MosaicCRM Experts Tips – Social Media is radically different.

If relationship marketing is important to your organization, managing and collecting social network data is radically different from the traditional historical based ‘interaction-transaction’ type recording.

• Adapt your CRM to recognize the instant real time data provided by network media venues
• More than ever customer centric response models are vital – re-engineer your CRM to address this closed loop marketing process
• Evaluate the type and degree of customer information needed to assist sales efforts
• Use CRM to spread the results of the customer experience within your organization

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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