Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Wait for recovery or recover now!

When this current downturn began, one of the first indications was the reduction of sales or marketing people and positions. This, unfortunately, is nearly always the group to feel reductions. This is followed by reductions in producing areas such as manufacturing and lastly by reductions in corporate accounting and management staff.

Now, many companies are asking their marketing and sales departments to do more with fewer feet on the pavement and we're all waiting for the "turn-around" to begin. But how will we know?

The most important customer is the customer we have, yet we're spending less time and energy on them as well.

When the "turn-around" does begin, the landscape WILL NOT look as it did when the downturn began. Competitors who were there will be gone and there will be new competitors who were not in business two years ago and we will ALL be after the same business.

There will be improvements in product areas as well. Take Cisco during the Y2K fiasco. Instead of hunkering down and trying to ride out the storm, they aggresively revamped their product line both by development and by acquiring existing companies. The result being that when business began improving, they had a new, competitive product line and new distribution channels while their competition was trying to sell older products in older channels.

I believe that if we wait for improvement, it will be too late. The time to improve, re-tool and rethink our business is NOW. What products to you have that need improvement? What processes are you doing that you know need improvement? When business begins to improve, we'll be scrambling to catch up and to get our share of the new landscape. We won't have the time, then, to change much of anything.

Now is the time to analyze the business and climate we think we'll see in a year or two. To strategize on where we want to be and how to get there. And it is definitely time to review our current systems and improve where improvement needs to be made.

I spent 5 dedicated years at IBM doing exactly this planning process with many customers - large ( GM/EDS, Norwest Banks, etc. ) and small. I'll be glad to share this methodology with you and help you spend a day or two now which might be able to change your business for years.

Another thing we need to do now is SAVE THE CUSTOMER we already have. Do you have a plan for covering existing customers while aggresively pursuing new ones? Does it work? How do you know? How are you managing your sales force of fewer people to do more? Here's an answer: CRM!!

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Generally speaking it's a way of combining knowledge of existing customers, lists of potential new customers with developed communication strategies to get more and more effective coverage done with fewer dollars and fewer people.

For example, CRM allows a structured process of combining mailings, emails, telephone calls, planned events and face time in a step by step process which becomes automated in terms of execution. It provides feedback to management in realtime about which customers have been contacted with what message, their response or lack thereof and gives management graphical and statistical views of what is happeng NOW in each territory.

It also provides ticklers and reminders to the sales people about which calls need to be made, when and a place to record the result.

Most CRMs also allow direct input from existing ERP / accounting systems so that past sales, actions, etc. become information to be used in triggering events. For example, you could have a trigger setup so that a customer who has purchased less than 90% year over year might get one action while a customer who has dropped 40% gets another type of action or alert.

You'd also be able to get your message ( typically a brochure or similar device ) sent to prospective customers so that they are aware of your offerings and are kept up to date on what you offer and your business so that when you do call on them, they already know something about your business and products.

Now the good news. In the past CRM systems as I've described would be very expensive, difficult to setup and require new hardware and staff. Now, there are offerings though companies like Microsoft which provide you access to these systems ( via the internet ) and costing a small amoung ( typically $49.00 per month per USER ). Users are people entering the data and would typically include sales persons and a manager or two. The beauty being that it's running on Microsofts hardware and maintaned by them.

A very effective way to implement CRM is to have strategic sales planning sessions which identify the processes you want followed, then implement and tune with a small number of sales people and finally going with all!

This is something that needs to be part of every company dealing with sales to new customers.

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