In my previous article I shared with you a checklist of some of the questions you should ask yourself when developing a profitable CRM strategy. The focus of this article is to ensure that your CRM (Customer Resource Management) project is successful by establishing clear objectives that can be measured and managed with-in your Marketing organization. Setting goals is paramount to any major project undertaking including your CRM project and will ensure that you achieve maximum return on investment that you desire.

One cannot even begin to embark on their CRM implementation unless careful analysis of their organizations current processes has been completed. (I would highly encourage you to review my previous post where I provided a series of questions that evaluate focus areas). Once this analysis has been completed you will then be in a more advantageous position in determining what elements are important to your organization. Here are just some of the elements that you will be able to understand at a moments notice after you put into place an effective CRM strategy.

• Gain an understanding of the effectiveness of new products to market and the ability to sell complimentary products to your existing customer base

• Identify your churn rate and understand the reasons behind customer loss.

• Conduct effective segmentation analysis to help find your most profitable customers and custom tailor you’re messaging and advertising to this segment for maximum results.

• Create models of predictability by identifying key growth or risk factors of why a customer chooses to leave or grow with-in your organization.

• Help understand why specific customer segments increase or decrease in revenue

• Identify un-profitable and profitable customers

The next step in further ensuring your CRM investment is to create specific, measurable, achievable and tangible objectives. I have outlined some sample objectives that you can employ when you have all the data about your customer behaviour easily accessible.

• Improve profitability by 2% by targeting advertising and messaging to the top 20% most profitable customers.

• Improve overall profitability by 2% by increasing rates to the least profitable customer segment by 4%

• Accelerate revenue by 5% among customers that have only purchased from the organization one time over the period of 6 months.

• Reduce customer churn by 4% by calling every customer that have not purchased from the firm with-in one year to understand why they no longer use the companies products and services

• Grow revenue with a clearly defined segment by 40% through introducing a new product or service.

Now that your objectives are clearly identified you are in a much better position to understand your return on investment is.

To get your CRM project going It is my recommendation to contact a systems integrator like Waggware to ensure that all your data moves seamlessly and you can access your data on-demand to make better business decisions.

In my next article on CRM I will be discussing the impact CRM can have to your Sales organization and what objectives and metrics you need to setup for this key organizational department.

Scott Van Dam is Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Waggware, a leading software development and consulting firm specializing in the Energy, Utility and Transportation sectors.

Scott has held previous roles at UPS Canada & the University of Toronto in areas of Marketing, product development, technology and ecommerce. Scott provides insight and experience on leveraging technology to transform organizations into leading edge organizations.

Tags: advantageous position, careful analysis, churn rate, complimentary products, crm implementation, crm project, crm strategy, custom tailor, customer loss, customer segments, desire one, elements, management project, marketing organization, maximum results, maximum return, moments notice, profitable customers, segmentation analysis

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