Until now, most companies have considered their Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM) as a separate system from their website, Internet marketing, social media and communication with their prospects, customers and partners.
Those days are gone.
Dont have a fence in your organization.
Your CRM strategy and resulting systems should be driving the design of your website, your social media, your Internet marketing and all communications with your stake holders. The overload of information we all receive each day, the result is the attention span of customers is so short these days, your organization needs a database and automated sequences to manage the process of communicating with your customers.
Our world is changing so fast with the tools of communication rapidly evolving (social media,text messaging, lexicon survelance, brand monitoring, etc) that you can not place your bets on any one form of communication medium as “the channel” to reach your clients. You need to segment your clients, refine focus your message and select the tools to delivery that targeted message.
At the heart of all this is your CRM database and the technology exists to integrate every communication into complete customer interaction history that can be tracked. You can drive your sales and marketing blind without the data and facts.
Smart companies who stay ahead of the competition will have their CRM system driving and tracking every communication with your customers.
Some questions to ask your team:
- Is my website a integrated with my CRM and is this integration two way to both push and pull content?
- Is my content integrated? Meaning all content is driving customers and partners to a sale, regardless of the medium?
- Does my current customer database include a field for social media ID’s and addresses? ( Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc)
- Am I using my CRM system to push communication to and from my social media presence?
If you are going to attract and maintain the Attention Connection™ of your prospects and make them a customer for life, you will need a CRM system that is driving it all.
Stay connected and have a great weekend! Spring is here.
Rex, very well said! I just got off the phone with one of my small biz roundtable members in which we were having the same epiphany. The techonologies are merging closer together on a dialy basis. My own business is right in the middle of that process to integrate our 3 separate tracking systems including customer communication. We redid our process flow and our operations process flow is being reduced by 2/3 the current time spent to maintain those separate systems. What a huge time savings ! I’m sure we will be looking for your help on the fine tuning.