Microsoft CRM for Manufacturing

3 Factors To Successful Microsoft CRM Implementation

ryan@customerdynamics.com — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:39:00 GMT

Having Microsoft CRM within your business is only the first step to successful customer relationship management. To complete the circle of success in CRM follow the Customer Dynamics process.

Finding Solutions for Creative Sign Designs

ryan@customerdynamics.com — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 20:18:00 GMT

Understanding and managing your client database is an essential part of running a successful business. We recently assisted Creative Sign Designs in getting the right tools they needed in order to stay organized, provide a higher level of customer service, and expand their business overall.

Tags: Creative Sign Designs,CRM Solutions,tradeshows,events

Increasing Tradeshow ROI with Microsoft CRM - Webinar Recap

ryan@customerdynamics.com — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 20:07:00 GMT

Too many tradeshows go used by businesses without being capitalized on for leads. It's time to stop wasting money and harvesting all your leads from tradeshows using Microsoft CRM.

Tags: tradeshow webinars,managing tradeshow leads,Microsoft CRM

Using CRM to maximize tradeshow ROI

ryan@customerdynamics.com — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:58:00 GMT

For a Manufacturing company, attending Tradeshows can be a great source of new leads. New, qualified leads can result in new orders and additional revenue. Are you maximizing your tradeshow investment? Are you able to track your tradeshow expenses, resulting leads and track them directly to revenue?

Attending different industry tradeshows can be expensive. Some companies spend their tradeshow budgets with the idea that they will just go to the show and see what happens . Or another approach is to invest time and money in planning, designing and producing new marketing collateral, booth rental, travel expenses but when the tradeshow is over, the new leads don’t make it into your system. You do have a system for tracking your tradeshow leads don’t you?

To effectively utilize your tradeshow budget and maximize your return on investment, you should be doing the following:

Create a Tradeshow marketing plan that includes pre-show, at-show and post-show marketing activities.
Have a "lead handling" plan going into the tradeshow which outlines how leads will be gathered, scored and handled.
Have a system that will store all relevant information about new leads including name, company name, email, phone, and a quick note about why they came to your booth.
Follow up with all tradeshow leads within 1 week of the event by phone or email (or both).
Nurture tradeshow Leads, qualify them into new business Opportunities, and close the Opportunities into Orders.

Effectively managing a Tradeshow campaign is a key feature set of any top tier CRM system. The diagram below shows how Microsoft CRM allows sales personnel to import leads, qualify them, manage new opportunities and close new business.

As manufacturing companies become more and more competitive, it is critical to get the most out of your marketing expenses and understand:

How much do tradeshow leads cost?
Which tradeshows are producing the best leads?
Are leads being contacted by sales after the tradeshow?
How much revenue is being generated by each tradeshow?

Microsoft CRM can provide these answers and more. CRM can tie all the information together, from the tradeshow campaign to the resulting revenue and provides you with great information to help make intelligent business decisions.

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Tags: Manufacturing CRM,CRM Tradeshow,CRM Sales Process

Using an Agile approach to CRM

ryan@customerdynamics.com — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:34:00 GMT

Our approach to managing and running CRM implementation for multiple clients at the same time involve some very basic “Agile” principles of doing first things first, keeping iterations small, and running sprints. An overview of CRM philosophy can be found on our CRM Success page at http://www.customerdynamics.comhttp://www.customerdynamics.com/CRMSuccess.aspx.

Our approach with our support and maintenance customers uses a simple backlog type approach as shown below:

This diagram shows the overall flow of work items (user stories and tasks) from initial inception, onto the Backlog, then onto the appropriate Sprint.

The Backlog is a queue of business functionality waiting for refinement, budget, scheduling and approval. A Backlog Item is a piece of business functionality that is well defined and can be budgeted and scheduled into an upcoming Sprint. Each Sprint is a 4 week period of time where approved Backlog items worked on and completed. A simple Backlog item example would be - “Sales user needs the Opportunity screen to display a weighted revenue amount calculated from the estimated revenue * sales stage probability, and allow that user to query the results in an advanced find.”

The Executive Sponsor, System Architect, System Consultant, and Business Process Expert(s) submit items to the backlog for consideration. The System Architect periodically reviews the backlog and ensures that each Backlog item is well documented and conforms to the overall system design.

The Executive Sponsor and Project Manager (and other team members as needed) have a monthly Sprint Planning session to review Backlog items and schedule them into the upcoming Sprints. The Sprint Planning session should be completed 2 weeks prior to the end of the current Sprint.

This approach helps capture new potential CRM items (business logic, custom workflow, plugins, ect) and allows the CRM team to prioritize and manage these items in typical Agile sprints. This “Agile CRM” approach keeps your users engaged, provides on-going value and ROI from your system, and keeps the Executive Sponsors involved.

Hope this helps!

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