CRM | Sales | Marketing Insights by Lindsay Garrison
How many calls did your sales people make last week? Do you know how many dials, on average, were attempted for each contact made? Do you know the average call duration? Sales performance monitoring often tracks KPIs (key performance indicators) such as these. Are these useful data? IMHO, the first “metric” only confirms that your reps can punch a keypad, the second affirms that you can count, while the last […]
Companies that use Sage ACT! can outgrow it. When I lose a client to a solution I don’t support, although I’m sorry to see them go, I know it’s a positive event for their business. Outgrowing the ACT! database means that a company is growing (or has been acquired) and that their processes and requirements have expanded as well. This can be a huge challenge to the sales team, who […]
Software users make mistakes. One of the most crushing ones is when they delete critical, irreplaceable prospect and customer information. Unless there are backups, once it’s gone, it’s gone. We recently heard from an ACT! customer who, due to a moment’s clueless mistake, had nearly 90% of their customer and prospect database deleted. It wasn’t noticed immediately and, because they overwrote their prior-day’s backup each night (yikes!), there was no […]
As the importance of customer relationship management (CRM) has grown, so have approaches to implementation. CRM is a multi-billion dollar industry that grew from basic contact management (DOS-based ACT!, 25 years ago) to complex systems that provide a 360 degree view of the customer (SAP and Oracle), to evolutionary social CRM platforms like Nimble. There are numerous deployment options, from on-premises, to SaaS and cloud-based solutions, to custom solutions. Software-as-a-Service SaaS (software-as-a-service) democratizes technology for small to […]