Jumpstart Your Business

Getting an early start in the CRM software industry may have helped Salesforce.com to become a leader in the Hosted CRM space, but another CRM solution provider is making a statement of their own, paving the way for some intense competition in the small to mid-size business sector.

Better known for its on premise desktop CRM software, Commence Corporation has been providing contact management, sales force automation and marketing campaign management solutions to small and mid-size companies for more than two decades. The company introduced a web-based hosted version of their popular CRM software and is gaining notoriety. With an outstanding track record for performance, reliability and world-class customer service Commence is a strong competitor and becoming a favorite among smaller businesses looking for a flexible hosted CRM solution with productivity tools that are easy to use.

“Commence web CRM has an impressive and unique user interface that makes the product very easy to use and navigate” says Gary Sanders of OK! Magazine. “The product’s Home Page or Dashboard is completely customizable by individual or job function. This allows each user to create a dashboard to the way they work. The value here is that you can place the functions you use most right on the home page, such as today’s calendar and activities, e-mail, sales opportunities, leads, reminders and even an interactive sales funnel. We hadn’t seen this in any other CRM solution. This flexibility enables people to conduct 90% of their daily activities without ever leaving the Home Page and has really improved productivity.”

See the whole story at Customers Find Good Value In Commence CRM

It is bad enough that the big banks are screwing small businesses by totally ignoring their need for capital. Must the SBA aid in the screw job by providing irrelevant and outdated training materials to those wanting to hone their small business skills.

photo credit: ShashiBellamkonda

Yesterday. I was looking for a marketing text to pass along to a client and decided to go up on the SBA website to see what they were referencing. I went to www.sba.gov and in the search box typed in “marketing documents” and it returned the following page:
http://search.sba.gov/gcse/searchresults.html?cx=012149749304426494285%3Avl4bn0plkpq&cof=FORID%3A11&ie=UTF-8&q=marketing+documents&sa.x=30&sa.y=5#1060
where I chose to review the following three documents on page 1 of the extensive listing:

A friend of mine recently received the attached letter from Key Bank. It appears that he kept some small change in a checking account at this bank and because the account had no activity for the last year the bank is threatening to charge the account a $5.00 inactivity fee every month. To prevent this from happening he needs to sign this letter and return it or make a transaction or keep a minimum of $5000.00 in a checking account that pays no interest.

You need to understand who your target market consists of and what they think of your business and your product/service. Your target market may be one or more market segments or sub-sets of your market, made up of people or organizations sharing one or more characteristics that cause them to demand similar products and/or services based on qualities of those products such as price or function. Here are 5 critical characteristics which help you understand your favorite customers:

1. Demographics
These are basic identifiable characteristics of individual final consumers and organizational consumers, groups of final consumers and organizational consumers. Demographics are often used as segmentation bases because groups of people, or organizations, with similar demographics often have similar needs & desires that are distinct from those with different backgrounds. They include: age, race, religion, gender, family size, occupation, income level, education level, marital status and others.

Are social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn being overhyped? Are all the social media pundits sending today’s business down a dark and dangerous alley?

If you are a large or medium enterprises you typically have the resource to devote to finding out the relevance of a social media focus on your overall marketing strategy. The million dollar questions for the small business are: “Is it really worth my time?” “Can I afford to be doing this now?”

Concrete Ears

photo credit: peter pearson

To really understand your market and get to know what pain your favorite customers are suffering and what their concerns are, you need to be actively engaged in conversations with them. Conversation has two sides to it – talking and listening and the latter is what allows us to gain information. The difference between hearing and listening should not be confused.

In today’s social media world, we have finally realized that we need to understand our customers and part of that process involves holding conversations with the customer. Holding a conversation implies two things: talking and listening. Since we are trying to gain information about the customer’s status and needs, it would appear that we should be listening more than talking. So how do we listen effectively to a customer? Here are some keys tips to improve your listening ability:
1. Pay attention – If you really want to be a good listener, you pay attention to the person speaking. Use non-verbal cues like a smile, eye contact or a nod of the head to let the speaker know that he/she is being heard.

The last several years have brought a radical change in the relationship between the customer and business as a whole. More and more customers are collaborating with businesses and technology is playing a key role in this new collaboration.

An increasing percentage of interaction with customers is coming by way of social networks and online communities. These interactions include suggestions for product improvement, requests for help, information requests and even customers assisting their counterparts directly. These customer conversations are driving the need for the business to respond in a timely fashion and to also convince potential customers of their ability to adequately take care of their needs.

Part 1 got us to the conclusion that the highly centralized model of the early years of CRM systems is causing a push to web-based technology which is nothing more than allowing the applications to execute where they make the best-business sense – close to the customer.

There are certain drawbacks to this among which is the need to move more and more data around the organization. This puts pressure on the enterprise to invest in networking technology and to keep pace with the demand for broader bandwidth to move the increasing quantities of random information around the organization. It also places strict requirements for data network security.

The typical enterprise of today was built several decades ago using organization and management theory of that era. The entire focus of management was on product and all the business processes which were put in place were designed to gather data and information to move product through the sales channels. Customer Relationship Management was born out of the need for tools to gather customer data so we could manage sales and marketing campaigns. No one was interested in gathering information that would help us understand target markets and build an optimum marketing message.