CRM Objectives

The goal of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is to provide structure to the "demand side" of your business. This is a very wide mandate, since there are many types of companies -- project companies, product companies, professional service companies, retailers, wholesalers, big, small, marketing oriented, high-tech, low-tech... well, you get the picture. But many of these companies have several things in common:

• They have customers, and those customers have employees, contact data, etc.
• They have a sales process, and that process needs some management oversight
• Multiple people need access to information on customers and sales, now and in the future.
• New hires need to be integrated into the process, and have access to the history.

CRM provides a way to keep track of and structure this information, thereby improving the "corporate memory", increasing management oversight, giving some shape to the sales process, and reducing the learning curve for new hires.

CRM Concepts

A CRM system should, at the minimum, recognize the following key concepts:

• Leads -- the raw material of your sales cycle. A Lead might be a business card dropped in a fishbowl at a tradeshow, a bingo card filled out from a magazine, or a newsletter signup on your website. Leads are targets for your marketing activities, and the seedlings from which Opportunities and Accounts grow.
• Opportunities aka "Opps" -- sales projects. Each Opp has an objective, a timeline, and measurable milestones. It's associated with a specific Account, which may be a current customer, or may be a "prospect" Account that was "promoted" from a Lead.
• Accounts -- organizations that you do business with. Accounts are often your customers, but they may be prospects, vendors, or partners.
• Contacts -- the people associated with Accounts.
• Issues aka "Cases", "Tickets" -- customer-service dialogs with Accounts on specific topics. Each Issue can be viewed as a customer-service project which has its own objective, history, and status.

A CRM system should provide the tools required to collect, manage, organize, and find the data associated with the key concepts listed above, as well as the associations between various data records.