Managing Customer Relationships: Streamlining the Process
In August of this year, Vertilocity entered a definitive merger agreement with Raleigh, N,C.-based Relevant CRM to add marketing, sales, quote automation, and customer relationship management to its service offerings. This is the first in a series of blogs with CRM professional Van Abernethy on how businesses can improve how they manage prospecting and their customer relationships.
By Van Abernethy
We are a team of customer management consultants who have also built products within the Microsoft Power platform. Most of the work we do is with Dynamic 365 Sales, a cloud-based customer relations management (CRM) that helps salespeople engage with customers and prospective customers and manage customer contacts. Our products, which we build onto the system, help you automate a lot of mundane sales-related tasks, improving sales efficiency by reducing and streamlining the lead-to-order process.
We design our products to integrate with your other critical business systems: ERP systems, service or ticket management systems, essentially information that is critical to salespeople when calling on prospects or up-selling existing customers. Is the prospect financially healthy? Does your construction customer have a lease on a forklift ready to expire? Our products allow salespeople to access and display data, but beyond that, provide actual intelligence that helps them make decisions.
The system is highly customizable. As opposed to adjusting your process to a piece of software, Dynamics 365 and the programs we build on that platform allow us to adjust the tool to your processes.
Our Dynamic 365 platform product includes four categories of tools:
• Activity Automation allows you to automate routine sales tasks. It can set up a recurring customer meeting and is fully integrated with Outlook to issue notifications. It also can create follow-up activities subsequent to a sales call, simultaneously in CRM and Outlook. It can track the last and next steps, that is, what you did last and what to do next in tracking an activity, like trying to close a deal.
• Rep Assignment is territory management on steroids. The program allows you to assign sales reps by zip code, by county or state, however your business goes about assigning territories to sales reps. If a new sales rep takes over a territory, it automatically reassigns all the accounts, contacts, and leads, or you can use the program to change or restructure territories. It allows you to assign multiple reps to a single account based on that customer’s criteria, such as an outside sales rep, an inside rep making phone calls, and a service technician.
• Goals, KPIs, and Quotas allows sales management to track what they consider important from their perspective: top-of-line revenue, monthly recurring revenue, and number of sales activities. It can break tracking down according to employee type, such as inside sales reps’ conversion percentages and the number of calls they make daily. You can apply tracking throughout your sales organization while taking into account individual variances, like vacation days, the number of biz days in a month for an employee—whatever metrics you want to apply. Management knows that you can only achieve what you can measure, and tracking performance is key to getting employees to focus on what is most important to sales.
In our next blog, we’ll take a deep dive into the fourth function in our CRM toolbox, Quoting, a highly customizable and broadly functional tool that that helps your organization get the quote right the first time every time.
For more information about Vertilocity’s CRM system, email me at vabernethy@vertilocity.com.