CRM For Dummies

CRM For Dummies®

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017942394

ISBN 978-1-119-36897-7 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-36898-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-36899-1 (ebk)

If you ask ten people what CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is, you’ll get ten different answers. Some think of it as a sales tool, some think of it as a culture. Some people see it as a savior for a business, offering accountability and efficiency. Some people are scared to death of CRM for the workload it can create if it isn’t done right.

Very, very few people have ever taken a class in CRM. Universities are only now starting to offer it in their curricula. Seminars are often very product-focused. Without standardized definitions and training programs, it’s a challenge to bring everyone in an organization up to the same level of proficiency with CRM.

I recently had a conversation with a friend who works in a company that forces all sales reps to manually enter every bit of data into the company’s homegrown CRM. He tallied up the hours he spent in a month just doing data entry – 20 hours. It’s no wonder some people don’t like CRM!

In this book, I talk about the concept of Complete CRM as a way of helping you think of it as part of a bigger picture. A CRM that doesn’t capture the information you need to do your job puts data in unreachable silos. A CRM that automatically pulls in sales, marketing, and operational information also pulls a team together. This is what I mean by complete.

CRM is not a simple subject. It involves many disciplines; to make it effective, you must have at least a basic knowledge of how those disciplines work. From managing sales people to building emails to running events, CRM reaches across every department in your organization. But like another friend once told me, “How do you climb a mountain? One step at a time.”

This book is written in plain, simple English. The point is to break down a complex topic (designing and implementing CRM) into manageable pieces. I first cover the basics of sales management, marketing, and operational process. From there, I show you how to apply CRM to each of those fields.