Re-engineering CRM For Reduced Costs & Increased Customer Productivity

After listening and initial discussion with our client it was mutually agreed that a wider fact finding exercise would be beneficial to establish pertinent insight into current sales forecasting challenges and internal organisational capabilities, capacities and maturity, before formulating a sustainable approach and action plan that would address the underlying root causes of their problems rather than treat the symptoms.
4impact drove arapid analysis phase that engaged a variety of tools and approaches including: focussed staff interviews, questionnaires on attitude to work and sales team morale, process workshops and systems analysis, mystery shopper calls. The analysis revealed a pattern of contributory elements:
·        Lack of a formal sales forecasting methodology, resulting in inability to measure or predict the rate of progress or likely success of prospects through the sales cycle Underutilised CRM system, creating a dependency on sales staffs’ own hand written notes, resulting in poor scalability and a lack of business continuity capability. No matching of supply and demand across the business unit. Lack of continuity in reporting and inability for sales managers to identify underperforming areas. Outdated technology, poor staff training and poor system performance were cited as reasons for not using the CRM system.High staff turnover, resulting in a lack of continuity, driving duplicate marketing spend due to inadequate knowledge retention, high level of opportunity costs due to orphaned prospects, a developing reputation for lack of professionalism
·        Inconsistent reporting, resulting in a lack of transparency and visibility across the business unit leading to a culture of secrecy and lack of confidence in line management. A large management overhead to rework reports into common formats, leading to high numbers of data and transposition errors.
·        Low adherence to forecasts, restated targets, which created ongoing under performance of sales figures, lack of accountability and commitment from staff to meet numbers. Actual sales figures were subject to sandbagging due to lack of transparency around prospect progression, leading to feast or famine mentality in reporting
·        Low quality customer and prospect data leading to a high percentage of wasted direct marketing spend due to outdated contact information. Lack of prospect tracking and follow up due to high number of duplicate records.
 
How we perform to win
Having established the effects and interrelationships between the underlying contributor factors, a plan of action was proposed to address the 6 key areas in a systematic manner.
1. Data Integrity
·        Proactively data cleanse to check and validate all existing prospect data;
·        Elevate opportunity identification, producing fast conversions and energizing staff
·        Treating information as a corporate asset – developing and applying quality standards and audits to protect the investment
·        Data quality measures to protect the asset (including mandating field formats and removing free text fields)
 
2. Process
·        Define a formalised sales process with measured milestones and surety of conversion
·        Agree formalised sales steps to predict a prospect's progress through the sales process
·        Identify key reporting requirements
 
3. People
·        Implement training and mentoring (both technology and process focussed)
·        Inculcate a communication plan to engage staff
·        Define and communicate best practices across the organisation
·        Implement train the trainer, “Buddy system” and named Subject Matter Experts across the company
·        Identify team members who needed extra support
·        Rework job descriptions to include critical activities as mandatory
 
4. Tools
·        Rollout of a new CRM system and in source inbound call centre, with multi-skilled staff capable of handling both enquiries and the first steps of the sales cycle, before performing a warm handover to sales staff
·        5 Key Reporting
·        Time to sell measure; Sales team activity levels; Pipeline reporting across all sale levels: Average customer contacts between sales phase; Conversation rates; forecast of demand against marketing activity etc

5. Maturity plan
·        Implement an overall maturity baseline against required – not against desired and ensure a KPI strategy to measure what the client needs to improve, not what he can measure
·        These activities were combined with a concerted effort to change the culture of the sales and marketing division to develop an understanding that transparency wasn’t a bad thing. Instilling the need for accountability and establishing direct linkages between activity and results and a focus on testing and measuring act.
Our commitment to deliver
Benefits that 4impact worked collegitally to deliver with the client were::
·        Marketing has started to base line spend against results (though this baseline will take several years to mature) combined with ability to proactively reduce ongoing spend
·        Marketing are reduced ongoing direct mail campaign costs due to 80% reduction in mailing lists
·        Sales identified multiple early wins through “unserviced” opportunities in existing data
·        Sales could for the first time, correlate activity level with results and resourcing needs
·        Management overhead reduced as improved reporting came on line
·        Staff moral and satisfaction improved substancially
·        Sales staff are starting to collaborate more and hand opportunities to other teams
·        A culture of “The Numbers” is developing
·        Additional areas that will be explored in the coming months include:
·        Incentivising prospects to shift interest to available/surplus developments rather than wait for a particular site
·        Referral programme (both internal and external)
·        Joint Venture introductions targeting client database
·        Expanding use of CRM into operational areas to maintain whole life information on customer
·        Outbound call centre support for sales staff
Conclusion:
This successful project demonstrates the depth of 4impacts ability. Our consultants worked collegiately with our clients senior management and importantly, closely with clients staff. The project deleiver the clients expectations and follow up work and seen most of the recommendations and implementation work still in place, and in most cases, further progressed by the clients team due to knowledge transfer and employer training.