You know, and we know, that none of us can stay in business without customers. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. Unless your business is really, really small – and wants to stay that way – you’ll have to figure out some way of winning and retaining customers.

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become a vital function of modern business, enabling us to reach out en masse to our customers, interact effectively with them and manage our relationships with expertise and finesse.

Or at least that’s the theory.

In practice, things don’t always work so smoothly. So we were quick to grab the latest white paper from salesforce.com, proudly entitled “Eight CRM Essentials: An Executive Guide to the Eight Must-Have Elements of Every Successful CRM Initiative.”

According to the sales bumpf, the guide “distills best practices, lessons learned, and collective insights from salesforce.com’s 32,000+ customers—as well as industry experts—across various company sizes, geographies, and vertical markets.”

So what did we learn? Well, understand that this is a white paper that’s been put together to highlight salesforce.com’s particular offerings (on-demand CRM), so the problems and solutions highlighted do tend to reflect their capabilities. Nevertheless, the paper does provide useful insights. Keep its self-interested origins in mind, however, as we take you through a quick summary of the Eight CRM Essentials, with our accompanying commentary where appropriate:

CRM Essential #1: Rapid Time to Value
(our translation: how to get earning, fast)

Instant messaging, 24/7 customer service, shorter development cycles… today, businesses and their customers move at a rapid clip. Buy decisions are made quickly, and in fact entire businesses can succeed or fail in a matter of weeks. No-one has the luxury of waiting months or even years to install a traditional, expensive, client/server CRM application. The competitive advantage today is on-demand CRM.

On-demand CRM solutions are better suited to today’s fast-moving businesses. You can be up-and-running with on-demand CRM in a matter of weeks, so you can focus on delivering greater value to customers, rather than worrying about installing and maintaining hardware and software.

[This is a fair summation of the benefits of born-on-the-web softwaresolutions, whether in CRM or elsewhere; just understand that it’s a not-quite-objective evaluation.]

CRM Essential #2: Point-and-Click Customization

No CRM solution is going to fit like a glove right out of the box, because the reality is that no two companies’ customer relationships and processes are exactly alike. However, because many traditional CRM solutions are difficult and expensive to customize, some organizations are forced to alter their business processes to fit the capabilities of their CRM technology. The key to success is a highly flexible CRM solution that allows you to keep pace with changing customer needs and your evolving business environment.

[This hits at the heart of the debate between “software written speciallyfor you” and “out of the box, for anyone” remotely-hosted solutions. If you’re going to use an on-demand product, satisfy yourself that its customization capabilities match with your needs before you buy.]

CRM Essential #3: A 360-Degree Customer View

The quality of the customer experience makes and breaks companies. Customers are becoming increasingly demanding and sophisticated, and they’ll take their business elsewhere if you don’t deliver the superior service they feel they deserve. Companies today are challenged to integrate and manage the complete customer lifecycle—seamlessly and effectively—to win and retain those highly desirable most-profitable customers.

You need a CRM solution where:

1. Leads go directly to the right sales team or individual rep, are well qualified, and include the right information.

2. Marketing gets real-time visibility into the status of every lead, sees which lead sources drive the most revenue, and plans appropriate customer marketing campaigns.

3. Service and support organizations get visibility into which products or services the customer is using and any pending sales opportunities, and can alert the sales team to potential cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

4. Back in sales, reps get insight into any outstanding customer service issues so that there are no unpleasant surprises when they make their sales calls.

[These are pretty much minimum requirements for any CRM solution worthy of the name.]

CRM Essential #4: Real-Time Visibility

To stay competitive, businesses must “mind their metrics.” Constantly monitoring the health of the business, determining what’s working and what’s not, and making adjustments to improve operations and increase revenue are essential to surviving and thriving in today’s competitive market.

Analytics can be addictive, and there are literally hundreds of CRM metrics you can track. Your CRM metrics should track to your organization’s other financial and business objectives. In addition, the CRM metrics you choose will be specific to your company’s size, product lifecycle, and your corporate mission.The key is to get good insight without becoming a slave to the metrics.To avoid that, it’s best to identify the smallest number of performance metrics that can still properly encapsulate the business objective.

For example, a new company with a promising but unknown product will need to invest heavily in marketing campaigns to solicit customers, build product awareness, and establish its brand. The company would want to keep close track of metrics such as new leads per marketing campaign, sales opportunities per campaign, and opportunities closed per campaign.

On the other hand, a company with a well-established brand, a large customer base, and a mature portfolio of products would want to focus on metrics that help identify its most profitable customers and show which programs further increase their customers’ spending and ensure their loyalty. This company would want to track up-sells and cross-sells with metrics such as the number of products or services per customer and average profit per customer.

Even small investments in dashboards and reporting for all your customer-facing employees can have a profound impact on business performance. Metrics motivate.

CRM Essential #5: No More Dirty Data

Almost every company suffers from “dirty data” syndrome, and few have any idea what to do about it.

Consider the findings of the IBM Global Data Management Survey of 600 major enterprises: 75 percent of the respondents reported significant problems as a result of defective data, including violated contract terms, failure to bill or collect for services or products delivered, delays in or abandonment of new systems projects and extra accounting costs.

You can’t be successful with CRM until you find a remedy to the data integrity problem that is prevalent in organizations of all sizes and in every industry. A three-step approach to quality data management can address this issue so that your CRM initiative will be free of dirty data.

1. Capture. If you don’t capture it, you can’t measure it. In order to capture all the data you need to get an accurate analysis of your business, you need everyone in the company to use your CRM system rather than store data inunintegrated or offline sources such as spreadsheets. To get quality data, high system adoption is critical.

2. Clean. Once you have the data in your CRM system, you need to continually weed out bad data by removing duplicates, synchronizing changing data, and updating information.

3. Augment. Merely cleansing your data is not enough. Maintaining high data quality also means filling in the blanks. For example, some of your account records may be missing company information such as revenue, number of employees, key executives, and so on. You can augment your data by leveraging data service providers to help you fill in the gaps.

CRM Essential #6: High Adoption

There’s nothing worse than investing in CRM and having no one show up. Too many CRM projects fail due to poor user adoption. After all, technology is only as good as the people who use it. To ensure that people do use your CRM system, it must be easy to use, accessible, and scalable, and significantly enhance productivity, efficiency, and visibility.

A look at successful CRM initiatives uncovers several best practices for driving user adoption.

· Build support for CRM early on.

· Go top down, bottom up, and sideways.

· Focus on people and processes.

· Make your users’ lives easier.

· Let them take it on the road.

· Keep it simple.

· Train your users in advance.

· Give executives—and everyone—a bird’s-eye view.

· Reinforce adoption with carrots and sticks.

· Give everyone a voice.

[The white paper goes into rather more detail about these best practices – we’ve just captured the essence here].

CRM Essential #7: Extending Your Success

Business is about evolution. Smart and successful companies are flexible enough to adapt as necessary while never letting go of the core mission and values. If your business must be nimble to survive, why should you commit to a rigid,unflexible technology solution for something as important and core to your business as CRM? The ability to tie-in additional best-of-breed applicationsthat address other key business initiatives and processes is essential to the long-term success of your CRM solution.

[This Essential Tip, which goes on to highlight various Add-Ins available to extend the functionality of CRM, makes a worthwhile point about integrating CRM into your other business applications.]

CRM Essential #8: A Broad Community

Community-building Web technologies and sites are some of the most popular and fastest-growing areas on the Internet today. Through blogs, wikis, social and business networking sites, and much more—people are increasingly engaging with each other online. At the same time, companies are realizing that nurturing their customer communities and engaging with customers can yield dramatic results in terms of customer loyalty and brand awareness.

You can facilitate the growth of a strong customer community by providing online forums for a variety of topics of interest to your customers, including:

· Best practices. Encourage customers to share tips, tricks, success stories, and ideas, etc.

· Ideas and voting. You and your customers can share ideas on the future of your products and services. Providing the opportunity for customers to vote on ideas is an excellent way to get feedback, drum up participation, and help customers feel invested in your company’s future.

· User groups. You can set up local user groups and provide an online forum for communication and planning among the local members.

[Online communities are hot right now. This is a smart piece of advice, firmly linking CRM with customer engagement].

The “Eight CRM Essentials” white paper provides some worthwhile perspectives on the topic, and is worth a read if you’re considering implementing or upgrading CRM. We do have a copy, of course, but we’re going to encourage you toget yours from salesforce.com, so you can see if their own CRM practices match their advice.

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