CRM solutions help companies boost their business efficiency, thereby increasing profit and revenue generation capabilities. Let us take a quick look at some of the measurable benefits that your organization can gain by implementing a CRM solution.
- Increase Customer Lifecycle Value
In most businesses, the cost of acquisition of customers is high. To make profits, it is important to keep the customer longer and sell him more products (cross sell, up sell, etc) to him, during his lifecycle. Customer stay, if they are provided with value, quality service and continuity. CRM solutions enable you to do that.
- Execution Control
Once the business strategy is put into motion, the management needs feedback and reports to judge how the business is performing. CRM solutions provide management with control and a scientific way to identify and resolve issues. The benefits include a clearer visibility of the sales pipeline, accurate forecasts and more.
- Customer Lifecycle Management
To keep the customers happy, you need to know them better. At the minimum, you need a centralize customer database, that captures most of the information from your entire customer facing departments and partners. Integrated CRM solutions, like CRMnext enable you to manage customer information, throughout all stages of their life cycle, from contact to contract to customer service.
- Strategic Consistency
Because CRM offers business and technological alignment, it enables companies to achieve strategic company goals more effectively, like enhanced sales realization, higher customer satisfaction, better brand management and more. Additionally, the alignment results in a more consistent customer communication creating a feeling of continuity.
- Business Intelligence
Due to the valuable business insights that CRM provides, it becomes easier to identify the bottlenecks, their causes and the remedial measures that need to be taken. For example, CRMnext provides real-time business focus dashboards with extensive drill down capabilities that provide the decision makers with the depth of information required to identify the causes and spot trends.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Is Business Intelligence for Small Businesses too?
If you don’t know everything you’d like to know about what makes your business tick — what works, what doesn’t and how much it all costs — you need business intelligence or BI. Business intelligence solutions pull data from multiple operational systems (finance, sales, supply chain management, etc.), integrate it, analyze it and present it in easily digestible form as graphs, charts and dials on screen-based “dashboards.”
“Business intelligence is about empowering people with the data that will help them make better decisions,” said Dyke Hensen, senior vice president of product strategy at Pivotlink, a vendor of software-as-a-service (SaaS) business intelligence solutions.
Business intelligence answers questions such as: Which are my best customers? Which are my most profitable products or services? Which are my most efficient locations? How much will it cost to open a new territory? Where am I wasting money?
Rapid ROI
The classic, often-repeated business case for business intelligence revolves around reducing inventory. If business intelligence lets you see up-to-the-minute sales and/or consumption trends and real-time inventory levels, you can delay re-ordering until you actually need items, saving the considerable costs associated with inventory management.
According to Anthony Deighton, senior vice president of products at QlikTech Inc., a maker of QlikView susiness intelligence software, the benefits of business intelligence software are enormous.
“It’s about being able to make smarter business decisions and gain insights into what drives the business: where the costs are, where the costs are leaking, where the opportunities are — real tactical issues that make a bottom-line difference in how you run your business,” Deighton said.
A study commissioned last year by QlikTech from IT analyst firm IDC concluded that the average payback period for a QlikView implementation was an impressively short 198 days. The average return on investment (ROI) reported across all QlikView implementations was 186 percent, and the ROI benefits included an average 16 percent increase in revenue and 20 percent reduction in operating costs.
Business Intelligence in the Cloud
Business intelligence is not the type of software solution SMBs have typically been able to afford, but it has been moving down market in the last few years. SaaS offerings from companies such as myDIALS Inc., Birst, Pivotlink and others have helped make it more small-business friendly — and more affordable.
“I like the whole SaaS model for business intelligence,” said analyst and consultant Laurie McCabe, a partner with the SMB Group. “Business intelligence is something that would be tough for small businesses to implement on their own.”
Buying a SaaS solution will also save small businesses the cost of setting up and then managing servers and network connections. “It really is a change in the paradigm,” said Pivotlink’s Hensen. “When done correctly, a SaaS solution levels the playing field for the small-to-medium guys.”
But SaaS is not the only route to business intelligence for small businesses. Deighton claims his company’s product is easy enough for SMBs to implement quickly on their own or with the help of a consultant.
QlikView is available for anyone to download and use for free until they’re ready to roll it out to end users. “Small businesses tend to be risk averse,” Deighton said. “This helps take some of the risk out of the buying process for them.” (QlikView is also available as a hosted solution from QlikTech partners.)
Do You Need Business Intelligence?
Is business intelligence really ready for small-business prime time? The answer depends on the size of your small business, how data-intense it is — and how much pain your current lack of insight is causing you.
“The place to start,” said McCabe, “is to ask yourself what you need to know about your business that you don’t know already. What questions do you have that you can’t get answers to today? Everything should be driven from that.”
There is a real danger, she said, of small businesses spending too much on business intelligenceand ending up with something that’s overkill and too hard to use for their requirements.
The Price of Business Intelligence
Business intelligence solutions — even the ones geared to smaller organizations and that take advantage of the economies of scale of cloud computing — are still expensive by the standards of many, possibly most small businesses.
Pivotlink, for example, mostly targets organizations with revenues in excess of $50 million a year. Prices for its SaaS solution start at $1,500 a month for 50 users. (Most BI solutions, whether SaaS or on premise, are priced per user, with only selected managers and analysts getting direct access to the system’s dashboards.)
According to QlikTech’s Deighton, it costs somewhere between $20,000 to $200,000 to implement QlikView. It is used by some small businesses, however.
SaaS solutions from vendors such as myDIALS may be somewhat more affordable. myDIALS charges from $25 per user per month for Lite users (who can only view dials and change timelines), and $75 or $90 a month for Standard or Professional users who have more complete access to information and settings.
If you don’t know everything you’d like to know about what makes your business tick — what works, what doesn’t and how much it all costs — you need business intelligence or BI. Business intelligence solutions pull data from multiple operational systems (finance, sales, supply chain management, etc.), integrate it, analyze it and present it in easily digestible form as graphs, charts and dials on screen-based “dashboards.”
“Business intelligence is about empowering people with the data that will help them make better decisions,” said Dyke Hensen, senior vice president of product strategy at Pivotlink, a vendor of software-as-a-service (SaaS) BI solutions.
BI answers questions such as: Which are my best customers? Which are my most profitable products or services? Which are my most efficient locations? How much will it cost to open a new territory? Where am I wasting money?
“Business intelligence is about empowering people with the data that will help them make better decisions,” said Dyke Hensen, senior vice president of product strategy at Pivotlink, a vendor of software-as-a-service (SaaS) business intelligence solutions.
Business intelligence answers questions such as: Which are my best customers? Which are my most profitable products or services? Which are my most efficient locations? How much will it cost to open a new territory? Where am I wasting money?
Rapid ROI
The classic, often-repeated business case for business intelligence revolves around reducing inventory. If business intelligence lets you see up-to-the-minute sales and/or consumption trends and real-time inventory levels, you can delay re-ordering until you actually need items, saving the considerable costs associated with inventory management.
According to Anthony Deighton, senior vice president of products at QlikTech Inc., a maker of QlikView susiness intelligence software, the benefits of business intelligence software are enormous.
“It’s about being able to make smarter business decisions and gain insights into what drives the business: where the costs are, where the costs are leaking, where the opportunities are — real tactical issues that make a bottom-line difference in how you run your business,” Deighton said.
A study commissioned last year by QlikTech from IT analyst firm IDC concluded that the average payback period for a QlikView implementation was an impressively short 198 days. The average return on investment (ROI) reported across all QlikView implementations was 186 percent, and the ROI benefits included an average 16 percent increase in revenue and 20 percent reduction in operating costs.
Business Intelligence in the Cloud
Business intelligence is not the type of software solution SMBs have typically been able to afford, but it has been moving down market in the last few years. SaaS offerings from companies such as myDIALS Inc., Birst, Pivotlink and others have helped make it more small-business friendly — and more affordable.
“I like the whole SaaS model for business intelligence,” said analyst and consultant Laurie McCabe, a partner with the SMB Group. “Business intelligence is something that would be tough for small businesses to implement on their own.”
Buying a SaaS solution will also save small businesses the cost of setting up and then managing servers and network connections. “It really is a change in the paradigm,” said Pivotlink’s Hensen. “When done correctly, a SaaS solution levels the playing field for the small-to-medium guys.”
But SaaS is not the only route to business intelligence for small businesses. Deighton claims his company’s product is easy enough for SMBs to implement quickly on their own or with the help of a consultant.
QlikView is available for anyone to download and use for free until they’re ready to roll it out to end users. “Small businesses tend to be risk averse,” Deighton said. “This helps take some of the risk out of the buying process for them.” (QlikView is also available as a hosted solution from QlikTech partners.)
Do You Need Business Intelligence?
Is business intelligence really ready for small-business prime time? The answer depends on the size of your small business, how data-intense it is — and how much pain your current lack of insight is causing you.
“The place to start,” said McCabe, “is to ask yourself what you need to know about your business that you don’t know already. What questions do you have that you can’t get answers to today? Everything should be driven from that.”
There is a real danger, she said, of small businesses spending too much on business intelligenceand ending up with something that’s overkill and too hard to use for their requirements.
The Price of Business Intelligence
Business intelligence solutions — even the ones geared to smaller organizations and that take advantage of the economies of scale of cloud computing — are still expensive by the standards of many, possibly most small businesses.
Pivotlink, for example, mostly targets organizations with revenues in excess of $50 million a year. Prices for its SaaS solution start at $1,500 a month for 50 users. (Most BI solutions, whether SaaS or on premise, are priced per user, with only selected managers and analysts getting direct access to the system’s dashboards.)
According to QlikTech’s Deighton, it costs somewhere between $20,000 to $200,000 to implement QlikView. It is used by some small businesses, however.
SaaS solutions from vendors such as myDIALS may be somewhat more affordable. myDIALS charges from $25 per user per month for Lite users (who can only view dials and change timelines), and $75 or $90 a month for Standard or Professional users who have more complete access to information and settings.
If you don’t know everything you’d like to know about what makes your business tick — what works, what doesn’t and how much it all costs — you need business intelligence or BI. Business intelligence solutions pull data from multiple operational systems (finance, sales, supply chain management, etc.), integrate it, analyze it and present it in easily digestible form as graphs, charts and dials on screen-based “dashboards.”
“Business intelligence is about empowering people with the data that will help them make better decisions,” said Dyke Hensen, senior vice president of product strategy at Pivotlink, a vendor of software-as-a-service (SaaS) BI solutions.
BI answers questions such as: Which are my best customers? Which are my most profitable products or services? Which are my most efficient locations? How much will it cost to open a new territory? Where am I wasting money?
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