CRM is not only related to customer relationship and sales activity anymore

It is true that the first goal of CRM is to help increase sales and manage customer relationships: however over the past 10 years, it has entered a new era. 

Indeed, it now offers more features which does not only arouse the interest of sales actors.

To better understand how CRM evolved, let’s get back a few years earlier: in the middle of the 80s, the time when CRM was created.

This first version only allowed processing and storing customer information within databases. 

Thanks to this capacity of centralizing all the activities, in a non-static way, salesmen quickly adopted the tool in order to increase sales.

Since then, a lot of things have changed: Now CRM is not exclusively just a simple tool for centralizing and storing sales activity anymore. 

It is now a decision support solution, to help us manage our business activity.

It gives us a better customer relationship management, through a clear and precise view on all the critical data about prospects and customers.

This data includes prospect or client partners’ details, interactions, past activities, customer follow-up, next actions to lead or even decision support and analysis.

CRM, a real decision support tool

As we just read, CRM helps us manage our activity in many of the company’s departments.

In fact, aside from customer relationship management, the tool has also enhanced its features to serve the other department within the company. 

For instance, in case of human resources (HR), IT Management, marketing, or even partner management…

What could CRM bring for the other business activities?

Human resources

• Multicasting job offers: creating a job offer and publishing it through about ten job sites in one click. This will help recruiters to considerably save time.

• Workflow or recruitment process: organizing and defining recruitment steps (contact, interview, offer, hiring, rejection) to simplify selection and automatically inform the candidates about their recruitment’s status.

• Collaborative assessment for the candidates: getting several candidates involved in the recruitment process (marks from 1 to 5, comments, votes) in an agile way.

• Multi-channel: gathering candidates’ entry points (social networks, company website, recruitment site) to create an unique candidate experience on all the channels. This, in order to offer more opportunities.

• Reporting: allowing HR department to follow its recruitment processes in real-time thanks to dashboards and reports given by CRM

• Candidate form and CV library: easing candidate data centralization (experience, skills, details, history of interactions with the company, etc). CV libraries allow us to sort and archive CVs.

Marketing

• Fluid information flow: giving to all collaborators the access to data about customers’ needs. This will ease decision support.

• Customer satisfaction and relationship management: enhancing customer satisfaction and making them loyal. This, with a better knowledge about their expectations and needs.

• Attracting new customers: finding new potential clients thanks to a database that allows better targeting and expanding the company’s customer range.

• Increasing sales: In case of sales activity, CRM improves the company’s sales through many features in terms of coordination and centralization of sales forces.

• Campaign launch and measurement: launching and setting marketing campaigns in real-time. Afterwards, measure the results and estimate them to understand their efficiency and profitability.

IT Management

• Productivity medium: automation and in real-time data and task update save the company some huge time. For example, in case of sales activity, if the department detects a purchase order, then the ordered product stock is updated, so as the accounting entry automatically.

• Management process optimization: allowing a better team communication and coordination within sales, marketing, and IT departments. Thus, CRM improves decision support.

• Better cost control: CRM gives us the opportunity to have a clear 360° vision on the company’s activity. This again improves decision support, and consequently, the company controls its cost management better. As a consequence, it will increase sales.

• Scalable use: IT management improves CRM features, so we can use the tool better and easily reach the expected goals. 

Easy CRM Tool, Simple Workflow Management:

Prediwell is a CRM Workflow hybrid software suitable for companies of all sizes.

His philosophy could be summed up in one sentence : an intuitive CRM solution giving the possibility, to easily automate the different tasks to lead in the business. 

Example : customer care(of contacts), historial of interactions, project process campaign customization, collaborative tool (team board), intuitive research of keywords and customizable Dashboards. 

Prediwell guarantees the management of the main activities within your company such as consulting, HR,  Sales…

This adaptable and simple to learn Customer Relationship Management allows us to:

1. Work intelligently with analytical informations with the business
2. Manage efficiently our activity
3. Have optimum control
4. Automate businesses procedures
5. Follow, analyze, and take fast actions

In terms of prices, Prediwell offers a monthly subscription from 9€ per user, which is a very competitive price compared to CRM market price.

Please note: Prediwell offers a special discount for all SMBs: all versions of Prediwell are now free for 15 days.

For more information:

Free trial

commercial@prediwell.com 

+33 (0)1 84 79 26 10

For more information around the topic:

https://www.hatchbuck.com/blog/crm-for-more-than-sales/

https://www.eligeo.com/general/crm-sales-tool/

https://www.nutshell.com/blog/crm-not-just-for-sales/

https://www.bethebusiness.com/productivity-insights/crm-system-not-just-for-sales/

CRM Terminology, different terms for each sector (Sales, Marketing, HR…)

As every analysis tool, CRM has also its own generic terms which vary according to the context: the terms that are used for marketing actions are not the same as for HR or IT operations.

It can also change depending on if it covers a SMB or big company. Because of course, each of them will not use the same terminologies.

In this article, we will see the most appropriate terms for a CRM, whether it is for Sales, Marketing or HR. Let’s get started first with those related to Sales activity.

1. Sales terminologies

Sales cycle:

Series of steps followed by a company in order to convert a prospect into a client.

Pipeline:

Sales volume forecast or prediction on a given period, from the first contract to the final sale. It is a key element that allows us to identify the treatment process and lead transformation.

Prospect:

It is a potential customer who is interested in your company. It can also be someone that you decide to follow, in order to conclude a sale, even though this client does not know your company yet.

Client :

A client is basically every contact in the database, who was brought to subscribe to a service or a product offered by the company.

Scoring prospect:

This system allows us to give a positive or negative mark to some prospects, depending on their activity and personal details on the web. The goal is to determine if they are “ready for sales” or not.

The score is generally established based on a percentage, color code or a simple mark (out of 10 or based on a number of stars).

List view:

A list view allows salesmen to check their contacts, customers, tasks… that are in general listed under a table or graphic. 

Prospect generation:

It is a process through which a company identifies new accounts or key contact targets (in other words new potential customers).

This target has to be in adequation with the company’s offer.

Sales qualified lead:

Sales Qualified Leads are leads that mostly come from marketing. They usually are detected by the salesman, who then turns them into opportunities.

More precisely, it is a prospect who is willing to know more about your products or services. He then has been redirected to a salesman.

2. Marketing terminologies

Analytics:

Analytics represent data around project performances or marketing campaigns.

Targeting:

Based on personas, targeting will allow us to identify key contacts and companies to call in the case of marketing and sales campaigns.

Data mining:

It is about extracting information that is potentially used from databases.

To do that, data mining gives us the possibility to analyse, through complex processes, this extracted information. Then, we will be able to anticipate customer’s behavior (eg: a churn score gives us the probability of a client to switch to our competitor the next month).

Outsourcing:

It is about contacting an external company to get some help managing our internal activity.

There are several kinds of outsourcing: database hosting, marketing campaign executions, call center, etc.

Contact channel:

It is all of the customer’s mediums of communication : offline (mail, fax), and online (face to face, phone, internet, e-mail, SMS).

Cold prospect:

It is somebody who has never been contacted and who did not respond to any offer presentation.

Qualifed prospect:

A qualified prospect is a prospect on whom we have enough information or data. This will allow us to see if he belongs to our target or not, but also to see his potential within the target.

Prospect to call back:

It is a prospect who has to be recontacted after a first conversation. He may want a new meeting after a first call.

KPI (Key Performance Indicator):

KPIs or key performance indicators are used to measure the global efficiency of a sales or marketing measure.

3. HR terminologies

Recruitment:

It includes the different actions that are set to find candidates. These candidates evidently have to fit the company’s needs.

Candidate: 

Someone who applies for a job in a company.

Selected candidate:

He is the chosen candidate who is allowed to pass the final steps of the recruitment. He is the one whose knowledge and experience fit the job’s needs.

Interviewed candidate:

It is the candidate who will be chosen for an interview and to pass a professional aptitude test.

It is important to know that certain terms can change between companies.

Each company is going to have their own terminologies. For instance, a company in the automotive sector, is not going to use the same terms as a telecom company.

In the same way, a SMB is probably not going to use the same definitions as a big company.

These terminologies can also differ from a department to another within the same company.

For instance, the marketing department is not going to use the same terms as the sales department, despite their management proximity.

It happens that companies create their own terminologies as well, while adapting them to their activities.

Easy CRM Tool, Simple Workflow Management:

Prediwell is a CRM Workflow hybrid software suitable for companies of all sizes.

His philosophy could be summed up in one sentence : an intuitive CRM solution giving the possibility, to easily automate the different tasks to lead in the business. 

Example : customer care(of contacts), historial of interactions, project process campaign customization, collaborative tool (team board), intuitive research of keywords and customizable Dashboards. 

Prediwell guarantees the management of the main activities within your company such as consulting, HR,  Sales…

This adaptable and simple to learn Customer Relationship Management allows us to:

1. Work intelligently with analytical informations with the business
2. Manage efficiently our activity
3. Have optimum control
4. Automate businesses procedures
5. Follow, analyze, and take fast actions

In terms of prices, Prediwell offers a monthly subscription from 9€ per user, which is a very competitive price compared to CRM market price.

Please note: Prediwell offers a special discount for all SMBs: all versions of Prediwell are now free for 15 days.

For more information:

Free trial

commercial@prediwell.com 

+33 (0)1 84 79 26 10

For more information about the different terminologies:

https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/10050-crm-software-terms.html

https://www.rolustech.com/blog/common-crm-terms-beginners-guide

https://advos.io/resources/glossary-of-hr-and-benefits-terms/

https://learn.g2.com/sales-terms

https://blog.influenceandco.com/50-marketing-terms-you-need-to-know