But, looking back to the run up to Christmas, how much time did operation Christmas cards cost you this festive season? 

Did you order printed Christmas cards?  Did you buy some and write on each one personally?  Did you decide to be environmentally friendly and send an ecard perhaps donating the money you would have spent on Christmas cards to a charity?

However you sent your yuletide greetings, you would have had to have decided which contacts to send the cards to.  Did you trawl through all your outlook emails / contacts to find contacts to send cards or ecards to?  Did you check through all of your paper records e.g. Invoices, Delivery notes, Purchase Orders and manually pick out your contacts?  Did you ask all your staff to provide you with a list and then collate it into one big list?

The issue is there are often hidden costs of the amount of time you spend collating all of this contact information which prevents  you from selling more or delivering services.

With a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) product, you can have all your contacts in one place, contacts are added straight into the database when you make contact with them throughout the year and there can be a simple tick box that says “Xmas Card” which you can tick if you want to send that contact a Christmas Card.

Now Operation Christmas Card just got easier.  You run a simple lookup for all the contacts that have “Xmas Card” ticked (which you and your staff have been ticking through the year).  If you are sending ecards, you go into the CRM’s HTML editor and create your own card if you wish, or you import one thats been designed for you.  You carry out an email mail merge and hey presto, in about 5 mouse clicks, you are sending out 200 individually addressed emails to your contacts.  If an outside agency send your cards for you, then you simply carry out the same lookup and then click the export to excel function and you now have a list of contacts with their email addresses which you can send to the agency.

If you decide to send traditional Christmas cards, a CRM system will be able to produce labels for you.  It’s easier if you use Avery standard labels as these are usually preset by CRM products, alternatively you can spend some time designing your own label template.  Again, create the lookup for “Xmas Card” then select the label template and print them.  200 labels are sitting on your printer ready to stick on your envelopes.

I know of some of my clients who have saved days of time just by implementing a simple cost-effective CRM system which has paid for itself already.

If you want to discuss how to improve your office efficiency with a CRM system, then contact Steve Crombie at Bridgehouse Solutions Ltd for a free consultation on 01462 450444 / 07931 580241 steve@bridgehousesolutions.co.uk or visit our website at www.bridgehousesolutions.co.uk

The first is a prospect who knows exactly what they want in terms of the exact product, e.g ACT, SAGE CRM, MSCRM, Wired Contact, SalesLogix, Maximiser, Goldmine etc.  These tend to be people who have used the product before, were happy with what it did, had a good experience from the Product Reseller and wish to use this at their new company.

The second usually have no idea about which product they should use.  They may have not used a CRM system before either in their previous or current company and have probably not heard of , or know, most of the products available in the market place.

Both of these tend to have different problems.  The first prospect have already made up their mind to go with a certain product.  This may be right, but sometimes this decision has not taken into consideration some of the following key points

• How does the new company work compared to their old company
• What network infrastructure does the new company have compared to the old company, and is it the same, worse or better.
• The Computer Hardware could be different to the company they were previously at .

The second type of prospect will be looking for the Reseller to advise on the best product for their business.  This will require the reseller to know more about their business and how they operate and then advise on the best product.

There are however, 2 key points for both types of prospect.

• What IT setup do they currently have.
• What requirements do they need for a CRM system based on how they work as a business.

For example, if you have lower spec PC’s then you may not be able to run certain CRM products unless you replace or upgrade it.  You may also decide to choose a different CRM as you do not wish to upgrade or replace the PC.  Also, its important to work out what you need from the system, rather than buying something that’s all singing and dancing, but is really not going to meet your fundamental needs.

In order to clarify what you need, ask yourself some of these key questions.

• How you want to access your data.  Do you want to see your contacts on your mobile phone, PDA, Laptop or via a webpage?
• Do you want to have your data saved locally on your machine so you can update it without a direct network connection, then synchronise the changes when you have a network/internet connection.
• What budget do you have?  Can you afford to invest in a CRM product up front, or would you prefer to pay monthly.  CRM systems dont have to cost the earth and sometimes the value for money products meet your requirements.
• Do you want to host the product on one of your servers / PC’s in the office, or would you prefer to have it hosted for you for a small monthly fee.
• What does the CRM product need to integrate with?  Is this out of the box functionality or will you need to invest in development services
• Is the product going to be future proofed?  Will it move when technology moves.
• Can the CRM product change when your business processes change.

With a bit of planning relating to your workflow and what the critical needs are, then you can be safe in the knowledge that you have maximised your CRM investment and you will have a CRM that fits into the way you work, not you having to work the way the CRM system works.

One last piece of advice, concentrate on about 3 to 5 key things you want to get out of your CRM system e.g. All my contacts in one place, track our sales opportunities, have a shared calendar for all our sales people.  Concentrate on doing these right and then once everyone in your organisation is doing them, plan for 3 to 5 more.

If you would like some free advice on which CRM product to choose, then Steve crombie would be happy to talk with you.  Contact Steve on 01462 450444 or steve@bridgehousesolutions.co.uk or visit our website at www.bridgehousesolutions.co.uk

The good news is that there is East of England Development Agency (EEDA) funding available for SME’s to train your management team in the form of the Leadership and Management Programme.  You have to match the following criteria in order to apply for the funding.

• Your company has between 5-250 employees
• Your company is NOT a public sector organisation
• The people needing the training are Leaders / Managers in your organisation
• You have not applied for Leadership and Management Training Funding at this company.

The funding takes the form of the first £500 of the training programme is refunded to you completely.  The next £500 is matched funding e.g. you put in £1, EEDA will match that £1.

So you could get £1500 (plus VAT) worth of training for £500 (plus VAT).  Alternatively you could just go for the £500.  The main issue is that you only have one application per company so if you have a lot of training to do and want to maximise the funding opportunity, make sure you review all of your management training requirements and apply for the funding in one hit.

You might decide to run a team building event especially when your team may have experienced redundancies, or you may decide to bring your IT skills up to date with Excel, Word, Outlook, Windows or PowerPoint training.  You may need assistance with Sales training or presentations, or you might decided to train on how to develop your website, or it could be Health and Safety training for your managers.  Whatever the requirement, Bridghouse Solutions Ltd will always be able to advise the most cost-effective way of achieving your learning and development needs.

If you want to discuss this programme in more detail and talk about how to meet all of your management training needs in the most cost-effective way, then please contact Steve Crombie of Bridgehouse Solutions Ltd.  01462 450444 or 07931 580241 or email steve steve@bridgehousesolutions.co.uk or visit the website www.bridgehousesolutions.co.uk

If your response falls into the former, then you are not alone and are probably in the majority.  Even though CRM (Customer Relationship Management) has been around for over 20 years, there are still some who have never come across the 3 letter acronym, but probably don’t know that this could be a saviour for their business, especially in times of (and if reports are to be believed) coming out of a recession.

In its broadest sense, CRM is the relationship that you have with your customers and the management of said relationships.  We are all very good at building relationships with our customers, but its the management of those relationships that can alter a customer’s perception of your business and therefore impact on future sales.  A company using a CRM system has a higher customer retention rate and will be able to make decisions based on their sales pipeline.

The strange thing is that you are probably contacting companies that use CRM systems already. You may have phoned a pizza company who know your address just from your phone call.  CRM systems have the ability to recognise incoming phone numbers and can pop up contact details for the person taking the order, to ensure that you get your Pizza delivered to your door.  Another example of CRM is when you discuss a complaint with a company and they can see who you spoke with, when you spoke to them and any documentation.  It just gives you the perception that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.

If I asked you now to go and find every single document, email, mailshot, invoice, presentation, quotation or file that you have ever sent to a client, then it could take you the best part of a day to find this.  This is what CRM gives you in a click of a button.

For business owners, it is extremely important that you don’t lose sight of your customers and that you can maintain your customer database.  Several clients have called me after their key sales person has left, deleting their entire email history in Outlook, shredded their client files and removed all data from their machines so as to leave no trace of who they were talking to, what they were talking about and worst of all, what the clients actually purchased / going to purchase from you.  My clients who have a CRM system can carry on with their business when their key sales person leaves and their CRM system has a built in backup program to ensure business continuity.

A good CRM system must incorporate integration with a calendar and reminder system.  It makes sense that you should be reminded on Monday at 9:30 to talk to George about the large project / delivery they require which you need to quote for.  How many times has that post it note disappeared which had the persons number on it who wanted the big order, or you are told to call back in a months time and then you forget to call back because you mislaid that piece of paper.

So CRM is important and it doesn’t have to cost the earth.  There are some free open source CRM systems available, but these usually have little or no support.  There are others from around the £180 per user mark such as ACT! by SAGE which is good value, packed with features and are easy to use.  If you are a Mid to large sized company, then you need to consider products such as SAGE CRM, SalesLogix, MSCRM to name but a few.

One thing I forgot to mention is that the organisers of the network group I went to use a CRM system called ACT to organise their events by creating groups of attendees, printing out a list of attendees for you to take away after the event, produce your badges within a few seconds and update you with email alerts about forthcoming events.   What used to take them 2 days to organise has now been reduced down to a few hours. This type of saving could be enjoyed by your company.

If you would like to discuss more about CRM and how it can help you to get more business, then please contact Steve Crombie of Bridgehouse Solutions Ltd on 01462 450444 or steve@bridgehousesolutions.co.uk or visit our website at www.bridgehousesolutions.co.uk