Erich Stauffer

Tag: CRM

  • My Experience Managing Salesforce and Other CRMs

    My Experience Managing Salesforce and Other CRMs

    When I worked at Marine Credit Union as a business analyst, I was also a product manager for the company’s CRM system. I then helped them to migrate to Salesforce’s CRM, but that wasn’t my first time administering Salesforce.

    At Skinny & Co., as their IT & Marketing Product Manager, I helped them migrate to – and then later administered – their Salesforce installation as a Salesforce administrator. This involved working closely with IT and Sales departments.

    How a CRM can help manage Sales

    The CRM helped the company stay organized about their sales process and pipeline by creating a mechanism for salespeople to document their activities. While a CRM can be helpful to the company, it’s not always loved by salespeople who dislike filling it out, which is where process optimization can come into play.

    People > Processes > Technology

    Once you have the right people, create processes for what you’ll do when you get a new lead or prospect. Be prepared for when you get them. Decide what information you want to collect from your website using the CRM.

    But you don’t have to use Salesforce for your CRM. It can be as simple as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, Google Sheets, Notion, or SugarCRM. The most important thing is to document all of your interactions with customers in one place.

    What is the best CRM software?

    BestVendor did a survey of 550 startup staffers — most in marketing and executive administration positions — on their favorite tools for email, accounting, web analytics, CRM, productivity, design, storage, payment processing, operations and so forth. Their answers, in aggregate, speak to the growing trend in startups moving toward predominately cloud-based operations, the most popular being Salesforce, which bested its CRM competition with 59% of respondents selecting it as the application of choice.

  • What Can SugarCRM Do for You?

    SugarCRM is a great customer relationship manager with pipeline management and email marketing capability.  The core Sugar modules are as follows:

    Home – The Home module provides a quick view of the relevant data and activities that you select for display.

    Accounts – Manage customer companies, entities, or even individuals if’s it’s a small business.  You can track a variety of information about an account including website URL, address, number of employees and other data. Business subsidiaries can be linked to parent businesses in order to show relationships between accounts.

    Contacts – Individual customers, essentially the various contact points within an organization. These are the individuals with whom we are doing business and we wish to target marketing activity towards.  You can track contact information such as title, email address, and phone number. Contacts are usually linked to an account.

    Opportunities – Click this tab to view the Opportunities module. Use this module to track potential customers. Opportunities help you manage your selling process by tracking attributes such as sales stages, probability of close, deal amount and other information.

    Activities – Click this tab to view the Activities module. Use this module to create or update scheduled activities, or to search for existing activities.

    Activities consist of the following sub-modules:

    Calendar – View scheduled activities (by day, week, month, or year) such as meetings, tasks, and calls. You can also share your calendar with your coworkers to coordinate your daily activities.

    Calls – Manage outbound and incoming phone calls between you and your customers.

    Meetings – Manage meetings, including both internal and external invitees, which you schedule or accept.

    Tasks – Manage a list of actions that you need to complete by a specific date.

    Notes – Manage notes and file attachments.

    Leads – Used to track potential customers.  This is the entry point into the system to know when a potential new customer is requesting information, or could even be a current customer wanting a new product.  Leads are an important aspect of the sales management process inside of SugarCRM.

    Emails – Click this tab to view the Emails module. Use this module to send, and receive emails. You can also automate email management, create email templates for automated responses, and for email-based marketing campaigns.

    Campaigns – Click this tab to view the Campaigns module. Use this module to create and manage marketing campaigns. You can implement and track marketing campaigns. These can be telemarketing, mail or email-based campaigns.