CRM Overview

Hi. My name is Anjali Bharadwa. I'm with DMC, and I'm going to be talking to you about CRM. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. The first question that you might ask yourself is: “Why even consider a CRM?” If you're like many organizations, you're probably managing your data somehow; most likely, it could be with an Excel spreadsheet. You could have multiple Excel spreadsheets and have lots of people managing different ones. At the end of the day, there are a lot of questions. You don't really know whose list is up-to-date, are your customers really happy and how are you best managing these customers.

This is when you would consider a CRM system; to centralize all of your information into one location, have everybody be able to update the same records in the same database, and have real-time tracking of all the activities that happen when interacting that customer. You can also use this outside of the sales organization and across different workgroups. If you wanted to be using it in the quality department, for technical support, or for customer service, all of these people are able to manage their customers – and you're all sharing this information.

There are a lot of common misconceptions about CRM – many think it's too complex for their business, “We have a simple sales process, it's too expensive,” or even, “I'm going to have to change everything about the way I do my business in order to take on a CRM package.” These really aren't true. You just need to find the right CRM package for your company.

With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, there are a number of different modules: There's a marketing module, where you're able to send out targeted marketing campaigns; for example, people who are in a particular geographical area or people who are looking for a certain product. You have the sales module, which is what most people know it for. You can also use it for service and support; track customer support calls, and the overall management module to be able to look at the data for your sales activities as a whole across the organization.

Here are some screenshots depicting how CRM is being used. The first one is leads and opportunity management. If you have a new lead, there's going to be a process that it goes through, and hopefully becomes an opportunity. You're going to want to be able to qualify, develop, propose, and then eventually close these opportunities. Account and contact management is done in CRM, as well; being able to see all the contact information, who are all the players that are involved, and who the decision-makers are within the process.

The management dashboards can have various different kinds of information, including what's in the pipeline, who's on the leadership board for the most sales, what opportunities are really big that we should be keeping our eyes on, and perhaps geographically, where our top customers are located. Because Dynamic CRM is a Microsoft product, it does integrate very well with SharePoint for the document management, keeping your actual proposals in one place.

With Office 365, there are now 3 very good CRM options. There's the on-premise CRM, which people are accustomed to, an online CRM which is in the Cloud, and then there's also a smaller product we call CRM Light, which you develop on SharePoint.

If you've ever considered a CRM option in the Cloud, you've probably looked at some of these different options before. Overall, the idea is that with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you're getting a lot of value for your money, you're not having to increase your costs in order to use more options. With CRM, you are able to better manage your customers by having all of the data in one central location.

Anjali Bharadwa, Senior Consultant, DMC, Inc. 2222 N. Elston Ave., Suite 200 Chicago, IL 60614  http://www.dmcinfo.com (312) 255-8757 sales@dmcinfo.com