Ramon Ray caught up with Melissa Shepard, Chief Architect, President and CEO at Lizzard Tech Consulting, a Salesforce silver consulting partner based in the USA at the Dell Women’s EntrepreneurNetwork in Singapore. Melissa is a CRM and Salesforce expert with over 20 years of experience in CRM improvements and innovations. Melissa is passionate about CRM and what it can do for small businesses.
Why Your Business Can’t Live Without CRM
The list of reasons why you need CRM to efficiently run your small business is seemingly endless. Melissa says it’s important because it:
- pulls all of your customer data.
- gives you insight into your customers.
- helps you communicate with your customers.
- helps you report on data and analyze analytics.
- helps you build your pipeline so you know what’s coming in so you can plan for the future .
- helps with sales, marketing, operations, customer service—and basically everything!
“{CRM} really will run your entire company,” adds Melissa.
Businesses Without CRM Have it Harder
Melissa’s been in the CRM business for over 20 years, and she’s probably seen it all. Businesses that don’t implement a CRM system struggle. Melissa says if you’re not using CRM, “You’re not communicating with the customers, you’re missing out on opportunities and possible sales, you’re not tracking your revenue. You’re not able to report on your data, no customer insights, you don’t know your customer base and who you’re selling to.” Communication is such an important thing in running a business and without CRM you’re not doing that as effectively as you could be.
A CRM System That Scales
Melissa admits that for some businesses, customer relationship management is not easy to implement. “There are CRM systems that are easy to use and some that aren’t so easy,” she says. But, Salesforce can be customized to specifically meet the needs of just about any business out there. Other CRMs, while easier to use, operate at a much more basic level. That’s fine for very small businesses, but Melissa says, “as you grow, and figure out your processes, something like Salesforce is going to support that growth.” Businesses can start out small with Salesforce Essentials, then as they grow, move up to Professional, and then Enterprise when your business goes global and you start growing at a pace where your business outgrows the smaller programs.
Let The Experts Face the Challenges
CRM is designed to support business processes. Melissa says one of their biggest challenges when helping a business troubleshoot a CRM program is when the business’s processes aren’t functioning properly within Salesforce. Melissa and her team make sure that everything is architected properly upfront, and will meet the business process needs, so a business can successfully scale upon that foundation. If your business’s CRM foundation isn’t set right, you’ve only wasted your time and money because it will have to be redone.
CRM Is There to Support Your Business
Melissa and her team conduct a business analysis when helping a company implement or troubleshoot CRM. They look at the day-to-day operations of the business and determine how they can create business processes with the CRM system that can best support that. Sometimes that means tweaking the business processes. Sometimes, Melissa says,
“It means taking a look at the company holistically, seeing how each team operates and how can they operate better together as opposed to in these silos and then creating that 360-degree view of the customer.”
Republished by permission. Original here.
Image: Depositphotos.com