Originally appeared in GATF Tech Forecast 2008
By Chuck Gehman, EFI
Summary of Benefits of Selling with CRM
- Enables printing companies to more deeply understand exactly who customers are, and their buying habits
- Lets managers and owners robustly forecast the value of upcoming business opportunities
- Helps you identify emerging threats and competitors, and change your course of action to address them
- Prevents customers from “falling through the cracks”, resulting in missed opportunities
- Provides a collaboration platform, which your staffers can use to better serve customers
- With integration to other internal systems, can streamline many activities in the process of acquiring new business and serving existing customers
- With integration to customer systems, can provide a value-added service that creates unique lock-in for your - print products and services
Introduction
For this year’s Tech Forecast, I wanted to share some insights I’ve found from building some new products this past year, from the interactions I’ve had with clients in the process of gathering requirements for those products, and from my own company’s implementation of a new Enterprise CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.
The basic goal of a CRM system is to understand your customers, and what they want, so you can serve them better, and as a result, sell them more. This is one of the most fundamental principles of marketing. The idea is to do this by collecting the information you learn about them on a day-to-day basis, organize it, and then use it to build stronger relationships with them.
CRM systems can help printing companies grow by providing these abilities; knowing what customers want to buy, when they want to buy it, and how much of it they will buy. A side benefit, that’s becoming more important these days, is optimizing and tracking how your customer wants to interact with your company, also known as their “channel” preferences (i.e., email, phone, direct mail, instant messaging). It is well recognized that CRM systems improve a company’s ability to market and sell.
The challenge begins with understanding what CRM is, and how to apply it to a printing business. Customers and prospects give the printing company information about themselves all the time. As a result of sales calls, Requests for Proposal or Request for Quote (RFP/RFQ) received, responses to an email blast or direct mail campaign, events like PIA (Printing Industries of America, local affiliates) open houses, transactions with existing customers, and even web site visits, customers volunteer a lot of information about themselves. With the advent of VDP and cross-media, integrated marketing campaigns, with PURLS (Personalized URLS) and microsites, CRM can collect even more valuable information about customers that can drive additional marketing activities and, as a result, sales.
Sales force automation (SFA) is understandably the place where most companies, including printing companies, start with their CRM implementation. Affordable and simple contact management, coupled with tools for keeping track of sales activities and simple forecasting have been available for a long time. However, this shrink-wrapped software (installed on the sales force’s desktop PCs) usually doesn’t connect with other systems that printers have—for example, the all important Print MIS systems that have the history of jobs won/lost, information about the volume of business that each account provides, as well as profitability insight. The Print MIS system is generally where information about what type of products and services customers buy, and how profitable that customer’s business is for the printing company; a link to a CRM system can provide powerful analytics that help Printers see and act upon this information.
Analyzing Data as the basis for Action
New CRM systems provide a higher level of value than just contact management, because with integration, they can give you visibility into the information about customers that you have in both the CRM system, and in other systems, that can be used to help make decisions about how to sell to them. This kind of integration has only been available to very large companies, who have reaped its benefits for many years, but at costs ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to license, implement and maintain. Much of “data mining” we hear about is really application of CRM and the somewhat newer technology/concept of Business Process Management (BPM), which we will discuss later.
CRM systems should connect to your other databases (in the printing industry, an example of such a database would be a Print MIS system), and allow you to record and analyze the buying habits of your customers, so that you can offer them goods or services which are targeted to what (and when) they are most likely to buy.
Existing printing company systems, like the Print MIS systems, are loaded with data about customers. The challenge is that raw data does not have value in and of itself—it needs to be turned into useful information. That is where analytical technology comes into play. Analytics in the CRM software help you “see” patterns in the data you possess so that you can turn the raw data into valuable information and use it to gain insight. EFI’s Enterprise Information System (EIS), is an example of analytical (BPM) technology combined with Print MIS to bring higher value to data you’ve already collected from numerous activities in your business, and then present that data to the people who need to use it—production and finance managers, as well as executives and sales reps.
At EFI, we’ve built a connection between our PrinterSite Internal system (which gives sales reps and CSRs an Internet-based “view” of sales, estimating and job status activities in the Print MIS), and the Salesforce.com system, as well as combining both with our EIS system, to provide all the sales force automation and analytics applications that a CRM system needs to deliver to a printing company environment. We are also going to build additional CRM touch points, because as we discussed, the value of CRM is analyzing the data for the purpose of taking action.
Even basic CRM systems can provide a foundation on which you can manage the data coming in from your field—sales reps, CSRs and potentially other touch points of customer interaction we’ve discussed. Newer systems, many now available as SaaS (Software as a Service, hosted by the software provide), can provide a much more sophisticated level of integration than older, legacy solutions. For example, Salesforce.com, now inarguably the most popular new vendor, provides a complete development environment, called AppExchange, free to subscribers. This can be used to build integration to other printing company systems.
Managing sales activities with a CRM system
Sales force automation (SFA) is still one of the cornerstone applications for CRM for printer, and it can deliver substantial benefits. One of the key benefits to using SFA is to let companies manage people and processes more effectively, so reps can close more deals.
With a properly implemented CRM system, Sales reps spend more time selling and less time on paperwork. Unfortunately, many sales people at printing companies are (at least initially) reluctant to participate in CRM systems. They may incorrectly believe that their business relationships, contacts, and the customer’s orders, belong to them. The challenge here is to change the mindset by convincing these people that their win rate will improve through the use of CRM. Once you’ve overcome this hurdle, sales reps are well served by today’s CRM systems. CRM systems directly serve the rep’s primary goal of managing the day-to-day business flow with customers, with the desired outcome of winning each deal. Sales reps want to make sure they win all possible opportunities that present themselves from customers. With a CRM application, they can track all their opportunity-related data, including milestones, decision makers, partners, customer communications, and a host of other information unique to the particular printing company, its customers and its products.
Sales reps who are engaged with the customers garner a large volume of market intelligence from them, but rarely have the ability to analyze it. With a CRM system, they will be able to turn the information they collect into action. Why didn’t your company get the bid? How many times did you provide a quote to the same print buyer in the last six months, only to be rejected? Who is winning the bids?
Perhaps more than anything else, reps want to know where they stand in terms of their forecast and pipeline, because their income depends on this information. This is important for the reps, and helps managers even more, by allow them to set goals and expectations, as well as to know when they will need to help their reps achieve the sales plan. Managers like CRM’s ability to see what the next month, or the next quarter, looks like from a sales perspective. What is the level of confidence that the sales rep has in winning the bids you’ve quoted? With CRM, managers can see segmented, historical, and rolled-up pipeline analysis for insight to help shape your business and drive it forward.
For owners and managers of a printing company, the visibility that CRM provides is unprecedented, as well as obviously valuable. Managers need to be able to analyze their team’s sales pipeline across multiple reps, so they can quickly identify and eliminate any bottlenecks in the sales cycle or determine the cause of downgraded sales opportunities. How can I help my reps be more effective, so they can win more deals? Who is outperforming, who is lagging? It also makes life dramatically easier for these folks, by automating much of the data collection and analysis they might be doing by hand today. The time it takes to do simple tasks like determining sales rep commissions, and the amount of effort required, can be dramatically decreased.
In many small to medium-sized companies, the President of the company may also be the top sales executive. A sales manager might also be a key individual sales contributor. Because of the strong benefits, managers are more likely to embrace CRM than individual sales reps. Reasons include their need for better visibility into the activities of their reps, the total picture of the manager’s business, and the insight a CRM system will provide into where each rep stands with their pipeline versus their quota.
In addition to pipeline and forecast tracking, business managers want to manage additional variables, like the competition, and key competitive issues on each deal. What are competitive trends and emerging threats? Who are the competitors we are up against? What are they doing that we aren’t?
Enter BPM (Business Performance Management)
Company executives want to know what’s going on out in the field, and want visibility into the forecast and how the sales plan is progressing. CRM provides a lot of what senior managers want to see about the business
But they may be more interested in BPM (Business Performance Management) information, than tactical, day to day data stored in the CRM system. BPM can help understand things like the lifetime value of the customer, or how to maximize the profitability of customer’s business with the printing company. BPM extends CRM, providing a link to enterprise data sources, processes, and practices. BPM applications (like EFI’s EIS system) unify corporate data sources and give managers more control and visibility.
BPM technology enables managers to quickly change processes to respond to shifting customer demand and market conditions, often without adding any additional work to the IT department. Adding BPM into the mix enhances CRM's value proposition.
BPM involves consolidation of data from various sources, querying, and analysis of the data, and putting the results into practice. This data can be found in the information collected in the CRM system about the customer, as well as from information from transactions kept in the Print MIS system. Continuous and real-time reviews (in contrast to static reports, which show a “snapshot” of a moment in time—the time the report is run) help to identify and eliminate problems before they grow. Forecasting helps the company take corrective action in time to meet financial projections, and can even be used to conduct “what-if” analysis.
Some of the Key Performance Indicators (areas from which top management analysis could gain knowledge) available through the use of BPM:
Customer-related Metrics:
Best Customers
Delinquent Customers (average days past due)
Customer Paying Habits (average days to pay, discounts taken)
Estimates by Customer, Estimates Won
Profitability by Customer
Product-related Metrics:
Profitability by Product
Value Add by Product
Sales by Product
Enterprise-wide Metrics:
Overall Profitability
Sales Performance (for the company, and by sales person)
Value Add (by sales person, by product, by customer)
Receivables (Average days to pay)
Beyond sales reps, CSRs, managers and executives, there are certainly many other staffers in a printing company who will benefit from CRM, for example, production managers and accounting staffers: so they can plan for future production needs and make important business decisions.
Combining CRM and Web-To-Print
Once a printing company’s internal staffers are using CRM, it’s time to look at extending the CRM functionality to the web. CRM can be a valuable become part of your Internet sales and marketing strategy. This combination can be an important enhancement that can make the impact of both more powerful. And, in a novel twist, your customer’s CRM systems could also be used to actually sell products and services.
There are many touch points between CRM and Web-To-Print (W2P) that can be valuable. The information you’ve acquired that resides in your CRM system can be used to increase traffic to your web site and the W2P application, by using it to create customized offers to customers who order online. CRM can be used to track customer Opt-In to your marketing programs, generate leads from your public website (with easy, direct integration), or upsell customers via merchandising features in your W2P software. You can also use CRM to control when, and to whom, you send a newsletter (perhaps even driving variable newsletter content depending on information about the customer stored in your CRM system), enhancing customer retention.
One of the best ways to lock in a customer’s business is to have them access the printing company’s products and services from within their own enterprise systems. In other words, their employees use their own CRM system to help identify their own customer’s issues or desires, and then use a link to your Web-To-Print system to deliver the document to that person in print.
Many large companies have done this for years, with multi-million dollar enterprise software like Siebel CRM systems and Documentum document management systems. Once the realm of only the largest printers, with large IT staffs, enterprise integration is now within the reach of most printing companies, even without a room full of programmers. This is especially true with the increasing popularity of new, open architecture CRM systems, like Salesforce.com, Centric CRM and SugarCRM, to name a few.
These are new applications emerging that a tech-savvy printing company can leverage to garner new business. You will still need some tech expertise, but the playing field has been leveled to a large extent—and you can partner with vendors to make this happen, as well.
The idea is simple: your customer’s sales rep, call center staffer, or support “help desk” staffer in gets an inquiry, and needs to send a particular document to a customer or prospect. Popular include sales collateral, training materials, point-of-sale posters, kits (which often include items like pens and binders), franchise startup kits (which might include signage, business cards, and sometimes even furniture and fixtures, or other non-print business supplies).
A link between your customer’s CRM system, and your catalog-based Web-To-Print application lets them automatically find and order the appropriate document. The customer’s contact information is automatically transferred via the integration link to your system. You print it, and mail it to the customer. This can also be linked to VDP products in your W2P applications, so the rep at the customer company can order a personalized item for their own customer or prospect.
Summary
In today’s fast moving and constantly changing business environment, the insight provided by CRM and BPM systems can literally make the difference between success and failure. These essential tools are accessible and affordable. Remember that the technology is only one part of the equation—a well thought-out sales and marketing plan should be the first priority, and then the technology will be a natural supporting element.
