If you are self-employed or have an SME you are interested in this class! We explain what a CRM is and what it is for, what metrics are important, how to apply Business Intelligence and much more.
CRM’s
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and can have 2 meanings:
- The administration of a company or project based on the relationship with its clients or users. Basically it is about putting the customer at the center of the organization, and generating strategies (especially related to sales) that improve the relationship of the company or project with its users. The closest concept is relational marketing, although it may be related to other related concepts such as: clienting, 1×1 marketing, direct database marketing, etc.
- The software that is used to manage the relationship with said clients or users. Said software can include various functionalities to manage the company’s sales and customers: automation and sales promotion, storage of all types of data, mailing, budgets, invoices, etc. The main characteristic of this type of program is that it allows you to create monitoring reports and statistics that can be used to improve the performance of the company’s internal processes, always with the aim of improving the experience of customers and users.
business intelligence
Business Intelligence could be translated as “business intelligence” and is a term that describes the applications, processes, infrastructure, tools, and good practices that allow access and analysis of information to improve and optimize actions within a company.
What does a web analyst paint in all this?
As we have been able to verify, the functions of an SEO, an SEM, a Community Manager, a web analyst or any other specialist in Digital Marketing end up blurring, fundamentally due to the rapid changes in existing technologies.
Because Digital Marketing specialists by definition have digital skills, it is increasingly common to see them analyzing business processes and proposing improvements, especially in the field of sales. It is true that they are more dedicated to marketing, but it is also true that they are specialists in improving processes taking into account metrics, so it is quite common for them to start getting into internal business processes to improve them.
The Internet has changed everything, and despite the fact that digital marketing usually starts with a website, it is more than likely that these changes will end up affecting the company itself.
Let’s take the case of an SME in Spain. Imagine: the owner of said company decides to invest in SEO, SEM and social networks. In 1 year you receive a considerable increase in new clients whom you must attend to by phone and the different social channels, send invoices, budgets, products, provide services and a long etcetera. How can you manage this increase effectively? Well, normally with the implementation of a CRM.
In addition, the data from these business processes will be essential for marketing: If sales, customer relations and logistics have their own metrics and are combined with those of Digital Marketing, campaigns can be optimized much better.
The reality in Spain is that many companies are in full digitization. It is a complex and expensive process, so it is unlikely to find CRM systems in companies in our country, especially if they are small. In medium and large companies it is more common.
CRM Examples
- Salesforce
- Oracle
- sage
- Microsoft Dynamics
- Sugar CRM
- hubspot
- Agile CRM
- SAP
- Zoho
- KarmaCRM
The implementation of a CRM
Although we select a free CRM, this does not mean that said CRM does not have a cost: Someone must implement it. Each company has different processes, stock, projects, actions necessary to generate sales and a long etcetera.
The person or company in charge of implementing a CRM must know all these processes in depth, make a list and simplify them and apply them in the selected program. It is very common to hire a person who is exclusively dedicated to carrying out this type of action due to the number of hours and knowledge of the company that such implementation requires.
Connection with Google Analytics and other web analytics tools
Once the CRM is implemented, it will generate a series of data that can be analyzed and improved: number of leads, number of budgets generated, number of budgets accepted, monthly sales… The number of metrics that these programs can generate are practically unlimited.
Those databases can then be linked with Google Analytics and other Web measurement programs. Let’s take the case of CRM Salesforce as an example:
- Can be integrated with Google Analytics
- Or with Facebook or other web tools
The combination of these data provides new opportunities for the analyst: instead of just seeing the number of forms sent, you can also see how many have generated quotes and how many have generated invoices. In this way, the ROI of Digital Marketing campaigns and strategies can be calculated much more precisely.
