Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems can provide much more than basic contact management capabilities, but many companies lack the knowledge they need to get the most out of their solution. Using the tools within your CRM program can help you more thoroughly understand your business from a sales, marketing and even operational perspective. Below are just some of the ways you can get the most out of your CRM solution.

Account Types
When used properly, your CRM system can assist you in identifying the distinctive demographics of those you do business with. You can gain this type of detail by simply assigning a ‘type’ to each account entered into the system. Some examples of types could be: Wholesale Customer; Retail Customer, Web Customer, or Donor, Member, Associate, and so on.  Also, you can add types such as Prospect; Partner; Vendor; Competitor and more. You can make them as specific as you’d like in order to best track different groups. You will be able to easily sort your database and run campaigns directly targeted to those demographics; invite all prospects in a specific city to a seminar, or offer a special to clients who have not done business with you in over a year.

Track Lost Sales
Tracking what’s not working is just as important as tracking what is. If you don’t know why people decide not to do business with you, you won’t know how you can improve. As one CEO put it, “The rate at which you are improving your service and offerings is equal to the rate at which you are rising above your competition.” To use your CRM solution to help you track lost sales you can add a list of reasons to the account form, and make selecting one mandatory before your staff can move on to the next screen. This will help you research whether it’s your prices, offerings, or competitors that are causing lost sales.

Track Lead Sources
Know where to target your marketing. Identify your most effective campaigns and successfully tracking your lead sources will help you get the most out of your marketing budget and ensure a full pipeline. Tracking your lead sources within your contact account form will give you the accurate data you need for future decision making.

Sales Management
Do you know how many sales opportunities are currently in your pipeline? How many expect to make a purchase in the next 30, 60 or 90 days? Having access to this information can help you greatly when it comes to budget and profit forecasting. To do this, simply implement stages for your sales opportunities within your CRM program.

Collections
CRM centralizes all of your important financial and customer data – making it easy for your financial team to get information, track calls, automatically follow up and bring in more cash faster.

These are just a few of the ways in which you can enhance your business through your CRM program however its capabilities are endless. Since your CRM is in essence a central repository of information you can literally use it across the board from improving your marketing to personnel management. A fantastic example of just how much customization is possible through CRM is what we did for the Jesuit Refugee Service.

The Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) is a multi-national nonprofit organization providing support to more than half a million displaced people throughout the world. They span multiple continents and countries, and had been using a custom legacy system that was unserviceable, not to mention outdated. They needed a very specific solution to allow them to run their operations more efficiently.

We were able to help them through the implementation of a completely customized CRM application. While Sage CRM is a ‘Customer Relationship Management Application’ on the surface, it also has the capability to be almost anything you need. And what JRS needed was a web-portal with a back-end database that could enable them to provide access to members and regional managers all over the world through one application. We essentially stripped out all of the sales and marketing CRM features and then used the tools within the program to rebuild it from the ground up to fit JRS’ specific requirements.

With their new program, the Jesuit Refugee Service can now send regular communications and newsletters to anyone who requests information; take advantage of Sage upgrades; and execute better broad project management. The new capabilities will allow their regional managers to archive and report on all of their projects, goals and annual accomplishments, as well as provide a better communication channel with the Rome office. Sage CRM allowed JRS to automate some very tedious processes and gave them more time to devote to their cause.