What is CRM Software and how can it help?

You may have seen some of the articles we have written or marketing material we’ve sent about our CRM Solution called ProspectSoft. But what is it and how can it help your business? In this article we’ll explain how CRM can help almost any business to save money and increase profitability through their Sales, Marketing and Service activities.

CRM is short for Customer Relationship Management and is a strategy for managing a company’s interactions with their existing and potential customers. CRM Software, such as ProspectSoft CRM, allows for this process to be recorded and monitored so that all forms of contact with a customer or potential customer are logged on a central system. By doing this all members of staff within a business can see a full contact history with any customer, or potential customer, including any phone calls, emails, letters, quotes, helpdesk calls and financial details required to contact the person in question with all the relevant information.

CRM systems also allow for custom data to be stored against each company record which shows any key information about the company such as turnover, number of staff or industry and this is normally used for marketing and sales purposes to target specific types of customers. Once leads are generated they can also be logged within the CRM system allowing leads to be monitored all the way from capture to sale.

Furthermore, the activities then carried out by your marketing team, and the leads generated from them can be recorded against each company and reported on so that your most, and least, profitable activities can be identified. This type of reports could also be generated based on sales person, territory or source of enquiry to establish other successful, or unsuccessful areas, of your businesses.

What are the alternatives?

In reality many companies use nothing. They leave the management of their customers in the hands of their sales or support teams but often the communication between the two causes problems. The contact with customers could be recorded on a spreadsheet but this obviously has many limitations and when managing multiple contacts and branches is unworkable for most companies.

Some accounts systems and service systems come with small CRM packages built in. These are often very limited and are commonly referred to as ‘Contact Management Systems’ as they simply allow for the contact and customer details to be recorded along with a basis notes field for recording contact. This suits many small businesses who do not have lots of customers or multiple sales people but as soon as they grow they often need a more centrally managed system that gives an overview of activities and can be viewed by multiple staff in different customer facing roles.

Why deal with the HBP Group for CRM Software?

As with accounts software we offer a range of options that give people choice in their CRM system. We offer ProspectSoft CRM, which is our most comprehensive CRM solution, as well as Goldmine, which is typically suited to the small business, Sage 200 CRM and Pegasus Sales Pipeline Manager. The latter two of these options both run in conjunction with their respective accounts packages but both ProspectSoft and Goldmine can be run standalone, and ProspectSoft can integrate with both IRIS Exchequer and Pegasus Opera II.

If you are interested in any of our CRM Solutions and would like to know more please contact your Account Manager, email marketing@hbpsystems.co.uk or phone us on 01724 400303.