What Can Small Businesses Learn From McDonalds

It’s hard to imagine a high street without a McDonalds today, but I have to hold my hand up to remembering the first time that the Golden Arches appeared on our high Streets in the 1970’s. In particular I remember going up into Birmingham with my girlfriend at the time and as it came up to 1pm we went looking for somewhere to eat. We found a busy traditional café just off New Street so we went in and took a seat.

It was a busy day and the café was clearly short staffed ; plates remained on tables for a little too long, and it took an eternity for the waitress to come to take our order. After another 20 minutes any thoughts of lust I had for the one I was with had turned to thoughts of lunch that I was now desperate to eat but which had still not arrived, so we just left and headed off down New Street and into McDonalds. 

The contrast couldn’t have been more stark. We were greeted with smiles and the familiar “Can I help anyone?”, and within minutes I was gratefully tucking into my quarter pounder with cheese. Who knows if my order in the overstretched café ever saw the light of day!

Needless to say, the café on New Street that had so miserably failed my expectations is now long gone, but McDonalds  … well, we all know!

So what has all this got to do with IT Support, small businesses, or anything that could be relevant to you and me? The answer is simple. McDonalds hasn’t grown into the megacorporation that they are today by serving the tastiest burgers in town. They managed that by being the restaurant that served you fastest, wished you a nice day as they gave you your food, cleared the tables more quickly than anybody else, swept the floor more often than anyone else, and even cleaned up the pavement outside the restaurant more often than anyone else. They also know their market better than any other company on the planet. See, I didn’t mention what I thought of their food once!

It’s called customer service, and in the battle against big companies it’s the only competitive advantage that many of us have. If you are a small business owner, I firmly believe that you need to bake good customer service into everything that your company does. If you give good service, you become a supplier of a commodity that is in short supply, and what's more you will get recommended. What's not to like about free advertising by your customers? 

So next week, just give a little more to your customers. It could repay you ten times over.

How Can Online CRM Help Your Company To Communicate Better?

Given that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers, you clearly need to take good care of your client base. Yet sales, customer service and finance functions within a company fail to join up, and this can be bad for business. Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to customer relationships, and installing a CRM provides a simple means of sharing relevant information about your customers that will help your employees to do their job better. 

Let’s take three hypothetical situations to demonstrate my point:

• A salesman is chasing a customer for a new order, but is unaware that the customer has unpaid invoices that are more than 90 days overdue .

• An engineer arrives on site to perform an installation, but has no knowledge of discussions between the customer and his salesperson on the detail of the work to be carried out so the work is completed incorrectly.

• An accounts administrator is chasing for payment of an invoice that has been issued, but is not aware that the contract has not been able to be completed because the goods are being returned as faulty.

In each case these people may have acted differently if customer communications had been joined up using a CRM system. The salesperson may have insisted on cash in advance;  the engineer wouldn’t have had to revisit an installation, and the accounts administrator may not have lost a customer for appearing incompetent.

What Else Does A CRM Do?

Of course there is a lot more to a CRM than providing a central point of reference for customer communications for everyone in your company. A CRM can join up your entire business process including:

• Gathering web  and social marketing leads directly into your sales process.
• Generating documentation for quotations, orders, invoices and customer service.
• Producing business pipeline reports  to assist in business planning.
• Analysing the relative profitability of all of your products / business .
• Measuring the performance of your sales staff.
• Evaluating the return on investment of your marketing campaigns.

You can of course do all of this by extracting information from multiple sources and crunching numbers through a spreadsheet, but at a far greater cost over time. It is the integration and automation of your entire business process that is the true prize of a successful CRM deployment.

Online CRM Part 4 - Managing your sales opportunities with Workbooks Online

Are you finding it difficult to manage your sales process using Microsoft Outlook, Word or Excel? It’s not that you can’t use these standard tools to organise your sales process, there are just better tools available. If your time is precious to you, then you can work more productively and make life easier for yourself by installing a proper Customer Relationship Management (CRM ) system such as Workbooks Online.

CRM Essentials

For me, there are a number of essential activities that I need to be made as simple as possible:

Company / Contact Search

Any CRM system that doesn’t allow you to find the company or person quickly wouldn’t even make it off the starting blocks. Workbooks provides a search box that allows you to perform a “Google-like” search for whatever it is you are looking for. You are presented with a list of matching search results and you simply click on the right one to go to the record you need.

Recording Notes and Activities
Excel Spreadsheets and Outlook fall short for contact management because they don’t provide a simple-to-use way of recording telephone call and meeting notes. Knowledge is power and your staff will be better informed and provide a better service to your clients and customers if they have access to meeting and conversation notes when talking to your customers. Workbooks allows you to record details of every interaction that your employees have with your clients / customers and make them available to everybody.

Activity Scheduling
A CRM needs to help you to plan your time by allowing you to schedule tasks telephone calls and meetings with your existing and prospective customers and provide you with reminders for these activities. With Workbooks, you can schedule events together with notes to remind you of the purpose of the call / meeting etc. You will be presented with a schedule of reminders of your pending tasks when you log into Workbooks.

Quoting
Whilst you can use Excel / Word Templates to generate quotes, by storing your product / service book within the system, Workbooks simplifies the process of drawing up quotations by eliminating the need to search for product information in separate databases / spreadsheets and pre-populating the quote with the right contact information.

Pipeline Management
Pipeline Management is a critical activity for any business, but without an effective CRM tool, they can take a long time to produce manually. Workbooks automatically provides sales people, managers and business owners with complete visibility of all business opportunities as well as where they are in the deal process.

The video below provides you with a quick overview of how you can use Workbooks CRM to manage your customer / client data:

If your current customer management tools no longer meet your needs, then let us know. We would love to be able to help you to implement the right tools to help you grow your business.

Online CRM Part 3 - Saving Web Leads Into Your Online CRM

Before we implemented Workbooks Online CRM, one of the prerequisites that we had for a new CRM system both for our own use as well as a system to install for our customers was to have the ability to capture details of enquiries submitted via our web site directly into the CRM system. Before installing Workbooks, we were using a Formmail system hosted by our ISP that simply sent an email containing details submitted from the web form to a specified email address. As a system it worked, but it meant that we had to manually copy and paste details submitted into our old CRM system.

Automatically Web Leads Into Your CRM

Installing Workbooks Online has allowed us to automate that process. We simply use the Workbooks form scripts to capture enquiry details as part of our web pages. We specify the information to be collected, and the lead information is automatically collected by the Workbooks system and allocated to the appropriate person.

You can see one of the forms that we use below:

Enquiry Form Screenshot

You can also see a brief overview on the Workbooks.com Web-To-Lead capability in the video below:

Automate Your Sales and Support Processes

Apart from sales leads, we are in the process of deploying the Web Lead Capture capability to capture support / customer service requests. For customer service / support applications, Workbooks will automatically generate a support reference that can be used by our customers to track progress on support cases raised.

Deliver Better Customer Service

If your company runs both sales and support operations, one of the resulting benefits of installing Workbooks is that it will provide your sales and support staff with visibility of all contact that your sales, support and customer service staff have with your clients and customers. Everyone is therefore fully informed of everybody else’s discussions, which can result in the ability to provide a better level of service to your customers.

Is your company’s productivity suffering from the need to re-key information between one business process and another? If so please let us know. We would welcome the opportunity to find out more about how your business works so that we can establish whether we can help your company to work more productively by implementing Workbooks.

Grow Your Profits With Online CRM - Part 1

Even when times are tough it makes sense to spend money where it will help your employees to work more efficiently. The right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is an essential tool to streamline your business processes. It will help you to “sweat your assets” and extract every last pound of profit from your employees and customers. A good CRM system also helps to answer a number of key questions:

• How can we generate more business from our customer base through better customer communications
• How can we efficiently track leads that are generated to maximise revenue.
• Can we simplify the processes to turn quotes into orders and invoices
• How do we provide better customer service to improve engagement and encourage customer loyalty.

With the right implementation partner to manage the implementation, you will also get the right training and support to help you manage the transition to your new system.

The Benefits Of Installing A "Joined-Up" CRM System

A properly implemented CRM system will:

• Join up sales, marketing and support information with customer transaction data to measure your return on marketing expenditure and track every customer interaction.
• Provide you with better sales pipeline management and forecasting information.
• Automate your cash management processes to reduce payment cycles.
• Provide management ready reports that allow you to measure key performance indicators .(KPI’s) across your entire business.
• Make your business more profitable.

Why We Chose Workbooks.com

Eighteen months ago, when we went looking for a new CRM system to support both the needs of our company as well as those of our SMB customers, we settled on Workbooks.com. You can see an overview of Workbooks in the video below:

Our needs will I’m sure be similar to the majority of small and medium sized businesses. We had a very specific “hit list”:

• A system to help us to track and plan interactions with prospects and customers.
• A joined up process to produce quotes, order and invoicing documentation.
• A way of capturing leads from our web site straight into the CRM database.
• Integration with Google Apps for Business for email and transaction documentation.
• Customer Service management for support cases raised by our clients.

More than Just Customer Management

Workbooks has proven itself to be more than capable for our needs, and provides a number of additional features that are very valuable including integration with Mailchimp for customer newsletters as well as well as Google Analytics integration to help measure the returns from Google Adwords campaigns.

Come back next week when we will begin to look into how Workbooks.com can help you to join up your business processes in a little more detail.