With 2009 behind us, now is the time to take stock of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to ensure processes and decision-making tools are serving their intended purposes. The suggestions below require reflection on company strengths and weaknesses, review of decision making processes, and good old fashion data scrubbing. As always, SilverEdge is here to help by sharing best practices we have learned from working with hundreds of service oriented clients and our years of consulting/real world experiences.
1 - The Information You Need to Succeed
In 2009, firms cut costs. With no costs left to cut, industry thought leaders agree 2010 is the year organizations will work to build top line revenue. Deltek CRM reports can help. Hit Rate reporting is a fantastic way for firms to analyze where they have been successful in the past by showing what percentage of revenue they were awarded vs. how much revenue they chased. The power of the system allows your firm to slice and dice the data in many different ways - whether you would like to analyze information by client type, by business developer, by lead source, or any other field that exists in the Vision database. This information can assist your organization in identifying its historic strengths for 2010.
2 - The Cost of the Chase
How much does it cost business developers and proposal production staff to submit for new work at your organization? If you do not have historic data to answer this question, you are doing yourself a disservice. Many firms choose to lump the labor and expense of the opportunity chase into the cost of doing business, but with a simple change in process, these costs could be taken into consideration when going after that “long shot proposal”. A promotional project can be created in order to capture charges at the time of timesheet collection/expense reporting entry to give all a true sense of marketing costs. Monetizing the chase is a powerful way to assist you during the Go/No Go Process to ensure your efforts are going after the right jobs for your firm.
3 - Keep Track of Your Effort
Many of you have spent hours putting together emails or physical mail pieces wishing your clients the very best during the holiday season. As part of this process, did you use the Marketing Campaigns feature to track who received what? Marketing Campaigns are a great way of capturing the efforts you put into client outreach initiatives that are not specific to a single project. Not only will this feature allow you to track which contacts are attending what events, a Marketing Campaign identifies what efforts are leading to Opportunities/Proposals, and ultimately leading to revenue producing projects. If you did use the Marketing Campaigns in ‘09, review your Campaign List Reports to see what efforts were successful and should be repeated/emphasized in ‘10 and which ones should be avoided.
4 - Mailing Maintenance
Speaking of your holiday mailing - The majority of the emails/physical cards have been delivered, but what are you doing to the cards that are been marked as “return to sender”? The industry average for returned mail is about 10%. Services oriented firms with a top tier CRM system experience far lower percentages on returns. Now is the best time of the year for contact clean-up because if your list was near perfect before the mailing went out, you now have the opportunity for perfection by making edits to the “return to sender” contacts. Also consider moving from the expensive physical mail pieces to an electronically delivered message. SilverEdge received excellent feedback from our clients this holiday season when our mailing dollars went to local charities as opposed to the printing press and the post office.
5 - Tidying Up for the New Year
Many clients we work with tend to create UDFs (user-defined fields) for the “need of the moment” throughout the year, many times to the point of clutter. Are those once necessary fields still providing value? If not, now may be the time to remove those unused fields and make the interface easier to use. You don’t have to delete them. Consider hiding them and see if anyone notices that they are gone.
6 - Changing Your Look
When was the last time your company’s deliverables had a make-over? Now may be the time to change that corporate look or perhaps add another set of templates with a different look. The focuses of your clients have changed, and this is the opportunity for you to change with them. Will that municipal client think a colorful proposal is wasteful and will equate to higher prices? Are you breaking into a new market and might benefit from a rebranding? Did you inherit a brand that you are just not happy with? Is it “just time” to make the change? If you are using the Custom Proposal module, this it could be a relatively painless task to implement the new look without risk of losing the information that is already in the system. If your project, resume, and text library/boiler plate information is not already in the system, this may be the year to implement the Custom Proposals module in order to increase the efficiency and data accuracy of your proposal production efforts.
7 - New Feature Roundup
Have you moved to Vision 6.0/6.1 yet? There are several new features in the system that make data maintenance a snap. I have found the Smart Grid functionality to be phenomenal. It is the equivalent to an interactive Excel spreadsheet, but allows you to view, edit, and add the live data. The sorting/grouping and filtering allows users to drill down to just the information they need. This functionality exists in all the info centers and is very easy to use.
8 - What’s Next? What’s New?
What about a social media update? A good first step is to take a look at your company’s website. Like it or not, your potential clients are visiting your web page and making split second assumptions about your company. With the ease of Google, Bing, or Yahoo, potential clients are doing their homework online. If you were an outsider, how would you rate your website? In the coming months, we will be hosting a complimentary web seminar to solve the mysteries of effective web pages, Facebook/LinkedIn profiles, Twitter, and “proper web etiquette”. We look forward to passing our knowledge and experiences on to you.
We at SilverEdge hope you build upon your 2009 successes to make 2010 an outstanding year. Are your current marketing and business development processes ideal? If not, what are you doing to change? SilverEdge is here to help you implement the tools and processes to not only compete in this economic market, but to thrive.