ABCs of CRM
CRM is typically seen as a technology solution to solve a business problem. But in reality, if you don’t have a clear understanding of CRM as a functional entity and don’t appreciate its need for your organization, no amount of great technology can help you succeed.
Today, as a primer in CRM, we would like to introduce you to 26 key words or concepts in CRM, each mapping to a letter of the alphabet. A fun way to learn CRM!
A – Accounts: Any organization external to the company implementing CRM. For example: Customers, Partners, competitors etc.
B – Books of Business: Using books to organize your company data allows you to control your data visibility by setting appropriate business rules.
C – Contacts: Contacts are individuals that your company currently conducts business with or expects to conduct business within the future. For Example: Employees of other companies, independent consultants, vendors, or personal acquaintances etc.
D – Deduplication: The elimination of redundant duplicate data during the data migration. For example, same contact getting repeated in two records, with a slight name change or spelling error.
E – Email Marketing: Powerful, integrated tool to run campaigns to bulk contacts in your CRM system using Email.
F – Forecasting: Estimating the sales (of a particular product or to a particular account) in a given period.
G – Group: Set of users in the system who share their system, records, calendar etc.,
H – Hierarchy: Defines the parent – child relationship between Accounts / Products or other CRM objects.
I – Integration: Process of integrating CRM system with external third-party applications / backend data sources / others.
J – Job Role: A particular role of an individual in the system. Every role has a set of access privileges given to perform action (Adding, Editing, Viewing, Deleting, Exporting etc.,)
K – KPI: Key Performance Indicators: Analyses / Measures performance / productivity of the entity / user through different reports and dashboards.
L – Leads: A sales prospect, later this may get converted to an opportunity.
M – Mail Merge: Process of merging CRM information in an outgoing Email / Printed letter.
N – Negotiation: Dialogue between two or more people or parties, intended to reach an understanding. Example: Sales Negotiation may include discussions about price, delivery timeframe etc.,
O – Opportunities: A person/ group who genuinely, show interest in a particular Product/ Service. They are also termed as qualified leads.
P – Products: Sellable goods / services.
Q – Quotes: Promise to sell something, to somebody, in a certain price.
R – Reports: Aggregated Tabular / Graphical presentation of CRM Data. Example: Daily Sales Report.
S – Sales Stages: Life cycle of an opportunity before leading to a closure stage (Win/ lose).
T – Territory: Geographical subdivision for better analyses of revenue generation. Typically, it is an area assigned to the field Sales executives to meet their targets and close the deals.
U – Users: End user of a CRM System, who interact with data by creating / modifying / deleting / querying / running reports against them.
V – Visibility: Business rules that determine who get access to what CRM Data.
W – Workflow: An automatic action performed by the system when a change occurs. (Example, on deletion of an account, Email sent to the Account Owner)
X – XML: Extensible Markup Language, Used for data transfer across multiple systems in a generic manner.
Y – Year end: Subset of Fiscal / Financial Year. A financial year is divided into 4 Quarters and the 4th Quarter is usually termed as a Year end.
Z – Zone: Large Regions used for grouping, analyses of various CRM data such as Sales, Service Performance, Client Satisfaction etc., (Example: US, Asia Pacific, Europe and Middle East)