Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/375553
10 FEDA News & Views continued on page 10 T hink it's tough trying to solve more than two sides of a Rubik's Cube. Try finding a standard definition for CRM. The blogosphere is plastered with chunks of theory on how to decode this loaded little string of letters. Customer Relationship Management is a business model for increasing profits, an application used to automate sales and marketing, and then there's this mouthful by an anonymous source that seems to personify the current trend in thinking. "CRM is a business strategy that permeates your entire company...All your management decisions, systems, processes, marketing, advertising, sales approaches, customer retention programs… billing, pricing—everything revolves around your customer." KaTom Restaurant Supply isn't there yet, but that's the kind of buy-in President Patricia Bible has been inching toward after rolling out CRM in the sales department nearly a year ago. Initial gripes aside, gains there have led to major tweaks in inside sales and a returns process that is now close to 80 percent automated. Next on the list is payables. "It's been a journey, but boy it's been worth it," says Bible, whose son-in-law, vice president of Business Development John Chesworth, first inquired about CRM to eat away at the number of hours spent monitoring sales activities and performance for outside sales. "It took John's team about six to eight months before they realized it was a win for them and not another layer of paperwork," she says. "That's what a lot of people think CRM is, more work. It is very time consuming in the begin- ning. It's pricey and it takes a lot of research to get it right, but we're really starting to see the ROI." A Tool for Sales Pairing hard numbers with gains is difficult when it comes to CRM but if anyone is convinced of its potential its Mark Dancer, the vice president of Global Channel Management at Henkel Corp. He's also the author of Getting the Most Out of CRM: Best Practices for Wholesaler-Distributors. Published by the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors (NAW), Dancer's book is a comprehensive look at CRM's worth as a tool for distributors via the insights of hundreds of distributor executives with varied layers of use. Some see it as a tool for simple contact and lead management, while others rely on it to track sales through the pipeline or for forecasting and social networking. "When I asked experienced CRM users how they would advise new users to think about ROI," says Dancer, "many Why one dealer decided it was the right fit By Stacy Ward, Managing Editor fedastacy@verizon.net continued on page 10 It Starts With a Winning Strategy "Strategy comes first," advises author Mark Dancer on a successful CRM implementation in his book Getting the Most Out of CRM: Best Practices for Wholesaler-Distributors. "If a distributor has a strategy for driving growth in sales or profits, and that strategy can be better executed by leveraging information to improve sales productivity or value add, then CRM can help," he says. "Here's one example. In our research with distributor executives, I talked with many who were trying to help their salespeople be more consultative. CRM was used to give their salespeople access to customer purchases (year-to-year, month-to-month trends, sales by product, etc.) and, in turn, used to help the customer buy the right products, take advantage of marketing programs, discounts for order quantities, etc. This sales strategy requires salespeople to have a deep knowledge of their customer's business and be able to make suggestions that will make a difference. In this case, CRM's role is to support the process with data that is at the salesperson's fingertips." continued on page 14