Creating a Client Relationship Management (CRM) Strategy

Posted on Aug 19, 2009 in Records Management News

Cre­at­ing a Client Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) Strategy

Con­tact Man­age­ment Strat­egy should have a binoc­u­lar cen­ter; i.e., both a “Client Focused Strat­egy” and a “Prospect Focused Strat­egy”. Each is sim­i­lar in struc­ture but with slightly dif­fer­ent imple­men­ta­tion method.

Many have attempted to define a con­tact man­age­ment strat­egy. One of the best dis­cus­sions on this is eas­ily ref­er­enced in the col­lab­o­ra­tive ency­clo­pe­dia Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_relationship_management. A review of that infor­ma­tion may be a good start­ing point for you to con­sider when build­ing your own.

As I assist clients in devel­op­ing this strat­egy as part of their over­all ser­vices and mar­ket­ing plan I have found that the fol­low­ing are help­ful guide­lines for our own indus­try and are eas­ily trans­lated into the media vault­ing, doc­u­ment destruc­tion and imag­ing industries.

Let take a look at some impor­tant points that seem consistent.

Set­ting a Goal

Before we ven­ture out on any trip we typ­i­cally deter­mine where we are going, what we will do and how we will get there. The same trip may have mul­ti­ple objec­tives. This is true in the devel­op­ment of any busi­ness strat­egy. An organization’s strat­egy must be appro­pri­ate for its resources, cir­cum­stances, and objec­tives. The process involves match­ing the inter­nal resources and capa­bil­i­ties to the exter­nal busi­ness envi­ron­ment the orga­ni­za­tion faces.

May I sug­gest these as com­po­nents of your con­tact man­age­ment strat­egy goal?

1. To deter­mine what efforts or projects your client or prospect is engaged in or may be plan­ning in regards to Records and Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment (RIM) 2. To ask your client or prospect to grade your com­pany, employ­ees and ser­vices against their expec­ta­tions and stan­dards 3. To present prod­ucts and ser­vices to deci­sion mak­ers and to close for poten­tial new business

Assign­ing Account­abil­ity & Responsibility

You may want to con­sider that the Client Account Man­ager (Farmer — Sales Rep­re­sen­ta­tive) be assigned over­all respon­si­ble for the imple­men­ta­tion, main­te­nance and bud­get of the Client Con­tact Strat­egy. Respon­si­bil­ity of the prospect man­age­ment strat­egy should be assigned to the New Busi­ness Account Exec­u­tive (Hunter – Sales Rep­re­sen­ta­tive) for over­all respon­si­ble of the imple­men­ta­tion, main­te­nance and bud­get of the Prospect Con­tact Strategy.

Deter­min­ing the Scope of your Con­tact Man­age­ment Strategy:

The scope of the con­tact strat­egy should be based on sev­eral issues;

1. Your CRM (Client Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment) bud­get. Activ­i­ties and com­po­nents are lim­ited to the amount of money that you apply to this pro­gram. A car­di­nal rule of the devel­op­ment of any mar­ket­ing pro­gram should be to apply fund­ing only to those activ­i­ties where you can mea­sure the results of that activ­ity. If you can’t mea­sure it you can’t man­age it.

2. The num­ber of clients that you need to man­age. If you do not have a Client Account Man­ager you should hire one if you have more than 200 client accounts. If you have less than 200 accounts your oper­a­tions man­ager may be able to han­dle these respon­si­bil­i­ties. Our stud­ies show that one CAM can han­dle up to 300 account rela­tion­ships in a CRC, but that is stretch­ing it a bit, 250 clients per CAM is recommended.

3. The num­ber of prospects that you need to man­age. The num­ber of active prospects that you have will cer­tainly be lim­ited by your sell­ing process. If the process is a for­mal con­sul­ta­tive process like the File­Man 7 Step Method © you will have all sus­pects, prospects, qual­i­fied prospects in your prospect data base, per­haps hundreds.

4. Seg­men­ta­tion of the client and prospect base. It may be seg­mented by size, value, rev­enue or some other mea­sure. The more seg­men­ta­tion the bet­ter so that you can develop tar­get mar­ket­ing strate­gies by SIC Code or other mea­sure of importance.

5. The qual­ity of your CAM (Farmer) and your AE (Hunter) per­son­nel. We really have to be care­ful not to over­whelm these folks. I had a recent client CAM tell me that she was respon­si­ble for more than 500 client account. She was dis­traught because she couldn’t keep up with them. I told her that it is impos­si­ble for one CAM to keep up with 500 clients. Do the math with only about 250 work days in a year how could any­one keep up that pace.

6. Your capa­bil­ity of man­ag­ing the CRM process. Yes, that is right I said man­age the process. It is incum­bent on you the owner to man­age the process. If you don’t it sim­ply will not work. Any­thing that is unman­aged ulti­mately goes astray.

7. Use of a CRM soft­ware pack­age such as ACT 2007®. The most pro­duc­tive tool that I know of today is ACT. Since Sage® bought ACT from Syman­tec® it has become both con­tact man­age­ment soft­ware and cus­tomer rela­tion­ship soft­ware. Addi­tion­ally if you use the File­Man Method or any other con­sul­ta­tive sell­ing processes you can add to it sales cycle man­age­ment. This com­po­nent is avail­able as Com­pan­ion software.

Decid­ing on the Types of Contact

There are sev­eral kinds of con­tact that could make up a con­tact strat­egy, all are impor­tant and rely on one another to achieve your CRM goals. You should not con­sider this a full list but only a start­ing point.

1. Direct Face-to-face Client Calls — There is noth­ing more impor­tant than keep­ing up to date with your cur­rent clients or prospects. A face-to face meet­ing is the very best and most impor­tant of all types of con­tact. Direct face-to-face con­tacts with any client should always be sched­uled at min­i­mum once each cal­en­dar year. The client and prospect data­base should be coded into monthly, quar­terly, semi-annual and annual direct contact.

2. Direct Mail — Peri­odic let­ters, infor­ma­tion pack­ets and score­cards should be devel­oped to sup­port this effort

3. eMail — Reg­u­lar email cor­re­spon­dence regard­ing items of inter­est should be lim­ited but regular

4. Newslet­ters — You should develop and main­tain a reg­u­lar email newslet­ter that con­veys news, infor­ma­tion, prod­uct launches and edu­ca­tional top­ics that would help your client’s focus on RIM related activ­i­ties. Ian Thomas of O’Neil Soft­ware tells me that one of the most effec­tive mar­ket­ing dol­lars he spends is their e-newsletter. I know it works well for me and I track everything.

5. RIM Edu­ca­tion — The Com­pany should develop a peri­odic edu­ca­tional event for clients and prospects. Once or twice a year the com­pany should spon­sor an edu­ca­tional event for its clients regard­ing a care­fully selected RIM topic. This gen­er­ally takes the form of a client sym­po­sium or an exec­u­tive brief­ing. (File­Man Client Sym­po­sium Method and Man­ual is avail­able from File­Man at no cost to its Clients)

6. RIM Arti­cle Update — The Com­pany should col­lect arti­cles of RIM impor­tance from numer­ous sources and share them with clients and prospects peri­od­i­cally. There are many free resources avail­able for these arti­cles. You can sub­scribe to the New York Times and the LA Times for exam­ple and select only arti­cles to be emailed to you with cer­tain key words in the title. Addi­tion­ally peri­od­i­cals such as the Har­vard Busi­ness Review and the Wall Street Jour­nal have exten­sive search­ing data­bases for high level dis­cus­sions on any RIM or other busi­ness topic. One of the best free resources are the legal arti­cle data­bases like Find­Law® http://library.findlaw.com/

7. Local ARMA Mem­ber­ship — CRM and AE rep­re­sen­ta­tives should be mem­bers of the local or regional ARMA chap­ter to build rela­tion­ships. They should par­tic­i­pate in com­mit­tees and lead­er­ship. ARMA is a great place to see your clients and prospects on a reg­u­lar basis.

8. Other Busi­ness Asso­ci­a­tions — There are an end­less num­ber of orga­ni­za­tions that you can either join or attend to get to know your clients bet­ter. Find out where the deci­sion mak­ers go; per­haps the young pres­i­dents club, exec­u­tive sec­re­taries club or the speak­ers forums.

9. Buy Stock in your Largest Clients Com­pany — There is no bet­ter way for you to know what is hap­pen­ing in any com­pany than by being a share­holder. Pay close atten­tion to reports like the 10K and the 14Q to feel their pulse.

Best Per­sonal Regards,

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Cary