A very well written article over at ZDNet titled NAB pins turnaround on improved CRM gives great insight into the value of CRM to a business. What is especially interesting is the strategy of the National Australia Bank in light of it’s recent problems.

I really like the way that the article points out that focusing on cost cutting can really hurt your business in the long term. Whereas, focusing on customers and what you’re offering them is the best focus for your business. This focus not only improves customer satisfaction, but this in turn will always improve your bottom line in the long term. Note, “long term”, it can take a while for this direction to pay off, but eventually, it does.

Shenkel believes the changes will enable the bank’s customer relationship managers to more accurately predict when and how to offer new loans or investment packages to its existing customer base. More importantly perhaps, the CRM package is also designed to indicate when such an offer should be avoided.

This is a great example of the power of CRM and the advantages it can give your business. Information like this can mean improved efficiency for your sales and marketing teams. They would spend less time targeting customers who are unlikely to buy, which improves your conversion rate, which in turn, improves the bottom line!

Beautiful, isn’t it?

CRM Magazine are going to release the results of their 2005 CRM leader awards in the October issue of CRM Magazine. There’s no word on their website, but a press release seems to include all the interesting info.

The types of awards include an “Influential Leader” award for individuals, a CRM Hall of Fame entry (!), a CRM elite award, and the best one of the bunch, the CRM Market Leader award.

The winner of the Small Business Market Leader award is Salesforce.com with honourable mentions to FrontRange Solutions, Maximizer Software, NetSuite and Sage Software. In this category, the company announced as the one to watch is Microsoft.

Hopefully there will be more information available on the CRM Magazine website some time soon. Otherwise, you may have to pick up the October copy in print to get all the details.

I was just thinking to myself, it’s a shame that the is no awards given to small software companies who innovate and provide helpful CRM solutions to plenty of small businesses around the world. Wouldn’t it be good to have some awards given to these guys?

Please tell us your thoughts on this by leaving a comment below.

I just stumbled across a very good blog post that poses the question CRM: Is the Problem the Technology or the Culture?. It basically covers the saying “Garbage In / Garbage Out”, meaning that you may have the greatest CRM system available, but it won’t help much if it is not wisely used. Your CRM system is only as effective as the quality of your data.

Considering the cultural changes needed to embrace a CRM strategy is an important issue that all businesses wanting to introduce a CRM system should be aware of.

This article may be brief, but it does analyse the role of IT in the building industry. It makes mention of CRM uses in this industry, which I would see as the core type of IT technology for this type of business.

Traditionally the building industry has been a little slow in adapting new technology, “safe as houses” so they say. To make matters worse, there are complexities in the way that this type of business operates. Sales of course is an important part of the business, but there is also ongoing client and vendor relationships to manage, project work, legal compliance issues and on-site inspections.

Because of this complexity, IT and CRM in particular would help greatly for these businesses. The tradition of the industry and the workflow quirks unfortunately work against the possible advantages.

Pivotal seems to be a relatively unknown name in Australia, but they offer powerful mid-level CRM solutions for medium sized enterprises. Unfortunately, my experience of the system has been in a large, complex environment with around 200-300 users and 10 million database records. I say unfortunately because the Pivotal CRM solution does not scale well to this level.

One of the main features of Pivotal’s systems is the level of customisation that it offers. Simple customisation can be made with standard GUI Pivotal tools. This means that someone with a reasonable amount of technical knowledge and a little training can customise the system, including reports, searches, and form design.

It’s fair to say that almost anything can be customised, right down to the work flow of the system, although some of the more advanced customisation features requires quite a lot of technical skills and knowledge of the system. This level of customisation certainly has advantages, but there is a downside. As the system is designed to be generic, it results in inefficient database connectivity and relatively slow and clunky architecture. This is not necessarily a problem, but it does place limitations on scalability.

The Pivotal CRM environment gives you plenty of possibilities including comprehensive enterprise tools, two clients, and many connectivity options. The toolsets could be better named and organised however. Not only is there similarly named tools that perform totally different tasks, Pivotal have a habit of renaming these tools often.

Their support team is fairly knowledgeable, and they also offer online training, but they do have a heavy reliance on overseas resources, using India in particular. This can introduce some communication difficulties, which can be rather frustrating considering that you’re accessing these resources when you’re either trying to learn, or when you’re wanting help.

I think that their pricing and scalability limitations place them squarely in the mid-sized market. I wouldn’t recommend the product for small or large enterprises. If you’re in this category and looking for a CRM solution, Pivotal may have everything you need, just be aware of the limitations it also brings.