Cloud CRM: Strategies for data ownership and control

Lead: This article is written by Mr. David Taber, CEO of Saleslogistix. David Taber a book on the Secret of Salesforce.con's success. David has worked in the High-tech industry for 25 and has more than a decade of experience as a VP or above. The following is a full text summary:

As I wrote earlier, the CRM system is essentially an enterprise system. The user's personal value and even their careers depend on the CRM system. Subtle data lapses can have serious consequences if you lose control of the system or if salespeople don't see information about customers and future prospects.

But this is not just a matter of data quality: even if theoretically it has a good policy. What happened to the qualified management? What is the entry criteria for the opportunity phase? What does it mean from a quantitative point of view? You will never believe the most fastidious arguments of the past.

In these debates, we must have a keen eye on the specific needs of the client organization, business processes, and sales channels. Here are some general rules that apply almost all business-to-business marketing and sales companies.

1. Almost all of the opportunities are marketing, sales support, and day-to-day operations. Endless arguments are usually around sales cycles, sales valuations, availability, and deadlines. However, other departments (especially accounting/finance and marketing) have their own unique insights and needs for the data, and the sales department makes decisions based on the specifications and quality of past records.

There are also exceptions under these rules. Large enterprises will have more opportunities through functions that are not part of the sales department, such as customer development or group internal sales organizations. In this case, the opportunity is transparent--that is, at least one opportunity phase--defined as sales. However, there are also a number of large organizations through the order operation, bear the cost, distribution/completion function finally closed. In this case, the sales representative will enter the transaction into the "Certified" opportunity phase, but the "OK" or "completed" phase of the determination is determined by other departments.

Finally, for organizations using E-commerce, the e-commerce team will define the sales cycle in the context of its own situation and have different interpretations of the opportunity data. This is the characteristics of the "sales process" in the CRM system.

2. On the other hand, the target account cannot be exclusively for an account-though everyone thinks so. In most CRM systems, accounts are nearly as close to the top of the object model. Therefore, the impact of creating, updating, merging or deleting accounts is shocking. Therefore, account records in theory include partners, customer support, management, marketing and sales.

However, in large organizations, accounting/finance is likely to be regarded as accounts because they have their own clients. Despite this, other companies still need to create accounts in specific cases where the accounting system does not exist. For example, e-commerce systems need to create an account to generate and deliver orders-but this could happen at Sunday 3 o'clock in the morning, that is, hours or days before the accounting system is officially created. In addition, the marketing and telemarketing teams need to establish accounts as part of the lead-conversion process-these accounts may not appear in the accounting system for several months after the CRM system has been in place. Salesforce.com uses record type functions, and different CRM systems function slightly differently at this point.

Contact object also faces the same situation, just as employees create these contact object and access them. Luckily, contacts aren't that complicated, because they're not as important to the object modules of most CRM systems. Typically, the owner of the contact object includes sales and customer service.

3. Leads belonging to CRM object has been controversial, the following is a brief introduction to leads: Leads should be divided into at least three categories: "Live ones"-groups that explicitly require more information; Names "-The target customer, has not made any request; Dead ones "-people who have been explicitly disqualified or not fully connected. "Live ones" is generally an important resource for telemarketing, internal sales, or customer development. These leads should focus on nurturing (vertical marketing).

Names belongs to the important field of market development. The number of "names" for an order is much larger than the "live ones", so they are the target customer base for marketing management automation systems and Low-cost database marketing and network tactics.

Surprisingly, "dead ones" should not have been removed from the system (although marketing and sales generally wanted to) why? We need to understand why business processes and technical failures can lead to dead ones. Marketing, business analysts are usually neutral analysis and propose business process improvement proposals to reduce the number of dead ones the best candidate.

Fortunately, most of the other objects in the CRM system are more valued than those mentioned above. But don't be surprised when an organization has an argument about some obscure field, especially some filter reports or fire alarms.

(Responsible editor: admin)